Timeline for "Newbie-style" questions: is there an "official" viewpoint of MO?
Current License: CC BY-SA 3.0
23 events
| when toggle format | what | by | license | comment | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Jul 13, 2017 at 17:06 | comment | added | user56983 | @AsafKaragila Is it likely to be met with so much scrutiny that either the question changes, an incorrect answer, or a non-answer is accepted instead? As independent events. | |
| Jun 7, 2017 at 7:10 | answer | added | Andrej Bauer | timeline score: 10 | |
| Jun 6, 2017 at 19:17 | answer | added | Alexandre Eremenko | timeline score: 16 | |
| May 31, 2017 at 11:51 | comment | added | Ali Taghavi | @მამუკაჯიბლაძე Because of such type of conversation I did not ask this question in MO but I asked in MSE. I do not know if this question appropriate for MO? I do not know if this question is trivial. But at MSE there is no pay attention to questions in comparision to MO pay attention. Do you have any comment on this question.(BTW +1 for your meta post) math.stackexchange.com/questions/2304015/… | |
| May 29, 2017 at 21:07 | comment | added | Ali Taghavi | @JeremyRickard Thank you and (+1) for your interesting comment. | |
| May 29, 2017 at 19:45 | comment | added | Ali Taghavi | @DavidSpeyer Thank you and (+1) for your comment. I think that MO is a paradise of math democracy and openness. | |
| May 29, 2017 at 18:27 | comment | added | Jeremy Rickard | I don't think I'm contradicting anything that anybody has said in response to this question, but I think that an important and relevant point (that I think is sometimes overlooked by people downvoting or voting to close), is that how trivial a question is for an expert or near-expert is not necessarily a good measure of how off-topic it is. For example, I've answered several questions close to my field which have been very easy for me just because I'm familiar with relevant examples. But I thought they were on-topic because I wouldn't expect a non-expert to have the same arsenal of examples. | |
| May 29, 2017 at 17:04 | comment | added | Kimball | @StefanKohl I may not have given an entirely appropriate example (but even though Thurston was a new user then, he was certainly known in the MO community). What I was trying to say is I don't like treating a question differently according to what I know about the person asking as a matter of principle (which is not to say I don't), but rather the question should (in as much as possible) stand on its own. (Users repeatedly misusing MO is a separate issue.) | |
| May 29, 2017 at 9:32 | comment | added | Stefan Kohl Mod | @Kimball: I think you are mixing here two different things -- asking a question anonymously and asking a question as a new user. -- In fact, when Bill Thurston asked the question you referred to, he was indeed a new user of MO. | |
| May 29, 2017 at 6:54 | comment | added | მამუკა ჯიბლაძე | @ManfredWeis Well formulated! This reminded me of one of my own questions which is an example of that: I had hard time trying to identify a combinatorial object I encountered. It was immediately recognized by a specialist (Pat Devlin) as certain kind of balanced code. The question currently has 25 upvotes (and Pat's answer has 37). | |
| May 29, 2017 at 1:31 | comment | added | Todd Trimble Mod | It may be defensible, but to me it feels a little weird to close this as a duplicate, as if the older thread has an answer and that settles the matter. MO is still evolving, and this is a topic we have to keep revisiting and asking each other about. | |
| May 29, 2017 at 0:27 | comment | added | Kimball | @StefanKohl I really don't like the idea of dealing with a question according to how established the asker is on MO. E.g., people might have closed mathoverflow.net/q/38639/6518 if it were asked anonymously. | |
| May 27, 2017 at 7:20 | comment | added | Manfred Weis | I think that such questions are appropriate for MO if the relevant information can't be found online using the terms in the formulation of the question (sometimes things go under "strange" names) and/or if a random professional mathematician could not provide the information ad hoc (by random mathematician I mean someone capable of mathematical reasoning, but possibly from an unrelated field) | |
| May 26, 2017 at 16:47 | review | Close votes | |||
| Jun 1, 2017 at 3:11 | |||||
| May 26, 2017 at 16:27 | history | edited | მამუკა ჯიბლაძე | CC BY-SA 3.0 |
Explain why mark as a duplicate
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| May 26, 2017 at 16:25 | comment | added | მამუკა ჯიბლაძე | Possible duplicate of early graduate level questions: MO or Math.SE? | |
| May 26, 2017 at 16:24 | comment | added | მამუკა ჯიბლაძე | Thanks, @Neil, I was not attentive enough when looking for related questions, this one seems to subsume mine. | |
| May 26, 2017 at 15:18 | comment | added | Neil Strickland | See also meta.mathoverflow.net/questions/2399 | |
| May 25, 2017 at 16:48 | comment | added | Stefan Kohl Mod | I think how to deal with such questions depends mainly on how they are formulated (did the asker take the time to formulate a clear and concise question without a lot of grammar- or spelling mistakes?) and who has asked them (is it an anonymous user who has contributed only other poor questions or nothing so far, or is it rather a known colleague or an established user of the site?). The goal should be on the one hand to prevent abuse of the site, and on the other to make the site as useful to the community as possible. | |
| May 25, 2017 at 15:42 | answer | added | Gerhard Paseman | timeline score: 9 | |
| May 25, 2017 at 13:54 | comment | added | David E Speyer | The answer to the question asked is "no, there doesn't seem to be a consensus on this." Personally, I believe that our standard should be that questioners have the sophistication of someone who is doing research in math as a whole -- so faculty or grad students from the 2nd year up or so -- not that they specifically are as knowledgeable in the area of the question as someone who is studying that area. I want to be able to come here and ask basic questions about differential geometry, logic and analysis when they come up in things I am thinking about. | |
| May 25, 2017 at 8:52 | comment | added | Asaf Karagila Mod | That depends on the nature of the question, and to some extent on the user who is asking it. If they are someone who has earned some leeway (through real world reputation, or through activity on the site), I would imagine people could swallow that pill. If it is asked by a relatively new and unfamiliar face, it is likely to be met with more scrutiny. Nevertheless, there is no exact threshold to be crossed here, it's all very fuzzy, and is therefore often played by ear on a case to case basis with variables such as direction of the wind or alignment of Jupiter and Mars. | |
| May 25, 2017 at 8:08 | history | asked | მამუკა ჯიბლაძე | CC BY-SA 3.0 |