Timeline for Tags that encourage off-topic questions
Current License: CC BY-SA 3.0
35 events
| when toggle format | what | by | license | comment | |
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| Mar 21, 2019 at 0:00 | review | Close votes | |||
| Mar 25, 2019 at 3:15 | |||||
| Apr 13, 2017 at 12:58 | history | edited | CommunityBot |
replaced http://mathoverflow.net/ with https://mathoverflow.net/
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| Jan 23, 2014 at 19:57 | comment | added | Lucia | I think nt.number theory attracts more than its fair share of off-topic questions! | |
| Aug 31, 2013 at 5:39 | comment | added | Kaveh | @François, you can also try to use Stack Exchange Data Explorer to figure out which tags have the highest number, ratio, etc. of closed questions. | |
| Aug 29, 2013 at 15:56 | comment | added | Amir Asghari | @FrançoisG.Dorais Okay. Convinced! | |
| Aug 29, 2013 at 14:58 | comment | added | François G. Dorais Mod | @Amir: No, that would suggest that this is the only criterion when it's only one of them. There are a variety of differences between calculus and linear algebra, different users will see different ones and vote accordingly. The total vote count should then approximately reflect all aspects and perspectives. If you feel that one aspect is being ignored in one case or another, add a comment highlighting your point of view so that others can see what they are missing out on. For example, Andres pointed out the alternatives aspect in a comment above and 19 users agreed that this was important. | |
| Aug 29, 2013 at 14:40 | comment | added | Amir Asghari | @FrançoisG.Dorais I think there should be written something about the possibility of using "good alternatives" in the body of the question. That is a very important side of the issue that should not be kept hidden. | |
| Aug 29, 2013 at 14:22 | comment | added | Amir Asghari | @FrançoisG.Dorais I was about the complete my answer that I realized that it was converted to a comment. Anyway, here is the rest: Moreover, I believe that people usually come up with a question and then look for a proper tag, not the other way round!! Thus, by eliminating the calculus tag, not only we haven't solved any problem, but we would encourage the use of misleading tags. | |
| Aug 29, 2013 at 14:16 | comment | added | François G. Dorais Mod | @Amir: Go ahead and downvote all answers where you don't think there are good alternatives! Linear algebra doesn't have much but calculus has plenty: ca.analysis-and-odes, special-functions, integration, limits, etc. | |
| Aug 29, 2013 at 14:02 | comment | added | Amir Asghari | Some of "off-tags" have a positive side that I think has been missed in the question asked. Right, they may suggest "off-topics" ideas. But, if correctly used, they may also give the right idea about the question. Suppose there is a calculus question tagged "algebraic geometry" since the poster couldn't find any better tag. Which one would be better? An off-topic question with a correct tag or an off-topic question with a misleading tag? I personally prefer the first. | |
| Aug 27, 2013 at 18:28 | history | edited | Kaveh | CC BY-SA 3.0 |
added 1 characters in body; edited title
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| Aug 27, 2013 at 18:22 | history | edited | François G. DoraisMod | CC BY-SA 3.0 |
edited title
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| Aug 27, 2013 at 18:12 | answer | added | user9072 | timeline score: 7 | |
| Aug 27, 2013 at 17:44 | history | edited | Kaveh | CC BY-SA 3.0 |
changing the title to match discussion
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| Aug 26, 2013 at 20:00 | answer | added | Stefan KohlMod | timeline score: -7 | |
| Aug 26, 2013 at 13:42 | comment | added | Mark Meckes | Maybe it's time for this question to get a new title. | |
| Aug 26, 2013 at 12:27 | comment | added | David White | What about all the computer science tags? There's now a CS stack website, so I suppose most of these get migrated, right? I'm thinking about computer-science, cs.cc.complexity-theory, cs.ms.math-software, and there are probably more | |
| Aug 25, 2013 at 22:54 | answer | added | Stefan KohlMod | timeline score: -13 | |
| Aug 20, 2013 at 4:49 | comment | added | Noam D. Elkies | One contrary data point: I used "calculus" as the first tag of my MO question "Source and context of $\frac{22}{7} - \pi = \int_0^1 (x-x^2)^4 \frac{dx}{1+x^2}$" (mathoverflow.net/questions/67384). The question got interesting and pertinent replies, and nobody suggested that either the question or the tag were not appropriate for MathOverflow. | |
| Aug 19, 2013 at 9:41 | comment | added | Martin Sleziak | In connection with this problem, it might be useful to know how many posts bear only the tag which is going to be burninated. (Which, I guess, means that these questions would have (untagged) as their only tag.) You can use this query for various tags. | |
| Aug 19, 2013 at 0:28 | history | made wiki | Post Made Community Wiki by François G. DoraisMod | ||
| Aug 19, 2013 at 0:19 | history | edited | François G. DoraisMod | CC BY-SA 3.0 |
added 36 characters in body
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| Aug 19, 2013 at 0:15 | answer | added | François G. DoraisMod | timeline score: -51 | |
| Aug 19, 2013 at 0:13 | comment | added | Gerry Myerson | At the risk of thread drift, I refer readers to a question recently posed at m.se, as to whether there are any open problems in linear algebra: math.stackexchange.com/questions/461017/… | |
| Aug 19, 2013 at 0:10 | history | edited | François G. DoraisMod | CC BY-SA 3.0 |
added 103 characters in body
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| Aug 19, 2013 at 0:08 | comment | added | François G. Dorais Mod | @LoganMaingi: That should be an answer so it gets proper notification to the community. | |
| Aug 19, 2013 at 0:07 | comment | added | François G. Dorais Mod | @Ricardo: That was indeed an entirely different question - meta.mathoverflow.net/questions/196/use-of-arxiv-tags | |
| Aug 19, 2013 at 0:06 | comment | added | Logan M | Strangely, trigonometry seems to be majority questions that are at least decent. Otherwise I'd suggest getting rid of it too. | |
| Aug 18, 2013 at 23:50 | comment | added | Ricardo Andrade | On a different note, if you are looking for tags which invite problematic questions, look no further than the deprecated tag 'geometry', which is much larger than 'calculus'. | |
| Aug 18, 2013 at 23:48 | comment | added | Ricardo Andrade | Also, the tag 'linear-algebra' is commonly used as a sort of replacement for a top level tag. I believe there are many valid questions which, other than 'linear-algebra', have only very specific tags. Personally, I feel that questions involving linear algebra are often hard to shoehorn into the usual top level tags. [Perhaps that means we should adopt new top level tags, but that is an entirely different discussion.] | |
| Aug 18, 2013 at 23:11 | comment | added | Joel David Hamkins | For linear algebra, to give an example, we recently had the very interesting question mathoverflow.net/questions/139595/…, which seems to me to be an entirely appropriate use of the tag. | |
| Aug 18, 2013 at 23:10 | comment | added | Bill Johnson | I agree with Andres. | |
| Aug 18, 2013 at 23:09 | comment | added | Andrés E. Caicedo | Eliminate "calculus", there are obvious alternatives. "Linear algebra", on the other hand, seems useful, even if it attracts some noise. | |
| Aug 18, 2013 at 23:07 | comment | added | Yemon Choi | My gut feeling (perhaps not borne out by cold look at evidence) is that "linear algebra" remains a useful general tag that can be applied even to questions at research level | |
| Aug 18, 2013 at 21:54 | history | asked | François G. DoraisMod | CC BY-SA 3.0 |