What do we mean by welcoming when we're a site aimed at researchers?

Question

I was just browsing the main page this morning, and I decided to look at some of the posts by new people. One of the questions had garnered three votes to close and a comment from a regular user to the following effect:

'Welcome! This website is for research level mathematics, and what you've posted is an exercise. I suggest you post it on M.SE'

I sort of stared at it for a moment, and I thought about the definition of welcoming. Now certainly the message did indeed begin with a hearty welcome. It then immediately turned the user away (inherently not welcoming).

But here's the problem! The comment was right (ignoring the initial comment of 'welcome')!

So there have been complaints that MO is not welcoming recently (I have grown to despise the word at this point, but okay). But the question is this: Can we simultaneously be welcoming and also turn away such a large number of questions? Isn't this simply a contradiction in terms?

I think that the correct answer is really that we ought to be welcoming to people who actually belong here (and that we cannot be welcoming to people who don't belong here). Am I misunderstanding the idea here? Has welcoming become some kind of catch-all buzzword for being 'nice' or 'polite'?

Note: This is not a rhetorical question. I am sincerely confused.

Answer 1

Here are some examples of people we would like the site to be welcoming to:

1. Prominent mathematicians who are less "online" than the typical MO user.
2. Current advanced graduate students.

Currently MO has a pretty bad reputation with both such groups. In neither case is this primarily about the relationship with math.SE Certainly the reputation of the site among graduate students in my department is that MO is too intimidating for them to use.

(It's not entirely clear to me what we can do about this reputation or exactly where it's coming from, but that's an entirely separate question.)

Answer 2

As an outsider from the math community, please let me share my personal experience on this site.

I am neither a mathematician, nor had any formal education on advanced math topics. Just an engineer who is interested and oftentimes fascinated with math. My first experience on this site was when I asked this question some years ago. It actually was a cross-post from MSE, which received a really poor answer there. So I thought it might be advanced enough to be posted here. I wasn't at all familiar with the atmosphere in here and to be honest, I had no idea how to ask a good question. Yes, there is a help page for every site, but like the manuals for the tools we buy, who is gonna bother to read them?

I admit that my question wasn't in good shape and had a poor wording, mostly because of my lack of experience in English writing and unfamiliarity with the merits of writing clear mathematics. But I was lucky enough to have a goodwilled commentator who patiently guided me through editing my question and didn't take offense in my initial arrogance. (I don't remember his name as the comments are now deleted).

Now the point is, my personal experience on this site was the fact that this community is very welcoming, maybe because I was lucky. And maybe someone else would have flagged my question and subsequent comments as inappropriate (and they would be right to do so) and the result would have been different. But showing a little patience and goodwill not only caused that question to be well-received and perfectly answered, but also strengthened my interest and fascination with advanced math topics. Since then, I am a regular visitor to this site and have learnt a lot from its wonderful contributors. Although I don't understand most of its Q&As but I sometimes read them anyway like a monkey staring at a book. Just because they look amazing and have lots of brainpower behind them!

So in conclusion, I want to emphasize on Gjergji Zaimi's great answer and his first point. All it takes to be welcoming is showing a little patience and goodwill. And if that's not enough, well then, maybe they don't belong here anyway.

Answer 3

Martin's comment and his recent thread on the welcome window hit the nail on the head. The correct way to be welcoming towards this kind of asker is having good "how to ask" instructions that essentially show the asker that this isn't the right place before they post. Mathoverflow doesn't have those instructions, and this is something that we need to change.

Answer 4

One way to reconcile the contradiction is to incentivize our more experienced users to clean up borderline questions. Then instead of sending the message, "Only people who speak our secret language are allowed in these parts," we can send the message, "Hey there! If you don't mind, I'm going to reword your request a little bit to help make sure your question gets attention from our users."

I had a recent success story in this direction with this question. The question had 3 or 4 votes to close when I found it, but I thought the core of the question was interesting and appropriate, so I left a comment and wrote an answer illustrating my point. Someone else then rewrote the question a bit, and now it has 44 upvotes and no votes to close. The original poster hasn't done much on the site since (in hindsight, even my comment defending the question could have been more welcoming) but I think it was a more positive experience than if the question had simply been closed.

I think we should do this more. When high rep users come across a problematic question, it's quick and easy to vote to close it - this has the upside of keeping MO clean, but maybe it has the unintended downside of making MO more hostile. If we can encourage high rep users to try to improve a question before closing it, either through the rep system or some other means, maybe we can get a virtuous cycle where more people are asking questions and then more people join to answer them.

Answer 5

I may add my 2¢ : I have the feeling that the single most unwelcoming aspect of MO is the down vote. There are several reasons for that: unlike a close vote, it is visible for all and therefore tends to have the effect of a "slap in the face". When new users respond aggresively it is typically after their first down vote. Moreover, while a close vote may eventually lead to closing of the question, this then comes with suggestions to improve the question, so it has a more constructive feel. Down votes also tend to arrive very soon after the question is posted, giving the impression that users did not spend any time thinking about the question.

I ask myself if down votes serve a purpose, and I am not so sure they do. Yes, they advertize on the front page that a question is not worth looking into, but seeing a question with 0 votes that has been around for some time conveys the same information. If a question is spam, then flagging it as such is quite effective at triggering a deletion, down votes do not seem needed for that purpose. Down votes do serve a ranking purpose for community wiki, big list, types of questions, but those are few and I guess that counting up votes would work just as well.

I don't think we can change the way Stack Exchange works, I presume the option to down vote is here to stay, but we could decide as a community that we will not down vote off-topic questions, just close them. All for the goal of making MO a more welcoming place.

Answer 6

Short answer: To be welcoming probably means to

1. Be patient and polite when explaining the scope of the website to those who aren't very familiar with the scope of MO.

2. Give newer members an opportunity to get involved with voting to close questions. Having only 6-7 names appearing in every closed question can be intimidating.

3. Encourage professional behavior in order not to turn away those that are familiar with the scope of MO.

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Whether Mathoverflow is perceived as a welcoming community depends on the observer. If it is someone who is not very familiar with the website, then I think that being welcoming boils down to politeness. This is not just about redirecting questions that may not be research level, but also explaining various other procedures such as other members of the community editing one's posts, changing the tags, closing as duplicate etc.

There are aspects of the website where the community's consensus is constantly evolving. When it comes to deciding what constitutes a "research level" topic, some users have a higher bar than others. As a corollary, the experience of a new contributor will be shaped differently depending on whom they come into contact with. For example, I have noticed that user abx has been vocal about casting votes to close on algebraic geometry questions that others might find ok or borderline, you may even have experienced this in a recent question of yours. I don't think that there is anything wrong with this (in fact I believe that many topics on MO could benefit from "raising the bar" a little bit) but perhaps it would be helpful if a new user could tell the difference between the opinion of a handful of users and the community as a whole.

One way of achieving this is to discourage users from identifying themselves with all of MO. In the context of borderline questions, using phrases like "I think that your question is covered in a standard textbook like X and might have a better chance at attracting more elaborate answers at website Y" is probably better than an absolute "your question is not acceptable/welcome/appropriate on MO". They essentially achieve the same goal, but the perception can be different. I guess the desired perception should be more along the lines of "community moderated" and less "policed by a small set of users". The first scenario is one where every member can feel like they have a voice whereas the second is one where some members are left to feel sort of helpless.

I think that the case of borderline questions is truly the place where you can clearly see how welcoming we choose to be as a community. Perhaps if we were able to treat them with more dialogue we might start seeing a change in perception. Here is what I think is a great example, where instead of getting closed, a question received constructive criticism as well as an edit that improved it.

Now, for the case of someone who is familiar with the scope of MO, there are other things that matter more. The impression I get form personal conversations is that some of the factors which may paint an unwelcoming picture of MO include: 1) Non-mathematical debates that turn offensive or rude. 2) The lack of a unanimous agreement against hate speech/symbols (without bias on which country or culture they come from). 3) Users regularly posting controversial statements and then deleting them for the sake of creating confusion etc. Running into such threads on MO or meta can give the impression that this is not a professional environment. This can turn potential users away because they do not feel like the level of decorum is high enough to protect them from personal attacks, prejudice, bullying etc.

Answer 7

Late to the party, but two points:

1. There is a specific premise to the question: Part of MathOverflow's "brand", in contrast to, say, Math Stack Exchange, is that we're not about all mathematics questions, but specifically, "research-level questions" -- whatever that means. Personally, I think it would be productive to try to reformulate the adjective "research-level" in a better way. After all, the idea that mathematics is a "linearly-ordered" subject, progressing from grade-school concepts to high school concepts to undergraduate concepts to graduate concepts to research concepts, is a widespread misconception. I don't think I'm alone in wincing every time I tell someone I'm a mathematician and get the response "Oh, I never got past calculus". So this whole business is problematic, but I think that has been at least partially addressed in other responses.

2. The issue of being perceived as "unwelcoming" is not unique to Math Overflow -- it's a widespread phenomenon on the Stack Exchange network, particularly on the flagship site Stack Overflow, as documented in the company blog, meta, meta, news articles, and memes. And among "curated knowledge" sites, it's not unique to the Stack Exchange network -- for example wikipedia struggles with analogous issues. I can't say I've carefully considered the issue from this broader perspective, but I do think that any attempt to grapple with these issues would do well to take a look at other places where similar problems have been encountered and (hopefully) solutions have been formulated.

Of course, there are other broad contexts in which to situate the issue, such as the "welcomingness" of mathematics as a discipline, academia as a whole, and so forth. But I think the peculiarities of the dynamics of Stack Exchange and similar sites are particularly relevant, and underrepresented in the discussion here.

EDIT: To expand on (2), I'd like to meditate on a recent experience on a different SE site. A few months ago I asked this question on Physics SE, a site I have occasionally visited, but with which I'm not all that familiar. The question attracted a good answer, but was also attracting votes to close for being "opnion-based". I made some edits to remove any language I thought might be interpretable as "opinion-based", but to no avail -- the question was still closed as "opinion-based". With no further feedback, I thought I'd done all I could and gave up, figuring that Physics SE had their own inscrutable criteria for acceptable questions on their site, and that it was not worth trying to get to the bottom of things at the time.

A few days ago, I decided to give it another crack. My only lead was the close reason -- it was "opinion-based". So I scoured the question for anything which might whiff of an opinion, and excised it. I speculated that the given close reason was not the true close reason -- probably the last few votes to close, made after my edits, had simply chosen to give the same reason as the earlier votes for simplicity, even though the reasons had changed. I recorded these speculations in the comments, but I didn't attempt to rectify any of these hypothetical issues.

I submitted the question to be reopened. A helpful moderator came along and improved my tags. While still closed, the question attracted another good answer in the comments. Eventually it was reopened, before being immediately closed for a new reason -- it lacked focus. I was confused again, but this time the same moderator left a helpful comment explaining that my question needed to have a unique answer to be acceptable.

Aha! It was indeed a community difference. I'm pretty certain that my question as currently phrased would be the sort of focused, limited list question we'd embrace at MO (maybe in community wiki format, but honestly we probably wouldn't even bother with that), but over there any list question was a non-starter. This wasn't in their FAQs, but there was some old discussion on meta on the topic. The helpful moderator helpfully listened when I raised these points in the comments, and eventually helpfully reversed the second closure despite personally feeling that the "list" objection was strong. We'll see where it goes.

I'm drawing a few lessons from this:

• To a new user, our criteria for deciding whether a question is acceptable are doubtless completely inscrutable. Even an experienced user on another SE site who has some reasonable idea of what "research mathematics" is will likely find it extremely frustrating trying to meet these opaque standards. For a user who doesn't have experience on another SE site, it will be unclear that there even are standards -- it will appear that their questions are being categorically rejected for no reason at all.

• At the same time to our users, many of these criteria seem self-evident. We may have internal debate over what exactly "research mathematics" is, but we probably don't even realize that there are subtle conventions of phrasing and so forth which have never been made explicit that we pick up on and use to determine acceptability of questions.

• If we don't even consciously know some of the reasons we find questions unacceptable, it's extremely difficult for these reasons to be communicated to new users.

• Things like official close reasons are very blunt tools for communicating what's wrong with a question. Expanding in a comment is better, but there's still going to be a communication gap.

Answer 8

I am not sure what specific suggestions I can make for how to make MathOverflow more welcoming, but I do want to say that the MathOverflow site—while tremendously interesting—does seem to be fairly unfriendly to new users, even ones who might be worthwhile contributors to the community. Although I first started posting at MathOverflow with a full understanding of the level and goals of the site, I nonetheless felt that the responses I received were rather shallow and dismissive.

Let me give a few words about my own background. I am a high reputation user on a number of StackExchange sites, so I know all the mechanics of how the stacks function. I am also a peripheral member of the research mathematics community. I have a Ph.D. in mathematics, although my regular job is as a professor of physics, and most—but not all—of my research is in theoretical physics. Several years ago, I made a couple of posts on MathOverflow, and I definitely did not feel like I got a warm reception. The responses I got could best be described as "chilly and cliquish." I felt like the way I framed my posts (based on my way of thinking as an applied mathematician) was not especially appreciated or even subtly sneered at. Besides that, there just seemed to be essentially no interest in the kinds of approach I was interesting in taking.

I considered and ultimately decided to suspend my account, and although I continue to read this stack, I did not post here again for many years. I only very recently reactivated my MathOverflow account, after I was encouraged to do so by some other colleagues. The response to the couple of questions I have asked since then has not been rude, but it has still been somewhat disheartening. I have endeavored to formulate my questions in a very pure mathematics language, although there have been more applied motivations behind them. The one substantive response I received was shallow and rather missed the point of the question, by trying to abstract it even beyond the level of artificial mathematical abstraction that I had already inserted into my query, in the hopes of attracting some interest from the very pure crowd who appear to predominate on this site. I am not going to be delete my account again, but I do not hold out much hope of getting useful answers to the kinds of applied math questions that I might really want to ask.

Answer 9

One might compare the overall population of MO and of sci.math.research, active in the 200$\ast$'s. On sci.math.research, there were no rep, no down/up votes. Posts were filtered by moderators. My first-glance impression was that these were similar populations, although MO's is broader. It would be interesting to have data about this, and feedback by moderators of sci.math.research (which are listed here, at least at some point).