# “What is known about” considered harmful?

I have noticed that those of my questions with downvotes are exactly those beginning with the words "what is known about..." or "is anything known about...." For example:

I will be the first to admit (well, technically the second to admit) that these two are not great questions, and I'm not here to complain about the downvotes.

My question for meta: Is this "...known about..." wording is frowned upon in all cases, or only if the question is otherwise overly broad?

• I think the downvotes in both cases are ridiculous. My advice: Think of them as noise, and pay no mind. – Andrés E. Caicedo Nov 20 '13 at 3:57
• There are lots of questions with a phrase like "What is known about…" that are poorly thought out and worth down voting. However, while I don't know much about logic or set theory (and thus can't say anything definitively), your questions look like perfectly good ones to me. Like Andres said, I'd just ignore the down votes. All of us manage to get random down votes from time to time! – Andy Putman Nov 20 '13 at 4:22
• And mathoverflow.net/questions/23391/… has 22 upvotes, no downvotes. Case closed. – Gerry Myerson Nov 20 '13 at 4:38
• Thanks for the encouragement, @Andres and Andy. I was initially inclined to ignore the downvotes also until I noticed their relation to the wording of the questions. But it could certainly be a fluke. – Trevor Wilson Nov 20 '13 at 5:31
• @GerryMyerson Thanks for collecting those. That is some significant evidence against my theory. – Trevor Wilson Nov 20 '13 at 5:37

• I think there's a difference between, "What is known about $X$?" and "I'm interested in $X$. I read the Wikipedia page, went on MR and saw that so-and-so wrote a paper in 1957 and further research looks like it has proceeded in $Y$ direction, have I missed anything?" – Neal Oct 18 '17 at 13:16