# soft-question tag for discussing mathematical best-practices

I asked a question about where people could store slides for future reference. As a discussion of best-practices in the Mathematical profession, I thought it was appropriate for the tag on MO. The reaction has been quite negative.

collective slide-hosting for Mathematics

Has anyone considered using SlideShare to host slides from talks? In much the same way arXiv hosts papers.

Truth be told, the slides are often much easier to absorb than the papers. Sometimes I will Google a paper and find 10 versions of the slides floating around.

These are usually hosted by conferences or on personal websites. Unfortunately, when the conference site or home page dies, the slides go with them.

My observations are true and my question addresses how mathematicians can communicate more effectively. Could someone explain why is my soft question being downvoted and closed? Or better yet, how to fix it for MO? I'd like to understand what questions are a good fit for the tag.

• Using [tag:sometagname] creates nice formatting and a link to the tag. I tried to add this but a parallel edit undid it. If you want you can do this, but it is of course not important. – user9072 Jul 2 '13 at 20:14
• One thing that I would guess happened is that people looked at the site you suggested and saw that it was not "serious" enough. I would feel bizarre posting things about my research on a website that seems mostly geared towards marketing and trendy business type stuff. This lead them to consider the question as not being a serious question. – Andy Putman Jul 2 '13 at 20:23
• My problem was (though I cannot vote) that I did not see a clear question which can be answered. You offered a topic for discussuion, which is quite interesting and has potential, but MO is not the right place to discuss. – András Bátkai Jul 2 '13 at 21:04
• @AndrásBátkai There doesn't seem to be a good place to discuss such questions at the moment. – john mangual Jul 2 '13 at 23:52
• @AndyPutman Because we are serious mathematicians we would be less organized and less effective communicators? Is that what you are saying? – john mangual Jul 2 '13 at 23:53
• @JohnMangual I did not vote to close, but some "top" examples on slideshare look as if they came out of Tufte's The Cognitive Style of Powerpoint. That is definitely not effective communication. – Michael Greinecker Jul 3 '13 at 2:39
• The fact that there is no good place to discuss some subject does not mean it belongs on MO. – Tobias Kildetoft Jul 3 '13 at 6:39
• side note: you can use the tag scope for discussions about what is/should be on-topic/off-topic. – Kaveh Jul 3 '13 at 6:52
• @Kaveh: thanks for this remark. It was me who added the tag allowed-questions that already existed too. I think we might want to use scope for broader discussions and allowed-questions more for individual questions. This one is a bit in the middle. – user9072 Jul 3 '13 at 13:08
• @MichaelGreinecker We don't have to be that gimmicky. Just more organized. If we copied Edward Tufte's better examples, talks would be a lot more fun. – john mangual Jul 3 '13 at 13:36