Questions tagged [discussion]
The question you're asking is designed to solicit opinions or best-practices on a particular topic, with the goal of reaching community consensus.
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2022: a year in moderation
As we say goodbye to the old year and welcome the new one, we have a tradition of sharing moderation stats for the preceding calendar year.
As most of you here are aware, sites on the Stack Exchange ...
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How is TeX rendered in edit summaries?
I recently edited a question Dynkin type classification for 2-dimensional hypersurfaces in non-commutative space, and entered as my edit summary "$<x,y>$ -> $\langle x,y\rangle$" <...
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MathOverflow in the classroom
My belief is that it is legitimate to cite some posts of the main site MathOverflow in the classroom of some course. Under this assumption I've wondered about the following question.
I don't know ...
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Posting multiple "answers" to an already answered question
This question was asked and correctly answered three weeks ago. Since then another user has posted, as of today, five other "answers" describing his thoughts about related questions, ...
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Should this question have been CW?
Yesterday I asked a big-list question (Examples of errors in computational combinatorics results). The question is naturally big-list because it asks for various examples. Now I am not quite familiar ...
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Gaining points for posting
How do I earn 50 points to comment if I am not allowed to comment or post? So my problem is as described as far you can see.
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Let us wear hats
Many of the other stackexchange sites enable a festive wintertime custom every year in late December, the Winter Bash, in which user profiles are accommodated with fanciful hats, earned for various ...
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Should we flag suspected ChatGPT posts?
Another meta question raised the issue of AI-generated (by ChatGPT or similar) posts.
I have a more specific question. If we see a post that we suspect to be of this genre, would the moderators like ...
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How should we respond to user profiles (as opposed to questions or answers) that appear to be spam? [duplicate]
I've come across 10 different MO user profiles that all have very similar usernames that contain the name of a company. None of these users have any activity on the site except for filling out their ...
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Is this question about partition numbers too broad/vague?
Here's my proposed question (edit: now posted) (edit 2: posted version now edited):
I have found an algorithm for counting partitions, and I've been able to express it into a mathematical formula, $P(...
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Can a question be muted from showing up to the front of the page so answers can edit their response as much as they please?
I liked the answer to this question: An algebra of "integrals" by @anixx
Which had a very detailed table attached. My understanding is the answerer had updated the question some 35 times to ...
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Should tags be removed from spam?
When flagging spam, I usually delete tags and replace them by tag-removed as well. I just received a comment suggesting that this is not useful. It probably doesn'...
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ChatGPT strikes MathOverflow
The user (or a bot) https://mathoverflow.net/users/496085/canvas123 appears to be posting ChatGPT-generated text on MathOverflow.
Two “answers” by this user already got accepted (!):
When is a ...
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Mathoverflow for finding the name of mathematical concepts
I am used to posting on MathOverflow problems with questions. However, now I am looking for the name of a mathematical object that I think already exists (and I would be happy to find reference ...
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Creation of "procrastination" tag
One user has created the tag procrastination: see this question. In principle I would have immediately deleted it as totally irrelevant (in the same way I would delete "Stupid question" or &...
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The tags (publishing) and (journals) - maybe change direction or cancel the synonym
At the moment there is a synonym publishing $\to$ journals. (With the tag journals as the master tag.)
I think that at least for some questions tagged journals:
Using a tag called publishing might be ...
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We have our first user with more than 200K reputation!
Congratulations to Joel David Hamkins who on (I think!) the 27th November 2022, was the first MathOverflow user to pass 200k reputation! Since Joel joined on the 19th November 2009, he has supplied ...
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New tag for "stochastic partial differential equations" (SPDEs)
Since there are separate tags for a) ODEs, ca.classical-analysis-and-odes and differential-equations and for b) ap.analysis-of-pdes but only one tag for stochastic-differential-equations, I was ...
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Why is this question locked?
This question has only two downvotes, which is not enough to keep it off the front page. I'd therefore like to downvote it, but can't, because it is locked for mysterious reasons.
Because this does ...
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Where did the reputation go?
Some time ago, it was decided that reputation should no longer be displayed by default, but users had the possibility to opt in to see it, as explained by Ben Webster. I had opted to see reputation, ...
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Why was my question deleted?
Why was my question Is the Frog game solvable in the root of a full binary tree? deleted?
It was a cross-post, but I followed all recommended advices when doing so.
It was also decently upvoted (12+).
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Migrated question returned to MO - how to handle?
The question I am referring to is
Is all complicated modern math intuitively understandable?
(See the user's math.SE account to see that the question was at one point migrated to math.SE.)
I think the ...
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If it doesn't interest you, don't read it!
As an algebraist, if I see an analysis question on Mathoverflow that falls outside my expertise, I probably won't read it in details, and if I do read it, I certainly won't judge its "level",...
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What to do with the erdos tag?
This was discussed before but that discussion is outdated.
Tags related to a specific person are generally bad. (This is not the same as specific topics named after a person, e.g. Galois theory is not ...
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2022 Election results: Congratulations to our new moderator!
The election is over, the votes have been counted, and on behalf of the current team and board, I'd like to welcome David Roberts to the moderators team!
I'd like to thank Carl-Fredrik Nyberg-Brodda ...
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Which questions should be tagged “reference-request”?
The reference-request tag is currently described as: “this tag is used if a reference is needed in a paper or textbook on a specific result.”
I have found current usage of this tag too broad to be ...
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Why my nomination for 2022 Community Moderator Election withdrawn without convincing reason?
I was honored to participate in the elections for moderation in MO 2022 , but I am sorry to say that my candidacy was withdrawn today without any convincing reason, frankly, I did not find it ...
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Can I ask this question on Math Overflow? (Advice on how to get started)
I am thinking of applying for a maths PhD programme. I have more or less an idea of the subfield I'd like to research, but not much more than that. I'm looking for suggestions on how to properly ...
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Nominating other community members
Is there no mechanism to suggest other community members for nomination?
If I remember correctly, last election there was some mechanism in place to suggest community members other than ourselves who ...
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2022 Community Moderator Election
The 2022 Community Moderator Election is now underway!
Community moderator elections have three phases:
Nomination phase
Primary phase
Election phase
Most elections take between two and three weeks, ...
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MathOverflow conferences
What would the appropriate initial steps be to host a MathOverflow conference?
Back in 2019 I hosted a party for the 10th anniversary of MathOverflow, and it was a blast.$^*$ Since then I've ...
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2022 Moderator Election Q&A – Question Collection
The purpose of this thread was to collect questions for the questionnaire. The questionnaire is now live, and you may find it here.
MathOverflow is scheduled for an election next week, 2022-09-19. In ...
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Partial answer accepted, thinking it could have been easily extended and provided enough insights
Some days ago I posted a question and I accepted an answer, "although it’s only a very partial answer," as the answer author wrote in a comment. I accepted it because I thought that it ...
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Should we allow link-only answers that point to stable, well known and respectable sites?
I have just been presented with an answer in the VLQ queue that consisted essentially in a link to a preprint on arXiv. The user having posted it is a high reputation user, so he definitely knows the ...
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Asking if a post about a mathematical characterization of gravitational geons can be potentially interesting for the main site MathOverflow
I would like to ask about if a question about the following subject can be potentially interesting and on topic on MathOverflow. I would like to ask on the main site of MathOverflow about the ...
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Upcoming election announcement (2022)
It has been quite some time since the last moderator election, and we decided that it would be a good idea to hold one soon.
This is just a preliminary announcement to let you know that this is going ...
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Would such a "big list" on known bounds for distances between $2^S-3^N$ be appropriate for MO?
After new questions and/or activities on older questions on "bounds for distances $2^S-3^N$" appeared in MO I thought whether a [BigList] or [CommunityWiki] on known such bounds (their ...
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Planar geometry on MO
"Planar geometry" here is 2-dimensional Euclidean geometry, usually used as Olympiad geometry problem, its objects just be a bunch of lines and circles, it has no Combinatoric aspect and not ...
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To which extent should spam posts on meta be considered a problem?
MathOverflow is one of the few sites in the Stack Exchange network where users with reputation 1 can post on meta.1 Clearly, this has some advantages2 and some disadvantages. Probably one of the ...
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Is it possible to see the source for a comment?
Although this question seems to be new to M.MO, @MartinSleziak points out several related posts on Meta.MSE.
I was curious about the diagrammatic magic of @YaakovBaruch's recent comment, and so ...
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Questions about correctness of published papers
A recent thread brought up the issue of the appropriateness of discussing correctness of a published paper on MO.
Correctness of Thierry Aubin's argument about positive Ricci curvature
I did a ...
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When, precisely, should history of math questions be CW?
I don't have much experience with "history of math" questions or the ho.history-overview tag. I tried to distill an answer to my question from looking at existing questions, but failed to ...
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Keeping a question on track or allowing people to chime in with stuff they'd like to mention?
I am slightly unhappy with the direction of drift to answers to this question. On my reading, the OP mentioned a phenomenon and asked how editors should react to it. This seems to have been taken by ...
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Why are some non-research questions so highly upvoted?
It is not difficult to find soft questions on the website which do not clearly strike as research level. To give examples of some: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5. Yet some of them are upvoted so highly that even many ...
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New community close vote reason
While doing some cleanup on the home page just now, I noticed that we have a new community specific reason to close.
The second option in the list is new, and leaves me slightly confused. While I ...
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Was the custom close reason mentioning Math.SE removed?
For a long time, these two custom close reasons used to be available:
This question does not appear to be about research level mathematics within the scope defined in the help center.
MathOverflow ...
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Citing papers in questions/answers
Is there an established policy for how to cite a paper you link to in a question/answer? If not, what does etiquette dictate appropriate for citations?
I used to be careful to include full citations ...
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How to make it easier to moderate blatantly off-topic questions?
As many of you have noticed, there's a lot of new users asking basic mathematics questions. This is not the only site in the network with this kind of problem; on Meta Stack Exchange we get all kinds ...
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Downvote and vote to close of a recent question
I recently asked the following question on God's number for higher dimensional sequential move puzzles. It was downvoted once and has a vote to close, even though it is in my eyes a perfectly good ...
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Revamping the closure reasons in 2022
Prompted by Gro-Tsen's recent meta question, it appears that now may be a good time to rethink our site-specific close reasons here on MathOverflow.
Background:
If you have sufficient rep, you can ...
Tim CampionMod
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