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.
1,027
questions
2
votes
0answers
86 views
Efficacy of bounties by reward amount
Is there any data available on how often bountied questions receive answers? Can we stratify by bounty amount, to see if we're actually 'getting more bang for our buck' when we bounty higher amounts?
...
6
votes
0answers
290 views
What happened to the fonts?
It appears that MO (including MO Meta) has recently changed the display fonts:
I couldn't find any topics on MO Meta pertaining to this new change, hence this question. SO has also switched the fonts,...
18
votes
4answers
915 views
Deletion of on-topic comment threads
This question is about suppression of threads of comments by moderators, moved to chat with the message "Comments are not for extended discussion; this conversation has been moved to chat", ...
9
votes
0answers
278 views
Why are there two separate tags (open-problem) and (open-problems)?
I assume that most likely this was just an oversight - but since it was a result of a moderator's action, it is probably better to ask than just remove the tag singlehandedly.1
Question: At the moment ...
18
votes
0answers
415 views
Three-vote close?
MO users might be interested in this StackExchange experiment:
Testing three-vote close and reopen on 13 network sites.
There has been considerable discussion around close-votes in MO Meta over the ...
0
votes
1answer
163 views
How to deal with answers that don't answer anything?
I'm really hesitant to put this on the table, but what should be done with answers that to do not contain anything of help related to the question?
Specifically I refer to this.
It is not the fact of ...
0
votes
2answers
240 views
Name of the site
This site keeps getting questions from users who have mistaken mathoverflow for a place to ask questions about elementary mathematics. This is not a problem for me, as those too-elementary questions ...
11
votes
1answer
290 views
Can I ask a question on MathOverflow and also on another site?
Sometimes one might ask a question on a website such as Mathematics Stack Exchange which is comparable but not identical to MathOverflow, and then decide to post the same question on MathOverflow. ...
9
votes
5answers
325 views
Revising the help page on “What topics can I ask around here?”
This is a freestanding post taking its content from a previous discussion on the modal window for first-time askers. Thanks to Martin Sleziak and Tim Campion for the encouragement to post it ...
13
votes
4answers
476 views
What should the modal window for first-time askers say?
When a user asks their very first question on a Stack Exchange site, they are shown a modal window with some introductory advice. As explained in the March 2020 announcement of this feature, there is ...
11
votes
0answers
359 views
Can I undelete questions deleted by the OP if I find them interesting?
I am not sure and I could not find anything about the ethical guidelines. A new user recently asked a question, which I've found interesting, as well as others, as it started some discussion, and then ...
11
votes
2answers
323 views
(When) are “career advice” questions on-topic here? If and when such a question is on-topic, what to keep in mind in answering such a question?
We have a tag career and a tag advice. We don't have a flood of questions under these tags, but for several reasons I think it would also be appropriate for us to have a bit more guidance on meta ...
4
votes
1answer
183 views
How are hot meta posts decided?
I'm curious about the exact mechanisms behind the 'hot meta posts' blurb on the right hand side of the main/meta page.
I have been monitoring it for the past few days to see if my recent question ...
10
votes
1answer
307 views
Proposing a change to the close-vote interface
The feature request in this post is at the bottom; I will first highlight why I think it should be implemented. Currently, when I go to close-vote a question I see the following pop-up menu:
If I ...
40
votes
1answer
882 views
2021 Community Moderator Election Results
MathOverflow's second moderator election has come to a close, the votes have been tallied, and the three new moderators are:
They'll be joining the existing crew shortly — please thank them for ...
3
votes
1answer
212 views
How could I compute my “candidate score”?
I have noticed that, during elections for moderators, the candidates are awarded a "candidate score", computed from their activity on MO.
Is its algorithm public, so that I be able to ...
7
votes
1answer
290 views
Migration of a detailed answer on MathOverflow Meta to Math.SE
Upon reading Professor Hamkins' detailed answer to this recent Question about $i$ versus $-i$ here on MathOverflow Meta, and his accommodating comments:
Oh, I see now that this was a meta question,...
7
votes
2answers
337 views
What are the exact mechanics of the vote for MO moderators?
The election for moderators is currently going on. Three new moderators will be elected.
On the election page you are allowed to rank your choices of the candidates. It is a little unclear whether you ...
10
votes
3answers
443 views
Moderator Elections: bug reporting for new voting UI
As we announced a few weeks ago, there is a new user interface for voting in moderator elections. Math Overflow will be the first Stack Exchange community to use the new UI when voting for your ...
20
votes
3answers
2k views
Question about $i$ versus $-i$
I vaguely recall that some years ago, there was an MO question about how to distinguish between the complex numbers $i$ and $-i$, and in what sense this might be meaningful.
I also recall that I ...
12
votes
0answers
410 views
What do moderators do these days?
More than 7 years ago, Scott Morrison asked a great meta question: What do moderators do?, and recorded some useful answers. Some seem to be of general significance, but many of the answers were ...
8
votes
1answer
359 views
Reason for the 2021 moderator election
There are three possible reasons for having the moderators election this year (with 3 positions to fill):
3 moderators from the current team have decided to step down (for reasons that I consider ...
16
votes
8answers
3k views
2021 Moderator Election Q&A - Questionnaire
In connection with the moderator elections, we are holding a Q&A thread for the candidates. Questions collected from an earlier thread have been compiled into this one, which shall now serve as ...
8
votes
0answers
818 views
2021 Community Moderator Election
The 2021 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, ...
9
votes
4answers
450 views
How acceptable is prosemirror-math as an editor style for this site?
This is a follow-up to one of the possible answers to the recently-announced changes to the editor.
Prosemirror-math is a math editing framework that allows for direct editing of a rich-text preview. ...
5
votes
0answers
154 views
Remove [tag:slick-proof] or make it a synonym of [tag:alternative-proof]
@YCor made a suggestion in an answer to another post (What is the intended use of the (proofs) tag?) a bit over a year ago. It received several upvotes, but does not appear to have been acted upon. ...
26
votes
2answers
549 views
Would newly elected moderators join the board of MathOverflow Inc.?
MathOverflow is a bit different from most of the sites in the network in that it is not operated only by Stack Exchange, but it "belongs" also to the nonprofit MathOverflow corporation.
If I ...
7
votes
0answers
263 views
`positive-characteristic` and `characteristic-p` are synonyms
I thought that tag synonyms were meant simply to be proposed and left to survive or die on their own, but I see another question in HNQ about tag synonyms, so maybe one is supposed to raise a ...
22
votes
13answers
2k views
2021 Moderator election: suggestions for nominees?
As you may have seen, the nominations for the 2021 moderator election will be open on March 29. Per StackExchange rules, MO users are expected to nominate themselves for the election. For some ...
15
votes
11answers
1k views
2021 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, 29 March, 2021....
4
votes
1answer
179 views
Should [tag:feynman-integral] be a synonym of [tag:path-integral]?
The question is in the title: I see no benefit from having these two tags for essentially the same concept (particularly as the path-integral wiki excerpt refers to the path integral formulation of ...
0
votes
1answer
79 views
What about bountying a meta question?
While I do agree in principle that anything meta should not have anything to do with reputation changes, there might still be cases when one would like to stimulate more activity with some difficult ...
0
votes
0answers
222 views
Discouraging (Some) Upvotes
I'm tagging this as "discussion", not as a feature request, because I am quite agnostic about whether it's a good idea.
That said: My subjective impression is that lately a lot of very bad/...
7
votes
1answer
665 views
Why do many experts on MathOverflow mention their full names on their profiles?
Sometimes I click on the users accounts on both MSE and Math Overflow sites. I noticed there are many users on MSE, prefer to be anonymous unless on the other site. and noticed there are many ...
8
votes
1answer
424 views
Reviving questions from the PROMYS application?
This elaborates on a comment I made on David Speyer's meta post.
Someone posted at least one problem from this year's PROMYS application on MO--without labeling it as such, of course. One concerned ...
4
votes
2answers
177 views
Tag [upper-bounds] is nowhere to be found
At the moment, MathOverflow has tag lower-bounds (100 questions), but no tag upper-bounds. Are lower bounds that much harder to compute? Or that much more interesting?
Worse, due to the non-existence ...
-1
votes
1answer
118 views
A fuller story of up/down-voting
MO-participants should appreciate the difference between information about +1 vote and +4 vs -3 votes. This is especially the case of closed questions.
I hope that MO will implement the more ...
6
votes
1answer
299 views
How should [applications] be applied?
Is tag applications for
applications of mathematics to mathematics itself?
applications of mathematics to other fields?
applications of mathematics to any field?
job applications? (e.g., ...
9
votes
0answers
506 views
Rationale for reputation change on “my” reputation page that says 'User was removed'
At MathOverflow > Help center > Reputation & Moderation I see the following:
[...] a user who voted for one of your posts had their account deleted (either by request or due to violating ...
23
votes
0answers
814 views
Request to keep an eye out for PROMYS admissions problems
Many of you may be familiar with PROMYS, a camp based out of Boston University which teaches number theory to high school students each summer. Students applying to the program are asked to submit ...
15
votes
1answer
507 views
What does the graph of MO questions-and-links look like?
Consider the graph $G$ whose vertices are MO questions and edges are links between the questions. What does $G$ look like?
I'm happy to define a "link" in the same way the SE software seems ...
26
votes
4answers
591 views
Which Latex / MathJax features do we need or want to have supported on the site?
As we've started discussing, Stack Exchange is planning to redo the editor for all questions and answers across all their sites. As articulated by Emilio Pisanty, these changes will have significant ...
49
votes
2answers
1k views
Nudge: the new Stacks editor has significant implications for this site
You have probably seen already a link, on the Featured on Meta sidebar, to an announcement of an upcoming upgrade to the text editor on Stack Exchange, Opt-in alpha test for a new Stacks editor. As a ...
34
votes
6answers
2k views
How can we attract more grad students?
To quote an answer to a recent meta.MO question:
Here are some examples of people we would like the site to be
welcoming to:
Prominent mathematicians who are less "online" than the typical ...
33
votes
4answers
1k views
Answers in comments are increasingly more common
I have checked a random sample of questions in the main page, and it seems that almost every one of them has some form of answer in the comments, apart from completely unanswered/untouched ones.
This ...
7
votes
0answers
277 views
2020: 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 past 12 months.
As most of you here are aware, sites on the Stack Exchange network ...
8
votes
2answers
667 views
Do we use the downvote button more than other sites?
Is there data available (besides crawling thousands of questions) on how often we use the downvote button, and how quickly?
The motivation for this question is Carlo Beenakker's recent answer on MOM.
...
9
votes
9answers
2k views
What do we mean by welcoming when we're a site aimed at researchers?
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 ...
14
votes
3answers
854 views
Scope and mission of MathOverflow
I followed with much interest the recent discussions on Meta about the community being perceived as unwelcoming to outsiders and the importance of looking for solutions (if any).
In order to do this, ...
-8
votes
1answer
492 views
A radical proposal on votes and reputation
I was trying to explain the current controversy how “welcoming” MO is to a non-mathematician friend. The current best hypothesis for why MO is either attractive or repellent in general is that it has ...
