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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"Questions" of the type "I have written something, please give me feedback"
I have now today seen several questions (this and this)
which asks for feedback on research articles, rather than stating explictit questions.
There is of course a gray zone, but I wonder a bit what ...
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Should Kevin Buzzard's Lean question be left in its original state?
Kevin Buzzard asked this question, which incorporated a long section of background discussion. Federico Poloni removed that section. Yemon Choi commented that he thought the question was OK before ...
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comments that are not displayed right away ("add/see 10 other comments")
Often when I start reading comments, it is only when I come to the end that I see a link like "add/see 10 other comments". I can understand that if there is a huge list of comments for the same ...
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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, ...
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Why can't I accept two answers to the same question simultaneously?
I asked a question in MO and I received two interesting answers with different approaches. Both of them are very interesting. I wish to accept both of them simultaneously, but it is impossible. ...
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Closing as duplicate
Many things changed when MathOverflow joined the Stack Exchange Network a year ago. While most changes were quickly absorbed a few are more subtle and might have been missed by some. In particular, ...
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Feature request: add short "about MathOverflow" section to the front page
Until a few years ago MathOverflow front page had a short section at the top describing what the site is for. I am not sure when it disappeared or why but I would like to see it restored. Currently ...
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a spate of deletions by "Community"
18 minutes ago (at time of writing) a whole swathe of questions appear to have been deleted, some of which seemed not to be obviously sub-par or off-topic, and some of which had a net rep scoire of 0 (...
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change in voting to close
I noticed today that the pop-up screens for voting to close a question have acquired a new layer. Clicking "close" used to produce a pop-up with checkboxes indicating various reasons for closing. Now ...
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Is it OK to abuse Mathjax for emphasis?
The author of this question uses Mathjax (in a way different from its intended usage) to make parts of his question stand out more; for instance, to display some headers in red or to alter the spacing ...
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Removing greetings and taglines
The Stack Exchange Network frowns on greetings and taglines in posts. There were mixed reactions to this before we moved to the network. Should MathOverflow tolerate greetings or not? Is it ...
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Is there left any way to highlight part of text after all?
Currently we have quotes, but
the quoted text looks more faint than the surrounding text
The vertical bar hardly helps, I believe. In fact I think (although I cannot explain it) that this bar ...
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Why is it not possible to offer a bounty for longer than 7 days?
I had offered a bounty for the following question that expires in 7 hours:
What did Gelfand mean by suggesting to study "Heredity Principle" structures instead of categories?
The results ...
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Interpretation of Time-limit for Editing Comments
Yesterday I had written a comment and, after 4 minutes began editing it.
After having finished my editing, I tried to save the comment and was prompted with the message, that editing is only possible ...
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Cleaning up comments
Traditionally, MathOverflow moderators only delete comments that are highly problematic. Even in that case, we copied the entire deleted comment thread to tea.mathoverflow.net. Since migrating to the ...
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Use of arXiv tags
When MathOverflow began we decided to start using arXiv classification and created corresponding tags. These are still the most broadly used tags on MathOverflow. However, the usage of some these tags ...
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Archiving of MathOverflow threads
We've had some discussion of adding an archiving feature to MathOverflow on the private moderators list, and I thought I should report on the current situation. (You might also read earlier threads ...
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What is the intended use of the (proofs) tag?
There is a tag called proofs. This tag has empty tag-info/usage guidance.
Without any usage guidance it is quite likely to be used incorrectly.
The fact that there are many deleted questions having ...
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Number of questions posed per day
Right now the sites statistics page shows that MathOverflow is seeing an average
of 38 questions per day. Is there a plot of this average over time somewhere?
My perception is that it has been ...
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migration versus on-hold
Several questions have been migrated to m.se of late, and several others have been put "on hold" as off-topic, and I'm having trouble seeing how the distinction is made between the two courses of ...
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Will MO have Community Promotion Ads?
Community Promotion Ads seem to be a useful tool for helping spread various links that might be useful for users of the site.
I have mostly encountered them at MSE. I have learned several ...
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Reappearance of (topology) tag
I have noticed that topology tag was created again. According to list of new tags it was created Jun 9 at 7:55. There are currently 3 questions having this tag.
I was not able to find a discussion on ...
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Happy tenth anniversary! How did you celebrate?
Question 1 was a test question posted about ten years ago from this one (give or take about an hour). There's been a bit going on since then with the main forum. This post is a place for celebrants ...
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On convexity tags
The tags on convexity are convex-geometry ($\times$560), convex-analysis ($\times$ 266), convexity ($\times$ 420). Here the number is the current (2019/02/23) number of uses and I ignore some more ...
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What to do if you want up-to-date answers to an old question on technology
One issue with the site lasting as long as it has is that technology has changed quite a bit since its early days, and so discussions of technology are extremely out of date. In particular, when ...
Ben WebsterMod
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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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How to make welcoming comments on "homework-like" posts that will be closed?
We get posts here that are phrased as if from a textbook or homework; the one I have in mind is Find the recurrence relation, but my question is more general. Such posts will certainly be closed.
A ...
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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 ...
Tim CampionMod
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Retroactively add linked questions
Any question on MathOverflow (or other Stack Exchange site) shows the list of linked questions in the sidebar on the right. A question is added there if there is a link between the two questions ...
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Should I delete my own question if it turns out trivial after a comment?
I had not given this question enough thought before asking it. I went straight to looking for a reference without thinking about it. Somebody pointed out the obvious solution in a comment. Should I ...
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How to find out what activity activated a favorite?
I have several favorite questions and it is a great feature that every time something happens around them, they are flagged up for me. However, when I turn to them, in most cases I cannot figure out ...
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Call for question titles: Mathematical modeling/applied mathematics SE proposal needs 33 more sample question titles
Edit: I wanted people to realize that they only need to write the question title, and not the question body itself.
The Mathematical Modeling SE proposal (http://area51.stackexchange.com/proposals/...
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Altering the question in a way that makes an answer obsolete
I've seen that several times: an answer makes OP want to change the question in a way that would damage the answer. Obviously this should not be done. In fact I think it is better to delete the ...
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OpenScience Q&A just went live
Perhaps you are aware of the fact that there was an Open Science private beta at StackExchange that did not quite manage to develop enough traction so it was closed down recently. Some people want to ...
user80006
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2013 Community Moderator Election
As the Math Overflow community grows, so does the load on our moderator team. The existing staff is doing an excellent job, and in order to keep up the good work, they've requested a few more sets of ...
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Geographic distribution of people on MathOverflow
Is there a way to answer questions like the following, either by means of the StackExchange
Date Explorer or by other means?:
How many of the regular MathOverflow users (say, e.g., those who ...
Stefan KohlMod
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Merge complex-analysis and cv.complex-variables?
We have distinct tags complex-analysis and cv.complex-variables, of which the latter is the arXiv standard name. They seem to mean the same thing. Should they be merged?
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Primarily opinion-based questions/answers
One closing option is primarily opinion-based: Many good questions generate some degree of opinion based on expert experience, but answers to this question will tend to be almost entirely based on ...
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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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Why adding a comment requires 50 reputation points?
When a new member tries to write a comment he sees “add comment (requires 50 reputation)” but of course he has no so many points. On the other hand, answering does not require any reputation. Then the ...
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Undelete request
This is motivated by this question, see also the comments, and Will Jagy's answer. I was asked to start a formal request, so here it is.
A user that has expressed no desire to participate anymore on ...
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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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Should top mathoverflow threads get DOIs and be permanently archived?
Josh from The Winnower (thewinnower.com) here. I wanted to reach out and see if users of mathOverflow would be interested in permanently archiving and assigning DOIs to top threads with The Winnower. ...
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Close cross posts between here and MSE
If a question is cross-posted here and on the Math Stack Exchange, what's the policy to deal with these? For example take this question and its MSE twin.
Should one of them be closed?
If so, which ...
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Should there be a "statute of limitations" for closable questions?
Ever more frequently I find in the "close votes" review queue questions which are a few years old. Many of them already have accepted answers, and one can see that they were well received at the time ...
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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 ...
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Can a person other than the author start a bounty for a question they like?
Suppose Jack is new to MO and he posts a good question. Tim has a lot of reputations in MO and thinks the question deserves more attentions. Why not we allow Tim to offer some of his reputations to ...
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Why are trivial answers upvoted more than answers that actually contain substance?
I have noticed that a two line answer that anyone can come up with usually has more upvotes than an answer that is more difficult to come up with. Is this trend simply a result of pure laziness as ...
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Probability question migrated to stats.stackexchange
What has happened to the following question?: https://mathoverflow.net/posts/202242/revisions
Firstly, it looks like a reasonable question to me (although the notation could be improved). Why was it ...
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Moving back my question to MO
References on Gerbes question is migrated from MO to meta.
It was never about MO. I was only giving information about search I have done. None of the comments except one has objection with this. None ...
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