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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Shall we have tea?
As was recently discussed at Should meta be Q&A?, it's rather strange to have our meta site run on a Q&A basis.
In the past our meta site was a Vanilla forum, and in fact it still exists, ...
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Why was "The origin(s) of the word “elliptic” migrated to hsm?
This question on the history of the ellipse terminology was migrated to hsm after a week of being active on MO and receiving several useful answers.
Did the OP ask for migration?
Why are some ...
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Are Links to Articles Behind a Paywall Acceptable Answers?
This question boils down to whether an answer to a question should contain sufficiently free and easily accessible detail about the solution to a question.
So IMHO it would be perfectly acceptable, ...
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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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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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Dealing with possible incorrectness
I have seen a few responses on MO that I think are either incorrect or possibly incorrect.
What is the best way to draw attention to possible incorrectness?
(I provide two examples below; if this is ...
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asking questions outside of field of expertise
MathOverflow + Math.StackExchanage are great resources for learning and talking about mathematics. Often, I can get constructive and informative discussions leading to progress.
MathOverflow is a ...
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Using MathOverflow to help with referee work
Suppose I am refereeing a paper and wish to remain anonymous as referee. Suppose I had trouble understanding some of the proofs in the paper and made a post on MathOverflow and received a very helpful ...
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Why do non-research and soft questions get closed if and only if the poster lacks high reputation?
The title says it all.
Don't get me wrong. I have actually enjoyed my first few weeks on MO. I am not writing out of personal vendetta. That is, I have not had any of my own questions closed and I ...
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What caused the spike in views and visits on September 23, 2018?
Just curious: What might have caused the spike in visits & views on that Sunday?
A spike in the pulse of mathematics.
Screenshot from site analytics.
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Should I give a link to my recent published paper to an old question of mine on MO?
4 years and 6 months ago I asked on MO: "Who introduced the terms “equivalence relation” and “equivalence class”?" It was somehow a resting stone of a long journey that started 13 years ago from today ...
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Is my question suitable for MO?
Around a month ago I asked a question on ME here. It was well received (got seven up votes). Sadly nobody was able to help much. To get more attention I also placed a bounty on it. Still no luck. The ...
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Using mathoverflow as a blog
In the past, I’ve seen instances where a user has been accused of ‘using mathoverflow as a blog’; the specific criteria for when this accusation is leveled vary, but generally the following are ...
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How can I tell if my question is appropriate to MathOverflow or if I should just put a bounty on it at Math.SE?
I have at least two questions which are about graduate level mathematics on Math.SE, but about which I have serious doubts regarding whether or not they are "research level". In other words, I don't ...
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Are we making it too tempting/easy to send inappropriate posts to MSE?
This "question" (asking for generalized help with a long list of elementary topics) is clearly going to be unwelcome almost anywhere, yet two users voted to close with a suggestion to "see math....
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Increase in unexplained downvotes on (old) questions/answers?
I recently received a downvote without comment on a question and all of its answers, which are good independent of the value of my question imo. I’ve also had two other questions receive similar ...
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The message "User was removed" can be ambiguous
You could save me a few heart attacks :-) by changing the message to the more clearer "Voter was removed" (or whatever you see fitting). I first thought I was removed (maybe on another suboverflow, ...
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Passing of John Nash
I'm sorry to report the sad news that John Nash has died.
Requiescat in pace.
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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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What areas/aspects of mathematics are underrepresented on MO?
The question:
What areas/aspects of mathematics are underrepresented on MO?
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Mathoverflow and the mathematical community
What is the general point of view of the mathematical community about MO ?
Do you talk about MO with your colleagues non-"MO users" ? What are their views?
Is it acceptable to cite MO's posts in ...
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Is it frowned upon to answer a question and vote to close?
Is it frowned upon to answer a question and vote to close it? I did this for
MO166234 and received this comment from a high-rep user:
...
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Are there universities that take your MathOverflow score seriously
When being considered for a position at a university as a post doc or phd or professor, does your MathOverflow account mean anything. Are there any universities that take this seriously when looking ...
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On the recent question "Is Euclid dead?", or: Is it considered good practice to use MathOverflow for a campaign?
Yesterday, a question entitled Is Euclid dead? has been asked
in which the OP states:
"Currently I am leading a campaign for the return of EG to the syllabus
of the high schools of my country (...
Stefan KohlMod
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Proposal to more aggressively delete off-topic questions
We are going to get many more off-topic questions now.
Can we agree to vote to delete on them so as not to pollute the site?
It takes a few votes from users who can vote on such things and/or one ...
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How long until MathOverflow will be part of the Stack Exchange Data Explorer?
According to this answer and this answer, MathOverflow will eventually appear on the Stack Exchange Data Explorer. A couple of weeks have passed since these answers were given and MO is still missing ...
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What's the point of having an *MO* chat without LaTeX enabled?
The title says it all. :-)
In response to the automatic disapproval of the question body:
I tried to edit the chat messages after submitting but couldn't figure out how to do that either. (And I ...
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Is the [completeness] tag necessary?
I have noticed today that we have a completeness tag. It currently houses seven different questions on widely different notions of completeness.
Since there are widely different notions of ...
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Comment template for questions more appropriate for MSE
I think it would be nice to have a comment template that everyone could use when a (new) user asks a question on the site which is clearly more appropriate for MSE. Here's what I've been using today:
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Splitting a question
I recently asked a rather broad question, with four parts. I quickly received an excellent answer which solved three of them, but the fourth seems to be less related than I thought, and is still ...
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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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Why is the "last seen 96 years ago" feature gone?
User homepages used to display the information "last seen ... (min/days/...) ago". It appears this feature is gone now.
I found it useful, and while it does divulge some otherwise ...
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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 ...
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Removing questions after answers
I recently gave a simple counter example to a question posed (I'm sure the mods can see the question). Probably the user was embarrassed by this. The question was promptly deleted and with that my ...
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What "lattices" do we need?
The tag lattices is a problem since a long time. Over the years there were varied discussions about this, but no clear resolution emerged, though some things were done to better the situation. This is ...
user9072
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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", ...
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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 ...
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Should these sexually suggestive jokes be kept or deleted?
There are a few jokes in "Do good math jokes exist?" that I think are inappropriate.
Specifically:
Nov 21 '09 at 9:01 item (1)
Oct 19 '09 at 16:03
Dec 10 '09 at 23:14
Dec 15 '09 at 1:31
All of ...
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Opting out of reputation
[Disclaimer. I'm making this feature request not because I want it nor because I think it's a good idea, but because I heard it so often that there is need to discuss it. Please don't shoot the ...
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Decluttering MathOverflow
There are quite a few very poor questions (all being put on hold quite soon after they've been asked), such as this. These questions stick around unless they get deleted by the OP (which they almost ...
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What do moderators do?
What do moderators do? Is it just a matter of dealing with posts flagged for moderator attention, or are there other things too?
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Guidelines for contacting author of paper directly as opposed to asking on mathoverflow
Every now and again I will have a very specific question about a paper or book, for which I think there is a high likelihood that only the author(s) of the paper or book can give a definite answer. ...
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Should we blacklist or delete the "research" tag?
Should we blacklist or delete the research tag?
This site is about mathematical research, so I don't see how the "research" tag is helpful, any more than a "mathematics" tag would be helpful.
Of the ...
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How to respond to well-known sockpuppeters
Frequent sockpuppeter/spammer Wolfgang Muckenheim is back, and across multiple SE sites (philosophy, mse). This leads me to ask:
Is there anything specific we should do in a situation like this, ...
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Frequently asked questions about tagging on MathOverflow
Due to several discussions on the main site, I am asking this question concerning the best practices for tagging questions on MathOverflow. Unfortunately, the relevant documentation page https://...
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Does anyone remember seeing this answer/comment? (A famous result known earlier than believed)
I remember seeing the following interesting exchange recently on MathOverflow:
someone asked a question about something,
another person ($X$) answered (or commented) that the answer is such-or-such ...
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Are well-posed questions about the mathematics job search on topic at MO?
When MO was young, it quickly became the dominant forum for mathematical discussions. At the time, the scope was pretty much "anything that is on-topic at a department Tea". For example, we had ...
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Should the rules for deleting own questions be modified? - an example
I am aware of the own question deletion rules - in particular, kindly provided in an answer to Rules for deleting one's own question by Martin Sleziak. I think these rules have to be changed ...
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Were there some recent changes to the moderators' team?
I have noticed that Mariano Suárez-Alvarez is no longer listed among the moderators and his profile page no longer shows diamond by his name. (I am pretty sure I remember that he was one of the ...
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imgur will remove some content soon. Does MathOverflow need to save images?
It has been reported that "Hosting site Imgur will remove explicit and anonymous content next month". Are there possibly some images linked in MathOverflow questions or answers, attached to ...
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