There are already a lot of citations of MathOverflow in the literature. Nevertheless, there is some resistance in the greater mathematical community since MathOverflow is not a traditional medium. While some of this is simply resistance to change that is bound to slowly disappear, some of it reflects some real problems of the medium. The main issue is that MathOverflow is continually updating and this hinders the citability of MathOverflow. Indeed, since a post can change drastically or even completely disappear at any time, a simple link to a question or answer on MathOverflow isn't a reliable citation mechanism. The site does keep a [revision history](https://meta.mathoverflow.net/questions/1453/make-edit-history-more-accessible) of each post which may help if after a post is edited but this doesn't help if a post has been deleted.

### How can we fix this problem?

One suggestion came up in an earlier discussion on the [long-term archiving of MathOverflow](https://meta.mathoverflow.net/questions/800/long-term-archiving-of-mathoverflow). We could publish monthly or weekly static version of new and updated posts at archive.mathoverflow.net. The static site could even have volume and issue numbers, an ISSN, DOIs for posts, just like a traditional journal would have. Posts on this static MathOverflow Archive would be just as easy to cite as any journal article.

Maybe there are completely different ways to address this problem? There are also important implementation details to discuss with the MathOverflow Archive and other ideas. We seek input from the community on this important issue for the future of MathOverflow.