44
Vote up this answer if you think the instrument of moving a comment thread to chat
should be used along the lines of Todd Trimble's comment -- i.e. only if a discussion
in comments goes off-topic or becomes contentious.
(Vote down if you don't think so, and leave alone if you don't care.)
19
The vast majority of people who write the most common low-quality questions are not going to read this page at all.
I think the people much more likely to read this page are those, especially graduate students, who are very nervous about asking a question on MO. They need some encouragement and some advice on how to present a question to ensure it is well-...
15
I haven't looked that hard, but it's kind of surprising that as far as I can see, this question hasn't come up before on meta.
MathOverflow's name reflects our proud history. Although we are hosted on the Stack Exchange network, we were founded independently and continue to be an independent entity. I'm pretty sure we pre-date the existence of Mathematics ...
15
Cross-posting is discouraged in general, because it can lead to duplication of effort by people answering on different sites. However, it is appropriate under some circumstances.
Most of the advice discussed by Joonas Ilmavirta in the context of cross-posting to Math Stack Exchange is applicable in general. To quote Joonas, if you're considering cross-...
11
If you really think that an answer is "not an answer", you can always vote for it to be deleted, or flag for the moderators to delete it.
However, I think in this case you have misread the situation. It's a bit of a stretch to say that this answer is "void of content or clarification". You asked a question, and the answer points out that ...
8
Just for closure, here is my slanted summary of the discussion in the comments:
It is a feature and not a bug that it takes some digging to actually migrate a question. This is because migration is only appropriate in very specific circumstances, but to the casual MO user (even one with enough rep to vote on closures), this is generally initially unclear -- ...
8
Vote up / down if you would / would not prefer to add to Martin Sleziak's proposal some language about cross-posting.
Voting for this change does not preclude voting for any other change as well; we may end up making more than one change in the end.
To improve the chances of your question getting an answer make sure that it:
Is about mathematics at ...
7
If you look at the community-bulletin tag info, you can find a link to this post: What criteria are used to select the links that appear in the community bulletin sidebar block? on Meta Stack Exchange. The post describes in detail, how a question gets into the community bulletin.
In short, only the questions from past two weeks, only questions having the ...
6
Vote up / down if you think Martin Sleziak's proposal should / should not be modified to use the phrase "research-level mathematics" rather than "mathematics at graduate level or higher".
(Note that this would actually bring the wording closer to earlier drafts of Martin's proposal; the term "graduate-level" had been introduced ...
6
I think it’s very helpful to compare with academia.stackexchange, where career advice questions are a much larger part of the site’s scope.
There are plenty of examples there showing that that career advice questions/answers can be very useful indeed, when done well. However, the “limited generalisability” concerns Tim Campion raises here are certainly ...
5
I think career advice questions can be valuable. You make valid points about pitfalls, but I think a good way to address them would be to have some guidelines for people answering these questions:
Base answers on your direct experiences, or experiences of people you know well (such as your students)
Use comments to ask for information that would be relevant ...
4
Concerning the first proposed edit,
its modifications are unlikely to make things more clear for users asking
low-quality questions.
In particular, such users rarely have any exposure to graduate education,
so would have no idea what “graduate-level training” means.
Not to mention that such a description makes no sense for much of Europe,
where the ...
2
I believe that it is very important to make the phrasing essentially positive, so as to encourage questions as much as possible from the main population of people that might make valuable contributions to MathOverflow. We need in particular to phrase things so as to encourage questions from graduate students who might otherwise feel inhibited to contribute.
...
2
Okay, after several days with no further substantive discussion on this question, it appears that both changes which I suggested as answers are supported by the community. After tinkering with a couple other possibilities, I was not personally able to come up with anything making the words "research mathematics" pop out any further. So the plan ...
1
Vote up / down if you think Martin Sleziak's proposal should / should not be used as-is:
To improve the chances of your question getting an answer make sure that it:
Is about mathematics at graduate or higher level. (Use other sites for general mathematical questions.)
Includes the necessary background and has an informative title. (See also: How to write ...
1
Rather than saying users are operating the site software the wrong way, I'd rather say the software doesn't properly reflect the way humans want to interact with the site. The solution is fix the software.
Only top voted, non community-wiki answers of a minimum length are eligible
