42
I thought the policy was the following, and I continue to think that it should be the policy:
Questions asking about famous open problems are typically closed
Questions that turn out to be less-famous open problems, but still well-known to experts, are answered by giving a reference to somewhere that the openness of the problem is discussed.
Questions which ...
30
I am against making "questions on math education no longer on-topic here".
There are some excellent education related questions on this site. We may specify that
education questions on MO should be related to graduate level (research) education.
Graduate-level education is done by professional mathematicians not by professional teachers, and it is natural to ...
22
I think that we should explicitly welcome open questions.
I mean this, first, in a narrow sense. Namely, every mathematician hopes that the questions on which they are currently working---whether for their dissertation or a later project----is an open question. These open questions come in all types, some interesting, some difficult. Let us welcome them ...
19
I would very much like to keep questions about graduate level courses here at MO. There is a lot of knowledge of how to present various topics which isn't available in books and is only known to a few experts in the field, and I don't think those questions would get answered at matheducators. Here are some recent questions of mine of that sort. 1 2 3
16
I think they should be merged, as choosing one tag instead of the other seems to convey little information.
I think we should also add the expression "complex analysis" in the tag wiki excerpt of cv.complex-variables for clarity so that it would read:
Complex analysis, holomorphic functions, automorphic group actions and forms, pseudoconvexity, complex ...
15
The problem seems to be more serious: the tag wiki edits by this
user seem to copy-paste material from sites like MathWorld,
which requires a license for commercial use
(http://mathworld.wolfram.com/about/faq.html#copyright),
for example, https://mathoverflow.net/tags/axiom-of-choice/info
is copy-pasted from http://mathworld.wolfram.com/AxiomofChoice.html.
...
14
Simply remove the tag from your question, unless someone else uses the tag it will be removed in 24 hours. Here is a very similar question from meta.SO: I accidentally created a tag. How do I delete it?
More details on pruning of low-usage tags:
The process removing tags having no questions is running once in 24 hours, see How can we get rid of misspelled ...
14
Such a system would be technically impossible since we can't delay posting a question until tags have been approved. However, this is not a serious problem:
Only users with at least 300 points can create new tags.
Users are quick to delete inappropriate tags from posts.
Unused tags get purged in 24 hours; single use tags get deleted after 6 months.
...
12
The Math Educators (MESE) site is still in beta, so there are a few things we can't do just yet. During the beta phase, SE sites are still defining themselves and narrowing down what is on-topic/off-topic for the site. It's best for other SE sites to avoid interfering with this process. For example, we can't establish a migration path to MESE. (Though ...
12
This seems like a reasonable thing to do. If there are no objections, then I'll set the wheels in motion.
Update: After removing completeness tags by hand (from the 7 posts that used it), I had put in a request to SE Community Management to blacklist that tag. I've not heard back from them though.
Second update: As per Shog9's comment, the completeness ...
11
I think neither "simplices" nor "simplex-theory" captures the topic that is currently described by "simplicial-stuff". If we want to rename it, maybe "simplicial-objects"? (even if taken literally is a bit more restrictive). I like a lot "simplicial-stuff" though, and I'd prefer to keep it. I don't think any name that we come up with is going to avoid well-...
11
There are many interesting zeta functions, and the Riemann zeta function is the most notable of them. It is natural to expect that people who ask questions about other zeta functions would want a separate tag, and indeed, only a very small proportion of the questions tagged zeta-functions are about the Riemann zeta function. I think it would be better to ...
10
Here’s a few words of advice on writing tag wiki excerpts:
The excerpt is the elevator pitch for the tag. You only have ~500 plain text characters for the excerpt, so don’t feel obligated to cover everything in it! Save that for the 30,000+ character Markdown tag wiki. The excerpt should define the shared quality of questions containing this tag — ...
9
There is a built-in system to automatically create tag synonyms by the nomination and voting of high-reputation users. Unfortunately, it appears that hardly anyone ever looks at this page (and the qualifications for voting are fairly demanding), so I'm posting it here to try to get it more attention. In particular, all of the synonyms marked as "pending" ...
9
Here are some comments to start off on question 3. Feel free to edit.
What are top level tags, and why should I try to use them?
The top level tags are tags like nt.number-theory and at.algebraic-topology which begin with a two letter code. They roughly follow their arXiv counterparts, from which they originated.
I believe it is recommended to always use ...
8
If you Google for unanswered tag site:data.stackexchange.com you can find some already existing Data Explorer queries for this. For example:
Unanswered Questions by Tag: Shows the number of unanswered questions by tag for the most popular tags. The same query was used in a similar question on meta.math.SE.
Unanswered Questions by Tag: Shows all tags with at ...
8
The SE team has the ability to blacklist tags. The most efficient way to request this is probably to list all tags that should be blacklisted into a single (new) meta post "Blacklist [topology], ..." and where possible link to the meta posts that support this blacklisting. (As far as I can tell none of the links in your post why the topology tag should be ...
8
Please do not ask for clarification when the content of the question is clear to specialists. The person asking the question is looking for an answer, not a discussion about basic definitions. Of course, a more accessible introduction to a question can be beneficial to non-specialists (and it tends to attract more up-votes), but I don't think we should ...
7
As of August 8, 2017, the length limit for tags went from 25 characters to 35 characters. So now is a great time to allow inconveniently compressed tag names to stretch out a bit...
Perhaps we could collect here list of tags which now, after the character limit for length of tag name has been extended, could be spelled in full instead of a shortening. (This ...
7
When MathOverflow was created, the site was seeded with a few initial tags, one for each arXiv category which are distinguished by starting with a two-letter acronym:
ag.algebraic-geometry
at.algebraic-topology
ap.analysis-of-pdes
ct.category-theory
ca.analysis-and-odes
co.combinatorics
ac.commutative-algebra
cv.complex-variables
dg.differential-geometry
ds....
Only top voted, non community-wiki answers of a minimum length are eligible
