# Why was this question “Norm of the product of two regular ideals of an order of an algebraic number field” put on hold?

I have no idea why this question should be put on hold. Please let me know the reason. Otherwise I cannot improve it.

EDIT(Nov. 12, 2013) I rephrased Remark to make it shorter and clearer. And I changed the spoiler to My method and made it visible.

• I have refrained from downvoting /voting to close Makoto Kato's questions lately, but I understand the irritation of many. Opening a metathread on each and every single thing is kinda pointless, because nothing new is going to come to light. Also the "rule" about answering one's own question and/or asking a question you know an answer to was, IIRC, not met with approval by Math.SE community. IIRC the provision winning a lot of support said that this is ok, only if it is something that would startle the community, i.e. would be a particularly sleek solution unknown to most of us. – Jyrki Lahtonen Nov 10 '13 at 16:35
• @Alexander: I'm not saying that people shouldn't give a second chance. But when someone has breached the trust of more than a handful of people (to the point that you can say that it became an actual issue for the community to deal with), then the user must first try to bridge that gap before they are given any actual leeway. The OP did not do anything to bridge that gap, with the exception of opening uncountably many meta threads and claiming that "this is your opinion" or "SE has this policy, and I don't care that you say it's invalid here" when people pointed out his behavior. [...] – Asaf Karagila Nov 10 '13 at 19:31
• [cont.] I would be very happy to hear your suggestion as to how to deal with someone who claims they want to hear criticism, but really just want to hear "You're absolutely right". Moreover when that someone bombards the meta site with every slight booboo they have, to the point that people no longer bother to try and communicate with him. I posted one comment on a recent thread, and I regretted it soon after. Please, enlighten me, what do you think people should do in that sort of situation when words seem to no longer have any effect? – Asaf Karagila Nov 10 '13 at 19:33
• @AlexanderGruber But that was not the one closed, and the question was not why it had not been reopened (in which case the correct action would of course have been to ask in the thread for reopen requests). Instead, the OP did what he always does and opened another meta thread, for which he was awarded with a moderator reopening the question as 4'th rather than as 5'th voter. After seeing the solution the OP had, I see no reason why he would feel it necessary to have it as a separate question or why he wants another proof, as this one is less than 2 lines. – Tobias Kildetoft Nov 10 '13 at 20:50
• I neither close nor reopen questions here (other than transport them to other sites or in a few cases of obvious duplicates), but I remember a discussion from more than a year ago in which the opinion has been expressed that one should not use MSE as ones personal blog or sketchpad. If one thinks this is a legitimate ground for closing questions, this could only be seen in the context of other questions. MK's behavior is certainly very consistent with him using MSE as a sketchpad. – Michael Greinecker Nov 10 '13 at 22:43
• I voted to close the original question. I don't think that MSE is the place to write a blog about algebraic number theory; if you'd like to do that, there are more appropriate places for it, such as ProofWiki or your own personal blog. It seems that your aim is to make a large collection of results about this field of study, using MSE as a platform to publish it all; while the goal is laudable, I don't believe that this is the correct place to do it. – user61527 Nov 10 '13 at 23:19
• @AlexanderGruber: Please be careful to distinguish between the merit of a question, and all of the other factors that influence whether or not a question should be closed. e.g. Makoto Koto certainly does not qualify for the "let's give the poster a generous amount of leeway while they adapt to the community norms" credit. – user14972 Nov 11 '13 at 0:53
• @MakotoKato You've cited this policy over and over again. Based on the votes and feedback you've received, the community disagrees. There's a significant difference between asking a question for which you know the answer, and trying to write a compendium of proofs for algebraic number theory. I have no objections to someone asking a question in good faith looking for alternative proofs, but I believe that using M.SE as a platform to publish so many proofs is misusing the site. – user61527 Nov 11 '13 at 3:28
• @Makoto: Your question doesn't look like a question. It looks like an excerpt from a reference book, a meta discussion, a node in a singly linked list, and an extra sentence with a question mark thrown in somewhere in the middle. – user14972 Nov 11 '13 at 4:08
• @Makoto: Scale. Even water is deadly if you drink too much of it! – user14972 Nov 11 '13 at 5:40
• No, MSE does not explicitly encourage asking and answering ones own questions. The text you keep citing is from the general stackexchange FAQ (as has been pointed out to you on countless occations). Different sites on the stackexchange network have different policies on specific issues. You are well aware of this as you have been told many times, and yet you keep ignoring everything you are told and doing whatever you please. – Tobias Kildetoft Nov 11 '13 at 7:56
• You can repeat that as many times as you like (you have certainly repeated it many times now), that does not make it any more true. – Tobias Kildetoft Nov 11 '13 at 13:54
• Makoto, questioning the competence of m.se voters is not going to incline anyone to look on your questions with favor. – Gerry Myerson Nov 12 '13 at 8:44
• One could indeed ask about the wisdom of a "general FAQ" that contradicts the norms of specific SE sites. But, in any case, it is clear from the comments here that on this site, askers should avoid posts that would be better put on a personal blog or on the arXiv. – Carl Mummert Nov 12 '13 at 21:42
• I do not think it is an appropriate use of the site to simultaneously (within the a few days) ask a minor variation of the a question you have just asked, when the original does not even have an accepted answer. Let someone answer the first one, and then see if you can prove the generalization yourself without posting it as another question. This is a specific case of my general advice to ask fewer, more valuable questions, in order to encourage other people to participate in them. – Carl Mummert Nov 12 '13 at 23:54

I am sad to say that reading this discussion left me no other logical alternative but to vote to close the question that initiated this round of exchanges.

The way I see it Makoto Kato's modus operandi is to repeatedly plea to that blog post by Joel Spolsky for justification of his actions. Furthermore he is continuously asking downvoters to explain what exactly should be corrected in the questions for them to be acceptable. The problem with that is that the need to define a function (one returning a Yes/No answer in response to a text to be posted), or a binding list of criteria for acceptability, should not arise in the first place. Even though this is a programming/math site, we cannot rely on such definitions alone on matters of judgement. I'm not the first to quote justice Stewart here, but if courts of law are unwilling to give a precise definition, and use the principle I know it when I see it when judging a case, then I don't think that we should be bothered either.

Because of this wider context I am unwilling to judge this post on its own merits alone, moderator's pleas notwithstanding. Does that form an ad hominem -attack? Possibly? I'm not good at critically studying my subconscious. But I know that the members enraged by Makoto's antics are intelligent and knowledgable people. They know history of ancient Athens, and are aware of what may go wrong, if we start ostracizing people indiscriminately.

Note that similar attempts at blogging on MSE (by others!) have been shot down in the past by the community.

• I'm sure you are aware that the "I know it when I see it" test for obscenity was subsequently superseded by the Miller test. – user642796 Nov 11 '13 at 8:34
• In short, you are just saying that you voted to close my question because you think it should be closed. I don't see anything logical here. – Makoto Kato Nov 11 '13 at 17:28

Closings, downvotes and suspensions are not necessarily rational processes on the main site and even less so on the meta. I have never downvoted or close-voted any of your material, may have upvoted some of it, do not believe that negative votes on the main site are useful, and don't agree with the generalized idea of "not using SE as a blog". I also considered your recent suspension, like most of the other suspensions noticed on meta, to be ridiculous.

Having said that: the style of your recent postings is awful no matter who posts them, the rate of posting, or the possible use of MSE as a blog.

• they are much longer than needed to state the question using standard words

• they contain huge amounts of meta comments in the postings, about your intentions, interests, or justification for posting the question. This is useless and destroys readability. Descriptions of yourself belong in the user profile, not the question.

• unnecessary comments about the relations to some deep and important theory sound like promotion of the question.

• there are no published sources given as evidence that the statements in the question are correct or were ever considered interesting.

• it is therefore unclear if the question is correct or interesting. Very few people will be interested in checking your proofs to guess whether the statement is correct. The SE technology is not designed to operate as a personal tutorial site that interactively debugs posters' "work and effort".

• you ask for intellectually limited answers by requesting elementary and complete proofs.

• there are hints and spoiler space in the question. This belongs only in an answer containing your solutions, hints, or other writings.

• the links that create dependency on a cloud of other questions. Nobody is interested in tracing through a forest of other postings that (for the above reasons) might be nothing more than a narration of your intuitions instead of a body of known theory. Maybe it is all correct, or maybe not, but nobody is going to spend the time to decide which is the case.

There are other problems [edit: such as using identical, cut-and-paste boilerplate text in many different postings, which can be considered a form of spam] but that should give a sufficient idea.

I do think there is a group of people who automatically downvote and close-vote your postings on both sites. Re-working the questions in fear of suspensions and close votes, by adding extra material (such as "context, effort and motivation") is only making these questions worse.

• I edited the question to make it shorter and clearer recently. Have you noticed that? – Makoto Kato Nov 12 '13 at 4:06
• I have seen a few versions of your question, probably all of them, and including the latest one. But I am also referring to other questions with the same stylistic problems. – zyx Nov 12 '13 at 4:11
• [they contain huge amounts of meta comments in the postings, about your intentions, interests, or justification for posting the question. This is useless and destroys readability. Descriptions of yourself belong in the user profile, not the question.] I used to ask questions without writing those. Some people downvoted for them or voted to close them because thay think they lack context. I didn't much care. However, recently a new rule that a question lacking context or effort should be closed was introduced. So I began to write context, motivation, etc. – Makoto Kato Nov 12 '13 at 4:26
• It reduces the expertise of the answers, since fewer knowledgeable people will be interested in responding, and your own answers are unclear as to their correctness. Not because there is anything known to be wrong in them (that would require checking them in detail to find out), but because you operate without any known synchronization mechanism to outside knowledge. The usual method for synchronization is published references, the kind that are read by a larger number of people, checked by referees, usually known to experts to be correct or wrong, and use relatively standard terminology. – zyx Nov 12 '13 at 5:29
• +1 for the list, -1 for the first paragraph. – Michael Greinecker Nov 12 '13 at 8:22
• I certainly do mean that a source should be given whenever possible. Not only as evidence of correctness, but that is the relevant application in your case. – zyx Nov 12 '13 at 15:32
• Then there are two consequences. For a single question, its quality is usually worse than if you did have a source. For a large body of questions, it starts to become a cloud that floats away from the known set of mathematics and become a "single-person isolated mathematics" whose rate of correctness is at some increasingly unknown point between 0 and 100 percent. Since you do not usually reference outside sources and other people do not refer to your postings, the chances of people interacting enough with what you write to either verify the correctness or catch the mistakes, decreases. – zyx Nov 12 '13 at 18:38
• The "error-correction process" would involve other people, hopefully some of them experts, commenting for or against the correctness of the source-less material. This is obviously not happening. When nobody comes forward to answer the question (in a relatively popular tag among experts using MSE), and number of page views is low, that is evidence of nobody reading your proofs, not that the proofs are correct. If the postings were written in a different way (such as adding sources) the fraction of people who read them closely might be larger. Currently it seems close to zero. – zyx Nov 12 '13 at 20:30
• What percentage of your questions (without a source, and requesting a proof) show evidence of others reading your arguments and forming a decision about correctness? You have 53 questions with $0$ answers. There are 244 with $1$ answer, and many of those are your own answers, but I don't know how to count that subset automatically, or the number of proofs that are logically dependent on un-reviewed arguments in your questions and answers. – zyx Nov 12 '13 at 22:37
• For example, the answers to your [alternative-proof] questions in the graduate-school level of tags like algebraic number theory and commutative algebra, are mainly from you, or the questions are not answered. A few questions get outside answers, but this is the exception, and in your examples we see things like expert answers to parts 1-2 of a 6 part question, with the other 4 in an answer you wrote, including claims (no.5) listed as nontrivial. math.stackexchange.com/… – zyx Nov 12 '13 at 22:56
• Bad statistics. If you want to use the Votes sorting, maybe we should also look at the last (several) pages of lowest voted questions and not only the first page of highest voted questions. Most of the first page are there because they are elementary questions outside your specialization, or in general popular tags like soft-question and math-history), or do contain references, or were posted in a relatively reasonable style before the start of the last few months of "new posting technique" described in my answer. – zyx Nov 13 '13 at 5:08
• For better examples, try this: math.stackexchange.com/… . In your last 15 [algebraic-number-theory] questions, basically the last two months of "new style" posts, there were 11 answers, of which you authored 10. That's one independent answer to 15 questions. Looking at the earlier questions, they either gave references or were in a simpler style of asking a short mathematics question. The new method makes replies much less likely. – zyx Nov 13 '13 at 5:21
• "How to ask a good question": meta.math.stackexchange.com/questions/9959/… – Carl Mummert Nov 13 '13 at 13:15
• Makoto: I think you may have misinterpreted the practices for closing (there aren't hard-and-fast "rules", of course). Questions are sometimes closed, among other reasons, for not including context and simply stating a problem. But what you are adding isn't "context" as I understand it - the place you encountered the problem, why the problem is generally interesting, and the specific issue(s) you are worried about. In at least one question, you added an argument why the question should not be closed and your personal intent for the question, which isn't the type of context I look for. – Carl Mummert Nov 13 '13 at 13:21
• @CarlMummert [But what you are adding isn't "context" as I understand it] Isn't providing outline of the proof enough? – Makoto Kato Nov 13 '13 at 18:45