Is there an MSE-like site that is more pleasant to work in? Or are there other solutions?

Question

The Problem: It becomes more difficult to help people on a site in which there is mass closing of questions. And I am disturbed that a small group of people is engaged in trying to delete permanently some of the questions I have answered. I interpret it as systematic deliberate erasure of my work.

In my opinion, things have substantially worsened over the past several months. If there seems to be no sign of change, one solution is to scale back my participation on MSE, possibly to nearly zero.

The question: Are there suggestions about alternate sites that one could contribute to? Or are there other solutions?

Answer 1

I haven't been here long, and I rarely follow meta. That said, I am surprised and dismayed by what I perceive to be very open hostility among several prominent users here, over something that I consider to be not particularly significant--"contributions" to a site.

No single user, no matter how high their reputation or extensive their contribution to MSE, should feel entitled to the ownership of such contributions. This site is not an academic publication. Whatever content you post here is understood to be freely given and subject to modification or deletion. If that doesn't suit you, then you are more than welcome to compile your knowledge in other, perhaps more traditional, ways. To that end, I cannot suggest any internet site that meets such a standard, for the internet is paradoxical in that, once put online, some things never go away; yet things are easily lost to intrinsic impermanence.

Regarding the nature of closure and deletion, I find that the role of MSE should not, in my view, merely be that of a homework-answering service. Questions that do not show any problem-solving effort on the part of the submitter are extremely common, and I believe that if these are not addressed in a uniform manner, such behavior becomes encouraged to the point that it will overwhelm the site entirely. One might argue that it is not our responsibility to police students and discourage them from cheating, unethical behavior, or at the very least, the failure to appreciate the value of self-learning. One might also argue that if they do not get their questions answered here, they would simply turn elsewhere (and they frequently do). But all I can say is that for my own personal conscience, I would feel ill at ease if I did not vote to close a question that I perceived as being asked in bad faith. That doesn't mean I am perfect at sorting it out, but that lack of perfect discernment does not mean an acceptable solution is to not attempt to draw a distinction at all.

And if others do not have such qualms, it is not my place to tell them that they should.

The system here is quite democratic: for the most part, each of us gets as much influence or voice as we ought to. What does not sit well with me is the idea that just because some people have very high reputation counts and a long posting history, that they can dictate to everyone else the direction this site should go--with thinly veiled threats. That, to me, seems juvenile and self-centered. We each contribute freely. That doesn't make any one person's contributions more worthy than another's. If your contributions get deleted because some users in the community are collectively deciding that this site should enforce a policy of not actively assisting parasitic behavior, that is unfortunate, but surely cannot be cause for complaint that "your" work is being lost: you cannot lose what you gave away. You are always welcome to not give away your knowledge, but to suggest in such a retaliatory fashion that you somehow "deserve" better treatment is not particularly mature.

Answer 2

As you may know, moderators have access to certain statistics which aren't otherwise easily visible (though which are largely retrievable from either the SO data dumps or data.se). I have also perceived more closures and deletions than normal, so I thought I'd take a look at the data. We are asked to not share specifics (I don't know why), so these are averages.

It turns out that somewhere between 8% and 9% of posts (questions and answers together) are deleted each week this year - closer to 9% now, closer to 8% in January. Last year, It hovered between 6.5% and 7%. So there is a definite increase. To me, it feels pretty noticeable.

In many ways, I find the SE platform to be well-designed for self-governance. I rarely disagree with people deleting answers - it seems to me that people rarely delete answers without good reason. But some people target some questions (and their answers fall because of it). There are three ways to delete a question (edit: as is pointed out in the comments, I'm slightly off here. See the comments, but it doesn't change the discussion):

1. If the question is negatively scored, more than a month old, and there are no upvoted answers, then the Community user will delete the question automatically.

2. A number of users puts the question on hold. If it is not reopened in the next 5 days, the question becomes closed. Once the question is closed, 3 10k users vote to delete.

3. A mod uses mod superpowers to delete the question.

Issues with the first way would be decreased if more people voted. Something that I've noticed much more than closures and deletions is that the voting has not at all kept up with site growth. Unfortunately, while we can sometimes say vote early, vote often, a very small group of users reads the meta and fewer care about what they read - this is very hard to change.

The ideal resolution of the second way is for users to edit their on hold question. It gets put in a reopen queue, and users tend to be pretty liberal about reopening after any nontrivial edit from the queue. Frankly, though, users very often don't edit their question. Or if they do, they're confused - they have no idea how to approach the problem, users demand context, and they edit something in like I'm lost. What do I do?, which typically doesn't lead to reopenings.

Something which could be done, but which isn't done very often, is for capable users of really editing lower quality questions into reasonable questions, especially questions that have been otherwise abandoned by the OP. For example, it seems to me that it's extremely likely that an answer of André is great, and the site is better off with it than without. If the question is enroute to being closed, then perhaps a higher rep user could really edit the question. [This conforms to the view that this site is a Q&A repository, where good answers to good questions should be kept so that they can be found later; a different popular view is that this site is for learning math, and thus answers should help the OP first and foremost, including limiting to hints and whatnot]

To try to answer your actual question, Martin's Link in the comments contains every site that I know of aside from reddit and quora. I've at least looked at all of them before (and migrated here from mymathforum), and I really think MSE and MO are the best at what they do (i.e. not discussion).

Answer 3

Since the question has been expanded to include other solutions, I'll propose one:

• Improve the questions whose current state puts your answers at risk

Here is a query that finds them: My answers at risk, with your UserId pre-filled. It locates the answers that may be deleted if you-know-who downvotes them and/or the question.

There are $25$ results right now, representing $0.25\%$ of your answers. These are closed (not as duplicates), have score at most $1$, the question has score at most $1$, and there is no accepted answer.

Sure, some of them can be saved from the evil downvoter with an upvote. But it might be better to improve the question. A question can be improved by adding some context:

Context

This problem is of the kind ... which are usually solved with ... This one is particularly (hard|nice) because ...

This will add information for both the OP and for future readers. It will also set a better example for future question askers.

Answer 4

One suggestion.

A significant part (may be I'm projecting here?) of the sentiment against answering routine exercises is related to the fact that variants of the same exercise occur repeatedly. A few years back Bill Dubuque launched a campaign in favor of so called abstract duplicates: to have one sufficiently general umbrella Q/A prepared by an expert (or by community effort), and thereafter refer new entrants to that canonical answer (and otherwise close them on the spot). We have a dedicated thread for collecting near-duplicates in Meta, but it is somewhat underused, and cannot really serve well to this end. Unfortunately the campaign for abstract duplicates has also fizzled since.

One of the suggested reasons to start our own Stack Exchange Mathematics Blog was that posts there might serve in this role. That blog is in its infancy, and I have some doubts about how often visitors read it. Advertising the blog on the main site is a bit difficult. Anyway, the blog is one possible outlet for members with an overwhelming desire to teach. Right now the blog suffers from a shortage of material/authors. Together we could generate enough volume, which hopefully leads to more people reading it. This, hopefully, would in turn attract even more qualified people to contribute to the blog.

Answer 5

Let me start off by saying that I agree with the fact that this site should be as informative as possible, and that therefore each question should be of sufficient quality to be maintained. However, one should not forget that the main driver of this site is its users (and then especially a few high-rep users). Ideally, everyone would of course want the site to be 100% organized, but for obvious and legitimate reasons deleting questions that are of mediocre quality but that have high quality answers evokes negative emotions from exactly those high-rep users that are of such vital importance to this site. In an perfect world each question on the site is of high quality, but not being able to achieve this on every single question is always better than not having this site at all.

Now to respond to 900's latest answer in which he suggests that users edit questions which are at danger of being deleted, I have the following proposal: why does 900 (or any other person that sees a calling in upgrading the quality of the questions on this site) not edit those question himself instead of deleting them? I think this is the best compromise as it (a) satisfies high-rep users (and maintains their high quality answers) and (b) makes the questions on this site of higher quality.

Let us please try to put our personal differences aside and channel our energies into empowering this site, rather than to try to win personal battles.

Answer 6

Help Center explains:

Answer well-asked questions

Not all questions can or should be answered here. Save yourself some frustration and avoid trying to answer questions which...

• ...are unclear or lacking specific details that can uniquely identify the problem.
• ...solicit opinions rather than facts.
• ...have already been asked and answered many times before.
• ...require too much guidance for you to answer in full, or request answers to multiple questions.
• ...are not about math as defined in the help center.

Let's take this question as an example: it's a recent one; I voted to close, and it's my downvote on the answer there.

1. The question is unclear: there is no assumption of $X$ and $Y$ being independent, and without that there isn't a way to find joint PMF.
2. There is no indication of what the asker has difficulty with.
3. "Find joint PMF" questions have been asked and answered many times before, even with exactly the same parameters

Some of these issues could be fixed. The Help Center says:

Don't forget that you can edit the question you're answering to improve the clarity and focus - this can reduce the chances of the question being closed or deleted.

The independence assumption, the all-caps BINOMIAL, the incorrect statistics tag -- those things could be fixed, but ... that's a kind of boring task best left to others.

In a nutshell, there is a contradiction between

1. I want to answer any question I feel like answering, regardless of its quality.
2. I want my answers to be preserved on the site.

On Stack Exchange, you get to pick one, not both.