Can we please be more generous to elementary beginners?

Question

This question: Given that $\arctan(1/5) + \arctan(1/8) = \arctan(1/p)$, how to find the value of $p$? (now deleted again) was originally closed as "off-topic".

Here is the original title:

Tricky Trig question - Given that arctan(1/5) + arctan(1/8) = arctan(1/p) find the value of P.

And here is the original body of the post:

I understand that you must use the tan(x+y) rule. And for a start, I let x = tan 1/5 and let y = 1/8. But what happens to arctan(1/p)?

A user answered and edited the attempt in the post (colors mine):

I understand that you must use the $\tan(x+y)$ rule. And for a start, I let $\color{red}{x = \arctan 1/5}$ and let $\color{blue}{y = \arctan 1/8}$. But what happens to $\arctan(1/p)$?

I later edited the format of the title and made it to a concise question with a question mark. Also, I edited the body of the post in a slightly more readable way.

Given that $\arctan(1/5) + \arctan(1/8) = \arctan(1/p)$, how to find the value of $p$?

Attempt

I think that one should use the rule for $\tan(x+y)$. And for a start, I let $x = \arctan 1/5$ and let $y = \arctan 1/8$. But what happens to $\arctan(1/p)$? I do not know how to go on.

After the edit, I voted to reopen the question. It was then deleted once by active users in the CRUDE chat room. After it was undeleted by three users (including myself), a user (who voted to delete the post previously) rollbacked the post to the original one and then immediately voted to delete the post again while it is "on-hold". (See the timelines for mentioned activities.)

I refuse such a strong action of deletion to a post like this. The OP did have a well-formulated though elementary mathematical question. True that the original attempt was a mess. However, I think a beginner like this one could certainly have difficulties in articulating his/her own thoughts clearly. For a beginner who is asking this level of questions, if he/she was really able to clearly identify where he/she was stuck, following strictly the "how to ask a good question" guide, then they would be very likely to be able to answer such question on his/her own and have no need to ask a question on MSE at all.

For such beginners, I think we could be little more generous to help since

Mathematics Stack Exchange is a question and answer site for people studying math at any level and professionals in related fields.

Can we please be more generous to elementary beginners?

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[Added for responding to criticism in the comment below. Since the response is quite long, and highly related to some points I would like to emphasize, I think it good to write it here.]

"That has little to do with being elementary."

It does. I am in particular talking about questions asked by "elementary beginners". I am not talking about "elementary questions" per se. There is a huge difference between how an expert/experienced learner asks an elementary question in calculus and how a beginner (who is still learning Calculus 101) asks a "routine" homework exercise when such exercise may not sound "routine" to the beginner at all. I am talking about human beings. The first sentence in the Tour site says in particular people (studying) at any level, not "question" at any level. Moreover, I have clearly stated above that "I think a beginner like this one could certainly have difficulties in articulating his/her own thoughts clearly."

"Please make sure to include in your reply why 𝑦=1/8 is due to confusion as opposed to being sloppy. Otherwise, please, explicitly acknowledge that the post was indeed sloppy."

I hate to be rude, but would you PLEASE read my post more carefully before making a misleading judgement?! I clearly wrote that the question (the one in the edited title) is clear while OP's original attempt was not satisfactory: "The OP did have a well-formulated though elementary mathematical question. True that the original attempt was a mess." Also, I have already explicitly colored the parts that were changed in the second version of the post.

Again nobody took the time to explain to OP what they could do to avoid common pitfalls on the site.

People can learn things by positive actions. One can learn how one's thoughts/attempts were a mess and likely avoid making similar mistakes in the future by simply reading well-written solutions. Also, reading an edit which articulates clearly a possible attempt is a way to learn. Yes, one might say "how the heck do you know what OP thinks; one should be responsible for him/herself and no one needs to take such burden of teaching." True that we are not mind readers. BUT, there are people who ARE willing to help by positive actions. I do not think such help is so detrimental to MSE that we should eradicate such posts by the strong negative action of deletion.

Answer 1

While I am preparing (slowly, due to lots of urgent foreground tasks) a longer post about deletion on math.se, let me quickly suggest a simple guideline:

Do not roll back improvements to a question unless they clearly make it worse or conflict with the question's intent.

This means, in particular, to not roll back clarifications and context (unless the author disagrees with them), LaTeX and formatting fixes.

As usual, please vote this post up or down depending on your agreement/disagreement with my guideline.

This is the second time that I am seeing "punitive" rollbacks (someone improves the post, then someone else rolls the improvement back, supposedly because the OP didn't "deserve" to have their question improved). While I understand the reasoning behind them, I think generating good content for readers is more important than training askers. This holds doubly so when the "training" is done in a way that is neither instructive nor helpful.

I did cast a delete vote on this specific question, though -- something I rarely do, but found justified in this case because it is literally a numerical example of a known formula.

Answer 2

(Posting as an answer, rather than a comment, because I'm curious how many will disagree.)

I think the "little to do with being elementary" dispute strikes at the heart of the underlying issue here.

We expect our questions to be well-formed, clear, and considered. We like them to have a clear, unambiguous answer. We want both the question and the answer to be helpful (and of interest) to future visitors of the site, not just the person who posed the question. We prefer them narrow, in the sense that we can isolate and obliterate one piece of misunderstanding in a compact single answer.

We tend not to like having to intuit (or, as is often the case, outright guess) the genuine source of confusion in the question. We tend not to want to have to explain things that have been explained over and over again, or indeed explain things that the asker already understands but has neglected to mention.

The site's own guidelines reflect this, if you look at the reasons for closing questions.

But, the problem is, this heavily biases against people earlier in their mathematics education. Writing the kinds of questions that we like requires mathematical maturity. It's a skill in itself to be able to reflect and determine what you do and don't understand, let alone pinpoint a specific lack of understanding that's causing you problems. In my experience, mathematics students don't tend to get reliably good at identifying what they don't understand until university (at least). Some students never develop it, and finish their mathematics education under the impression that believing that you understand something in mathematics is a trap for fools, and that there's always some hole in your understanding that someone could point out.

Mathematical maturity is also important for clear communication of mathematics. We ask students for their thoughts on a problem until we're blue in the face, but even if the student has had a myriad of thoughts about a problem, there's no guarantee that they'll be able to communicate even a single one of these thoughts to us. It's even harder when the communication is written, not verbal.

Personally, I honestly believe that a majority of low-level PSQs are written without context, not because of a lack of effort in solving the problem, but simply because the student is incapable of communicating their problem beyond reciting it word for word. When you press these students for more details or thoughts, they may respond with more context, but our own influence in this process should not be ignored; without us asking the right questions, I just don't think they're capable of further mathematical communication.

So, in short, both our personal preferences and the site's guidelines implicitly bias in favour of higher level mathematics, simply because the questions we like require mathematical maturity to formulate.

I'm not necessarily in favour of explicitly changing the guidelines, but I definitely agree that we should be more lenient on beginners.

Answer 3

Vote on the question, not the user.

A good question is a good question, regardless of the user's account age or account status. And a bad question is a bad question, regardless of the user's account age or account status. If a user has chosen not to familiarize themselves with the site standards, and has gone ahead and posted an off-topic or low-quality question, then so be it. This is independent of question level or the difficulty of the mathematical content.

Polite and kind comments directing them to the relevant site guides are great (and we should be very generous with those, especially for brand new users), but that's orthogonal to the moderation actions involved in downvoting, closing, or deleting.

Answer 4

I have a great deal of sympathy with the general point being made here. I could say a lot - the challenge of maintaining quality whilst genuinely welcoming new contributors to the site is a tough one.

I am not a professional mathematician, but hugely enjoy mathematics - so maybe my approach is idiosyncratic - but I think that in the back of my mind, when I am trying to respond to situations like the one described, I have the question "how can I help the person asking this question to enjoy their mathematics?"

One of the hazards of the site is that some "low quality" questions attract equally low quality answers so fast that there is no time to engage the questioner with how to ask a good question - there is no time to coach good behaviour. It may be that shutting down the possibility of an answer while the quality of the question is addressed could be fine-tuned and protocols around putting on hold could be refined with this in view.

Answer 5

I feel that the title of this thread is misguided. I see no evidence of this being about the elementary beginner. The asker of your example question has not been seen on the site since March 30th. Looks like they got what they wanted. Therefore I suspect (I hope I'm wrong) that:

• You picked the title with the expectation that this way you get more sympathy for your cause (it may or may not have worked).
• Your real goal is to discuss deletion in general as opposed to deletions of questions by elementary beginners, or
• Your goal is to "protect" the answers to such posts from being deleted.

Anyway, let's assume that you truly want to discuss the way we treat newbie beginners, and just happened to pick a bad specific example (IMHO it behooves you to find a better one).

I could actually get behind the idea of using softer gloves with newbies. Theo listed some reasons. They do run contrary to the fundamental goal of the site of being a repository of quality questions and answers, but let's ignore that for a moment for the sake of an argument.

There are good reasons for handling a post by a beginner differently, but I will not extend the same liberties to answerers of low-quality questions.

I could agree not to delete a post by a newbie, if:

• the first person wanting to answer the question engages with the asker, tries to elicit an explanation for the missing context, points the newbie to the resources and so on, and
• any person wanting to answer the questions spends at least 15 minutes searching the site for (near) duplicates. If they find one, then they must A) post a link to the potential dupe target, B) refrain from answering, but C) are more than welcome to post their answer to the original if they think that is prudent.

Many users do the first bullet, but they are IMNSHO too eager to post any answer.

The thinking here is that the same people who think the new question is worth answering are the people who should do these rounds of checks. In particular if the would-be-answerer is a trusted user, they should take the role of a mentor-on-duty as opposed to rush to answer.

For the record:

• I practice what I preach. I am getting better with Approach0 as well as the on-site search engine, but I spend a signficant fraction of my time on main searching. I have also referred hundreds of new users to our guide for new askers. If all the upvoters to Jack's rant (including himself) would do the same, the problem might be solved. Unless you, my reader, take part in that effort, you have little right to complain about the current state of affairs. The gall... (shakes head).
• The founder of SE, in a blog post suggested that in his opinion a newbie programmer should spend 98% of their time on StackOverflow searching. We may not have yet covered math as comprehensively as they have covered programming, but we are competitive. We should put a lot more effort educating newbies about the available search engines. True, google doesn't grok TeX, and neither does that newbie, so let's be reasonable. More reason to insist that the answerers do their part searching.

Answer 6

By popular demand, yet another answer.

The subject has various aspects. Let me start with:

The specific post.

The question mentioned in this meta post falls into a category that some consider as not appropriate for the site (including me). It is very common that such questions get closed and deleted. Of course, others disagree with doing this, and the subject of deletions and closures of such posts was discussed to great length at various times. Indeed, only recently at the initiative of OP: What are the merits, if there is any, of deleting (correctly) answered questions in the main site of MSE? and I had provided an answer there.

There does not seem to be anything particular about the post. Thus, focused on this one post, there is no case for creating an entire meta thread to draw attention to it, doing so is frowned upon by some. If anything, a request to undelete it, could have been posted in the dedicated thread.

Why did I re-delete it right away?

When a post is in a un-delete cycle (the post had been deleted twice and undeleted twice when I acted) it is common practice that a moderator, or moderators collectively, decide the fate of the question.

The reason I acted rather quickly is that due to the high visibility that was just given via the meta post, based on earlier experience, it was a given that un-delete and open-close conflict would rather escalate. Letting play out such conflicts does not lead anywhere. Moreover, as I remarked earlier in a comment, to focus the attention of numerous users via meta on some particular post that until then had low visibility, is not at all ideal and can lead to problems especially when the post-owners are not involved in the meta. The idea that 'the community' would have reached a consensus on this post strikes me as wishful thinking.

Thus, I am firmly convinced that it was the right course of action to prevent drive-by actions of various forms on this one particular post.

An alternative action to achieve this would have been to lock the post (undeleted). Retrospectively, this might have prevented some problems, but as I said, I decided to put the post back into the state where it was prior to the meta post. Moreover, as said, I am also personally of the opinion that such posts should be deleted. While the decision was taken by me alone, I did right away put the other moderators into the loop, saying that if there is considerable disagreement with the post being deleted, then it could be undone. Until now, I still do not see much disagreement against the post being deleted (maybe against how and why it was deleted, but that's a separate concern).

Comment on the timeline

While the meta OP does a reasonably good job at explaining the situation, I think some clarifications about the timeline might be helpful, especially as not everybody can know this and most cannot know it all at least no easily (yes, partly me fault, see above).

The question was asked on March 29th, in the early evening (all times in UTC, that is "SE time"), was answered near instantly and a first, incomplete, edit happened.

The question was then closed slightly more than a day later (very early on March 31st).

Then a bit more than two days later early afternoon of April 2nd a motion to delete the post started (common practice), via vote and post in CRUDE.

Right after that, likely as a reaction to it but maybe independently, the question was edited for a second time and a competing motion to reopen the post was set in place.

Thus the actual course of events is somewhat different from the impression OP tries to convey (even though what they wrote is not literally false).

Summary on the post

On its own merits, there is no reason to try to preserved that post. It is routine and very localized, and was presented in a sloppy way. In my opinion, it should not have been answered. As said, the merits of deleting such post got discussed recently What are the merits, if there is any, of deleting (correctly) answered questions in the main site of MSE? and I had provided an answer there (to the same OP).

What about "elementary beginners"?

The simplest answer is to say it does not matter we judge the posts on their merits, a point advocated in other answers. Those that follow this meta know that I am personally in itself not hostile to this approach, and I though this also came through in comments I had left here.

However, those that follow this meta know too that this is not at all in line with historical practice and any number of earlier discussions, and most crucially it is not at all in line with the thrust of this meta post, which specifically focuses on being "more generous to elementary beginners" doubling down and stressing that I did not get it because it was about "beginners" and not elementary questions, about "human beings". So, there I followed there line of reasoning, rather than to simply dismiss the idea with "we don't care, lets only talk about the post."

I will freely admit that I was quite annoyed, actually still am, though I should have handled it better, when this then was completely turned around and I was accused of having promoted the idea that the deletion of the post is only because of the main OP not being responsive. This is not my position.

What I do think is that if somebody considers to make accommodations based on the (presumed) personal context of the poster, which is what that entire thread is about, then they should take the full picture into account. Merely that the account is new and the question is simple does not strike me as sufficient to envision any sort of exceptions, not only but also as it's trivial to get a new account. So, one can always be "new." (I do not want to imply this was the case here.)

What about being "more generous"?

The initial reaction to the question was generous. It was answered near instantly and even improved, only slightly but still. Then later it was reviewed in view of its suitability to contribute to the pool of knowledge that we try to create and was found lacking. Thus it was put on hold and then scheduled for deletion.

One could say, first, we helped the individual, then once this was done, we switched the focus to the interests of the site. That actually seems like a reasonable compromise between different visions of the site.

The casual and new users often don't mind all that much what happens to their posts down the road. Flags by new users demanding why no answers is forthcoming already are not rare, flags asking about disappearing posts happen sometimes but really it doesn't seem to be of much concern, at least as long as new questions can be asked.

Those that mostly complain are those that answer a lot. Now, that's also understandable, and we can discuss how to balance things out, but that's a separate concern.

Answer 7

Regardless of the fate of this question, the attention span of the asker should never be used as a criterion for casting delete votes.

I have observed a moderator(!) suggest, in multiple comments on this meta question and its answers, that the OP's lack of involvement with the site is in some way relevant to the fact that their question got deleted. I encouraged that moderator to post an answer explaining that relevance in more detail, but the moderator refused to do so. This is unfortunate, because it forces me to guess what that moderator actually meant by those comments.

Charitably, this was a bad question, and probably deserved to be deleted. But that's beside the point. We should never judge the value of a question by the behavior of the asker. A question's value to readers is substantially more important than its value to the single person who happened to post it.

I don't know if that is what the moderator intended by these comments. I hope it isn't. But I wanted to state, clearly and on the record, that the inattention of the questioner is not a valid basis for deleting questions.

(Obviously, if a question is already eligible for deletion, then the asker's inattention may result in it actually being deleted, or remaining deleted, and in some cases this may happen faster than if the asker was attentive and unsuccessfully tried to salvage their question. But that's a separate issue.)

Answer 8

This doesn't answer the question, but I'd like to comment on Theo Bendit's comment:

We tend not to like having to intuit (or, as is often the case, outright guess) the genuine source of confusion in the question. We tend not to want to have to explain things that have been explained over and over again, or indeed explain things that the asker already understands but has neglected to mention.

As a purely descriptive comment, this is basically correct: most people here don't like having to puzzle out what's really being asked, they'd rather read unambiguous mathematical questions, especially when those questions are perceived as elementary.

However one of the things that makes a great teacher is the ability to puzzle out what's being asked in contexts where the student lacks the vocabulary or linguistic devices to directly ask their question. I think the answer-writers on this website should use such questions as opportunities to build this very important muscle, rather than blaming students for not having skills that realistically, someone at their level is likely not to have. Curiosity should be rewarded, not punished. I also disagree with the use of the word "confusion" here. Not having the language to ask the question you're trying to ask is different to being "confused", and I've always found teachers who ask things "what are you confused about?" pretty obnoxious, and usually a lot more ignorant than they realize.

Also, being a good teacher inevitably involves explaining things that have been explained over and over again, or else creating something to do this task for you (like a blog post, or a text snippet that can be copied-and-pasted where needed). That's just part of being a teacher. If you can't be bothered to do this, fine, but please don't harass the OP over this. Just be silent and look for questions elsewhere. Perhaps someone else will come along with the energy to help; why should they be blocked by an [On Hold] tag when they're willing to help? The purpose of these tags should be to stop questions that display no interest in the subject matter, not to block questions that display "too much" interest in the subject matter.