On occasion, there are posts related to math contests and olympiads on math.se, and there is a contests tag well. I was thinking recently about whether it would be appropriate for there to be a StackExchange community for math contests, in addition to the existing general math.se community - just like there are separate communities for puzzling and math education. Here are a few reasons:
- There could be tags for the country and year of origin of problems, which would make specific problems easier to categorize and find through the search function. I don't know whether there is a convenient way of integrating such tags into the math.se tags.
- Problems from math contests seem to be different from the other kinds of problems that we see on math.se, where more theoretical ideas show up, anywhere from high school through graduate school. Contest problems tend to require more ad hoc methods.
- A natural community (or many) already exists for students and adults who engage in math contests, so it only makes sense to transport it online.
- It would be easier to catch cheating on contests if such posts made their way to a math contests stackexchange because the post would be more visible to a community of people who are familiar with current problems.
One argument against this idea is that an online community already exists for math contestants on the AoPS website. Quite a few years ago, I used to be a moderator for a number of their forums and had access to their Moderator's Lounge. When they were asking for updates on features, someone proposed adopting a system more similar to StackExchange where people directly answer a question or not. A popular response to the proposal was that AoPS prefers to have more of a more forgiving discussion-based format where people can reserve the right to be wrong, whereas StackExchange prefers users to provide solid hints/answers in the full responses. Given the difference in attitudes, I think a StackExchange for math contests is a relevant idea.
Any thoughts? Please discuss.