64 questions linked to/from List of Generalizations of Common Questions
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### I want to make an article which I can reference to. [duplicate]

We are having a lot of questions on combinatorics which can be considered as a case of arranging balls in boxes. That would make a total of $6$ different cases and I would like to make an article to ...
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### Requests for Reopen & Undeletion Votes, etc. (volume 01/2015 - 07/2018 ) [duplicate]

The purpose of this thread is to help focus the attention of the community on posts that may require exceptional handling. This includes requests for reopen and undeletion votes. A request should be ...
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### How to ask a good question.

How to ask a good question. This thread has advice on the following aspects of writing a good question on this site. Each item in this list links to an answer below about that specific aspect of ...
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### What do you think is the largest problem facing Math.SE today (July 2015)?

I think it can safely be said that Math.StackExchange (and MathOverflow and perhaps some of the sister sites on the SE network) are the best resources for (English-speaking) people with objective math ...
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### Coping with abstract duplicate questions.

Any longtime reader cannot help but notice that we get many abstract duplicate questions, e.g. this recent question on partial fraction computation, which is not essentially different from many other ...
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### 2020 Moderator Election Q&A - Questionnaire

In connection with the 2020 moderator election, we are holding a Q&A thread for the candidates. Questions collected from an earlier thread have been compiled into this one, which shall now serve ...
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### How to ask a homework question?

How to ask a homework question? Can I ask a homework question here? How do I ask a homework question on this website? What information should I include in a question about homework? Why don't you ...
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### Is there an MSE-like site that is more pleasant to work in? Or are there other solutions?

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 ...
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### One of my students may be getting math.SE to do their homework

So I strongly suspect that one of my students is asking all their homework questions here. In particular, all the questions that user8917 has asked about probability are homework questions that I have ...
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### Is there a lower bound to the level of the questions that can be asked in here?

Recently I've seen a couple of questions, specifically this one and this one, that were relatively low level for what I've seen up to now in the site. Basically both questions were just asking for ...
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### Is downvoting all solutions to a question that turns out to be a duplicate an acceptable use of downvotes?

So here a certain user has downvoted all the answers because he "can't believe" we didn't tag it as a duplicate instead. (In case you're wondering if I'm just speculating about the downvotes' origin, ...
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### How to search on this site?

When using this site, it is quite important to be able to find posts on this site which might be related to the question I am interested it - both to avoid duplication (i.e., not asking again ...
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### How close a match we need to close a recurring question as a duplicate?

An hour ago I closed a question as a duplicate of an, in my opinion appropriate, generic question. Two gold badge holders have since expressed disagreement with my decision, and the question has since ...
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### Number-guessing, sum of all natural numbers and hot trend questions

I really think that "popular" questions are treated with inappropriate hostility here. Do I think that "What is the rule for constructing the sequence $3,4,6,10$?" is a mathematically interesting ...
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### Would “organizer posts” be useful/welcome here?

I believe that question/answer of this form: Q: Is there an online repository of basic identities/results about topic X? A: Many of such identities can be found with the proofs at math.SE, I'll give ...
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### Was I right to answer this question this thoroughly?

I'm looking at this question. I gave the answer that was accepted. Please bear in mind that, when I answered this question, it was a different edit. In particular, there were more parts to the ...
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### Handling users asking lots of similar questions with little work

I realize that one of the major goals of this site is to help others learn and understand mathematics, and in fact it is one of my favorite parts of math.SE. As such, I don't mind a bit when I see a ...
717 views

### What to do about “What is 48/2(9+3)?”-type questions?

Recently there have been a rash of questions of the form "What is 48/2(9+3)?", the most recent of which being here (and other examples are linked to in mixedmath's answer). I think most of us can ...
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### Should community growth be encouraged?

I'm having a doubt about how should we users encourage the participation of new members. So far I have only presented MSE to three of my fellow colleagues in grad school. In an overall way I feel like ...
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### Can we make IEEE 754 off topic?

For those who may be unfamiliar with IEEE 754, it is the standard that the vast majority of computers use to store floating-point numbers. There are about 100 questions on this site about converting ...
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### Why do high rep, long time users answer duplicate or too similar questions on book recommendations?

Way too many duplicates to Selecting the Real Analysis Textbooks, Recommend a statistics fundamentals book, What is the best book to learn probability?! I feel that too many book recommendations ...
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### There are only 40 calculus problems

There is a saying in mathematics that there are really only 40 calculus problems, and all the other problems are just permutations of these using different numbers or stories attached to them. This is ...
719 views

### How do you search for duplicates?

Sometimes I am really surprised how fast are the duplicates of new question found, given that we have vast amount of questions here. I hope posting this question here can be useful and can lead to ...
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### Closure of extremely basic questions

I'm somewhat disturbed by the closure of this question: What is $9-5+2$? It appears to be a mathematical question that is specific, answerable, and genuine - a "real" question. I can recall wondering ...
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### What do we do with so many similar combinatorics questions?

I don't know if this is a problem, I just wanted to listen to more points of view, we seem to get a lot of combinatorics problems that are really similar, problems like this one Seat 5 men and 4 women ...
2k views

### How do you search for specific questions?

I have noticed that a lot of times people ask a question and a duplicate is instantly found. It's not necessarily true that the person hasn't tried to look up the question, but it is just hard to ...
1k views

### Do we need a FAQ question for “Guess what I am thinking” type of questions?

This question here: Interview riddle seems to have gotten a lot of views (perhaps by someone posting to reddit or something), with a lot of me too answers, leading to a protection. Such questions have ...
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### The birthday tag

Recently the birthday tag has emerged and it quickly has around 100 questions tagged (mainly by one user I suppose). This is indeed not the first time we have this tag. The last time it was deleted ...
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### Should full solutions be given (indiscriminately of the question being homework or not)?

Meta seems to bee filled with questions on this particular subject, and I have seen eloquent and convincing arguments from both sides, but the thing that leaves me ambivalent towards leaving full ...
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Sometimes when I see a question out of a textbook or competitive exam, I want to post a generalization of the specs of the question. I think my situation is (probably?) similar to this. Should I post ...
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### Allow question to be closed for low effort

I do like helping people out on exercises but I see way too many questions with little to no effort in trying to solve. I think these people are just asking to get their assignments done. I don't ...
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### Stock answer for questions relating to formal proof

Lately there has been a slew of questions (see below) which basically say "how do I construct a formal proof of proposition X?" where $X$ is usually a tautology from propositional logic. These ...
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### Request: an easy way to access the posts on meta that explain policies or serve as tutorials or lists.

Today when I was going through the questions on our main site, I saw a question that showed absolutely no effort. But the op left a sentence "don't know where to start". Then I remembered I've seen ...
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### How to search math terms/notations accurately and efficiently? Could some experienced users summarize some tips here?

How to search math terms/notations accurately and efficiently? Could some experienced users summarize some tips here? I believe such tips will be helpful for inexperienced users looking for hints or ...
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### Does our site need a blog like a few sites on the network have?

Does our site need a blog like a few sites on our network have? To me this question is a compact version of the following sub-questions: What do we use the blog for, if we had one? TeX. SX has a ...
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### Is it OK to post a question you already know the answer with the only purpose to answer it by yourself?

Today someone has posted a question, and after less than 30 minutes he also posted an answer to his own question. I've flagged the mods and they declined my flag. If I remember well, in the past, ...
480 views

### How aggressively should we tag a question as duplicate?

Some questions seem standard and very likely to have already been asked. For example, a question on Prove Binet's Formula would almost certainly have been asked, even without referring to the links by ...
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### When are questions the same?

This is a rather philosophical question, but reflects the fact that essentially the same question can be asked at different levels of mathematical sophistication and with differing motivation. Here ...
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### Do some calculus theorems deserve to have their own tag?

The question is basically in the title: Should we have tags for some individual theorems from calculus? (Or perhaps groups of theorems?) If so, which ones deserve their own tag? It is not ...
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### Encouraging duplicate hunters

There are more and more duplicates on this site, but sometimes it is time consuming to find an earlier source. Now, there is a variety of moderation badges for editing, voting, reviewing, raising ...
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### Some idea for math.se to propel some discussion.

I am only a beginner in math.se, (and to math as well in some technical ways, not in terms of enthusiasm though) in my view i feel that math.se has a very good amount of wealth of knowledge in math ...
260 views

### Canonical “-1 = 1” answer?

There are quite a few questions which involves "showing" $1=2$ or $0 = 1$ or $-1 = 1$ via incorrect algebraic manipulations of $i = \sqrt{-1}$. Does anyone know if there is a "canonical" question/...
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### Sylow theorem meta question

This is in relation to http://meta.math.stackexchange.com/questions/1868/list-of-generalizations-of-common-questions : I noticed that there have been quite a few questions (recently and otherwise) ...
235 views

### Orphan answer (worth saving?) to deleted question

A few minutes ago I started answering one of those "how does this sequence continue" question to which the standard answer is, essentially, "any way you like". The question was deleted while I was ...
368 views

### questions asked over 100 times

I just saw another question with the limit of $(1 + 1/n)^n.$ A few months ago, somebody asked some other multiple repeat question, I wrote to check any of the last 137 times it had been asked. he ...
381 views

### Generalization case vs Particular case

Could the - generalization of a problem - post be a good enough reason in order to vote for closing a question? I agree that in some cases is proving to be useful and the effort is significantly ...
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### How to quickly find duplicate questions which are not exact duplicates.

Some moderators are able to find duplicate posts which are not exact duplicates. That is to say even in the case where the question is posed completely differently but the solution uses similar ...
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I am aware of the questions List of Generalizations of Common Questions and Coping with abstract duplicate questions, but I would like to make a suggestion. On Computer Science meta, there is a ...