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### Is it appropriate to close every question that doesn't show efforts and/or lacks of context?

Yesterday this question was asked: Finding solutions to $2^x+17=y^2$, then it was closed and finally it was reopened. My concern is about if every question showing no effort or lacking of context ...
1k views

Yesterday, I answered this question (later deleted, see below for the text) and was a little surprised when the question was closed. A user in the comments stated, "This is not mathematics. It is ...
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### “Contest problem” policy

What is our policy concerning contest questions on the Mathematics Stack Exchange? Why do we have a policy? What is a contest question? How we deal with on-going contest questions? I see a question ...
734 views

### Is it a good idea to include source from where a question is taken?

My question is- Should we include the source from where we have obtained a question? Let, a question has been asked in a particular exam/paper/ or anywhere. Is it a good idea to include the details (...
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### Curiosity question - Why does “Hi!” get removed at the beginning of posts?

Out of habit I write "Hi!" at the beginning of my questions and I noticed it got automatically removed, and then when I edited to add it back in, it got automatically removed again. I'm just ...
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### Homework, reasonable to have no clue?

In this post OP was asked to derive the Catalan numbers. I am not sure how to react. As posted, there was no background. OP showed no effort. If I were asked the question and had no clue how to ...
936 views

### Should we encourage upvotes on more advanced questions, that are seemingly well written, even if you don't understand it?

Something I notice is when there's an advanced/specialized question, it often receives very few upvotes. Even if it is seemingly well written. I try to upvote advanced questions that I might not even ...
963 views

### Short and helpful advice on using MathJax on the site …

The point of this question is to give people a chance to draft their best MathJax tips for new users. Perhaps this question will stand alone as one of the places to go. Perhaps the material in the ...
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### Enforcement of Quality Standards

Math SE has a long-standing policy regarding what constitutes a Good Question. The policy is intended to ensure that the collection of questions and answers here is of high quality, is searchable, ...
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### List of commonly misspelled words

Judging by some of the posts on meta1 and comments posted there it seems that there are users who try to improve the posts by correcting spelling mistakes. Of course, there are other ways to improve ...
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### Is it OK to automatically downvote homework questions that show no effort or etiquette?

I have seen a lot of very similar questions here, so I apologize if this is a duplicate. There is a related question at Closing questions that show no effort - official policy? I see this very often ...
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### “Context” vs. “your work” redux

Recently, we (once again) discussed the practices of requiring context and asking for someone's work on a question. It has been quite an established principle these days that people ought to include ...
833 views

### How to make users follow a better etiquette?

We've all seen it. A question of a new user, copied from a problem book, 5 people answering it with one-liners within 10 minutes, the user saying maybe a "thankx" and either picking a best answer ...