Questions tagged [policy]
For questions on Mathematics Stack Exchange policies.
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An almost 8 years old question was closed just after I added a new answer to it
This old question recently got closed. Just some days ago, I added a new answer to it.
Perhaps my action caused the closure of the question (e.g. draw close-voters' attention).
I am interested in many ...
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Should I vote to close very old questions?
I saw some very old questions in my close votes review queue (one from 7 years ago, one from 10 years ago, and another from 12 years ago) like this or this or this, and I was not sure what to do. ...
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No community promotion ads any longer?
It seems there is no community promotion ads from 2021, so our community won't have that any longer? Different from some irrelevant commercial ads from the SE network, I in fact would like to see some ...
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Our Community vs The System
This site means a lot to many people, myself included. It has been my number one source of sharing interesting problems, learning mathematics, and seeing what others have to share. This being the case,...
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New user posts 8 answers, all likely AI-generated, in the span of 82 minutes; I think we either need or are close to needing an official policy
According to Xander's answer to a previous question on AI-generated content, posting chatGPT-generated answers without disclosing they are generated by chatGPT is a violation of openAI's terms of ...
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Answers in a language other than English
I would appreciate if someone could clarify what the policy and etiquette are about using languages other than English on MSE, or point me to an authoritative resource on the subject.
What prompted ...
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How exactly are we incentivized to post links to duplicates?
So yesterday I came across a question (we'll call it Question $1$) which I found interesting, and after having spent a little time thinking about it without result, I started searching MSE for some ...
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What is our policy on AI-generated content?
The author of this answer (now deleted) claims that it was generated by AI (artificial intelligence). This claim could certainly be false (for example, if the user wants plausible deniability for an ...
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Does the moderator violate the EoQS?
This recent question on the main site: If whenever $|x-a|<\delta$, $|y-a|<\delta$ then $|f(x)-f(y)|<\epsilon$, is this equiv. to $f$ cont. at $c$ then $f$ cont. on some interval around $c$?
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user1046533
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Closing a post with multiple duplicates
Many questions posted on the site are duplicates, but sometimes it's not easy to identify the most perfect match. Frequently, for instance, there is an older question, itself a closed duplicate, that ...
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Limits on self-promotion?
What, if any, are the limits on using ones participation in math.se for self promotion?
I ask because a user (who had already been noticed for 'iffy' answering habits) has now changed their display ...
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I haven't been around for a while; what are the new policies I need to know in order to use the site?
I haven't used this site for a while (years); just busy with other things.
A screenshot of my rating chart
I've constantly been on Stack Exchange, but seldom on Math.SE (and virtually never on Math....
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Can I perform "test solves" on MSE?
I often enjoy designing problems of my own, generally Olympiad-type proof questions. It is often hard to assess the difficulty level of the questions I have designed and hence I was wondering if I ...
user905694
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The community need to make a good decision regarding closing/downvoting good questions/answers
The most common problem I see on this site is that many poor questions/ solutions are highly upvoted and many great questions/ solutions are downvoted. I have no problem with the highly-upvoted poor ...
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What does this mean 'Have you considered accepting an answer or starting a bounty for this question?' [duplicate]
Can anyone help me in informing how can I accept an answer? Also can anyone tell how can I start a bounty? I think I have no control about it but please help.
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How are policies, norms, and rules are determined in this community?
Many people, including some moderators, have expressed to me the following, which is an excerpt from a moderator's comment, many times in many places:
... the guidelines are guidelines and not rules. ...
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How should questions tagged "solution-verification" be answered? [duplicate]
Often when people post their solutions to a particular problem on a question of theirs and they tag it solution-verification, the solution that they give is flawless, or can be improved a small amount ...
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A question about enforcement of quality standards
I'm reading this post about enforcement of quality standards, and it puzzles me.
I feel like most of the time, it a user were able to ask a question that follows the quality standards, they would ...
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Two cheers for EoQS
NB: this post has been edited in the light of @quid's comment revealing all moderator messages link to a text that explicitly contradicts MSE's deletion policies, without disclosing the latter in any ...
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Approved edit that makes question *less* readable
I recently encountered the following edit of a question: https://math.stackexchange.com/revisions/4126525/2
I hope everyone here agrees that the edit is not appropriate. A minor thing is that editing &...
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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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I am a student and have reached my limit of 50 questions per month what do I do?
I am a student and have reached my limit of 50 questions per month. I am poor and can't afford a math teacher and have been using this site to teach me a lot of new things so that I can get better at ...
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Should I feel upset because I have accepted few answers over the years? [duplicate]
First off, I want to make clear that I have read this question beforehand thus to avoid duplicating the question. I changed it in such a way that it describes best my current feeling about this ...
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Policy on posting links to pirated content?
Do we have a policy about users posting links to sites that feature pirated content? Like sites offering "free" copies of my book, for example? (see comment at the bottom).
Edit: in case you'...
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Deleting questions with upvotes, or with upvoted answers.
Sometimes, poorly formulated questions contain enough information to answer them and, more importantly, for the community to find them interesting enough. Then I found that there is a race between ...
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Policies on counterproductive retagging sprees
I have just noticed that, right now, old questions in field theory and Galois theory are being brought up because someone is tagging them ring-theory, for instance here, here, or here.
This somewhat ...
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Blindly answering easy questions without considering whether the question satisfies MSE policy.
Here's the question which motivated me to write this question.
Inspite of being clearly mentioned in the MSE's homework policy about Avoid "no clue" questions this question was asked by the ...
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Is arithmetic mathematics and can we answer questions about it?
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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Using text and MathJax instead of screenshot.
I would suggest the community simply close questions containing screenshots of text. I can understand a screenshot of a figure, but if the text part of a question can be easily typeset with the built-...
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Is it appropriate to ask for possible downvote sources on Mathematics Meta?
I recently received a downvote for an answer I gave, but I am unsure of the cause. I would like to ask for a possible explanation of the downvote on Mathematics Meta SE, but I am unsure of the policy ...
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Are questions about ideas in preprints off-topic?
Another note: (Since the first one wasn’t heeded...) OK, so the question was closed again. My appeal below was to both sides of the issue, so even though five people sought fit to do otherwise, ...
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Math exchange's policies for online exams and COVID-19
Due to the COVID-19 outbreak, almost all US colleges and universities are going fully online for the remainder of the Spring 2020 semester. This includes online or take home final exams in classes ...
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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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What is our question deletion policy?
I've recently become a 10k plus user, and I was taking a look at the moderation tools, specifically the deletion votes section. As I was looking at the questions nominated for deletion, it struck me ...
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Why do we care about monitoring for CodeChef problems?
Title kind of gives away the question, but here we go.
Very recently another meta-thread has appeared "warning" about the possible appearance of questions related to a CodeChef challenge. There have ...
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I voted mistakenly to close as duplicate. When I realised my mistake, my comment explaining why was deleted.
I refer to this question: Comparing logarithms with different bases.
Over-hastily, I flagged it as a possible duplicate of How to compare logarithms $\log_4 5$ and $\log_5 6$?.
I also thought it was ...
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Is Math StackExchange aging?
I am just a relatively new user, so please correct me if I'm wrong.
If you read about the questions with most votes in MSE, you can find that until the $35$-th of question, the questions are all ...
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Immediate question deletion to prevent others from seeing an answer
I recently answered a question about a simple strategy game. (Mine was the only answer.) The OP deleted the question about a minute later. It occurs to me that he might not have wanted a potential ...
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What happens if the answer which had appeared after starting a bounty is not worthy of that bounty?
This happened to me once. I had a question and started a bounty over its topic but the "new" answer which came for the bounty was "to my standards" not worthy of that particular bounty. Stackexchange ...
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On bibliographic references.
On this answer, which provides a bibliographic reference to one of the standard sources of information on the subject of question to which it is attached, was flagged for review for «low quality» and, ...
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Question on proofs with text-&-LaTeX images
Two days ago, I saw a stochastic process question which contained images that could be completely $\rm\TeX$ified. Based on several related questions found on this site, I think those images should be ...
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Can the site-design be improved to be more welcoming to new users?
I think that the design of MSE could be more welcoming to new users. I don't know how much effort it would take and of course that should be considered. My view is as someone who is relatively new to ...
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Are intuition-based questions off-topic?
I was perusing the "Close Questions" queue just now and noticed a common theme. It seems like a large number of questions involve gaining intuition about some result; most of them use the word "...
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Why don't we use a homework policy... like physics.SE?
I was reading Proposal: ban verbatim homework questions which have no accompanying text and I came upon some startling old statistics.
Since 2013, the number of questions on this site has multiplied ...
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The things that make math.SE 'better' (or worse) than most other math sites
So there was a recent conversation below the main post of When does the series converge?, which prompted this meta post.
I know there are plenty of people who are for and against the closure and ...
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Best way to "revive" a question (which does not abide by the Math.SE rules) [duplicate]
There exists a question which looks interesting to me, given that I scribbled some attempts to solve it and, in spite of the fact that it "seems" like an easy application of Rolle's theorem, couldn't ...
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Is it a bad thing to give more than one example in a [big-list] question?
In most [big-list] questions, I see that every person has entered at most one example. Why is this so?
I recently provided about 5 examples in this answer. Is that considered a bad thing?
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Should there be a policy about "hints"?
First, let me say that I completely understand the idea of not posting full solutions, but instead "hints" (or outlines) to let the OP figure out the details by themselves. I tend to do that myself.
...
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How closely must a question match a contest question to fall under our policy?
With the start of this academic year's USAMTS, we are going to get a some questions that have their origin in these problems, some more closely worded to the original than others. Perhaps it is time ...
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Has there been discussion about a Beginners sub-community?
It would provides a space for beginners to ask questions that may be "stupid" without spamming the serious forum. (Thus only those feeling particularly generous in a given moment would have to be ...
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