# Tag Info

26

If a new answer does not add anything at all it might reasonably be considered as "not useful" (in the given context) and thus could be down-voted. Basically, I think this suffices to control such activity. Of course, if a question allows too many distinct answers it is "too broad" and could be closed as such. I think it is difficult to give a hard and ...

22

Votes do not just accumulate, they can "age away" and how quickly actually depends a bit on the number of views. Moreover, questions with many views often are disproportionately viewed by users that cannot vote to close anyway. Finally, if they are closed and many disagree they are also reopened quickly. That said, for votes to delete the score of ...

22

There is a very simple reason why we should not encourage posting about open problems by plain amateurs. If we allow just one, to be consistent we would need to allow a hundred. With the recent popularization (yet again) of the Collatz conjecture, we are already seeing a significant number of posts by people who do not even know what a mathematical argument ...

20

https://math.stackexchange.com/revisions/1072132/1 Seriously? You consider this a reasonable question for the site? I would have voted to close in a heartbeat. We already get too many question, to the point that excellent questions get little attention and no answers. If users who can't be bothered to put thought and effort into their posts are scared away,...

20

The question was automatically deleted by the Community♦ bot: Apr 11 at 0:16 history deleted Community♦ Scheduled: RemoveDeadQuestions It had a score of $-2$, was more than 30 days old, and had no answer. Such questions are automatically deleted network wide. Your question was never closed, old negatively scored questions without activity are ...

19

In general I don't answer homework problems, because in general they only seek for a solution, not for a better understanding of the problem I don't think this statement is true. I have asked a lot of homework questions here, and I do appreciate it to get a really good hint, but getting a good (full) solution, I do appreciate as well. I think there is a ...

19

The opposition to fully answering homework questions roughly amounts to: The OP will get away with cheating on their homework, or at least without learning anything from it. MSE shouldn't facilitate this. Usually, any other visitors will not be hampered by such considerations. So as soon as a full answer has been there for 10 minutes, the OP will likely ...

18

I think that this question seems to be more of the type "I would like to have a conversation about ..." than of the type "Please answer this mathematical question". The topic of "mathematical interest" or "mathematical beauty" of obviously of interest to mathematicians, but it is not a mathematical question. In that sense, the question is "off topic" for ...

18

The first obvious issue (which I feel is what may have triggered this post, and has been identified by other users in the comments) is that experts can guess the context from a question, and appreciate why it is relevant, even if there is zero detail given in the original post. They may also know most of the background and guess what the motivation behind ...

17

I agree that in general it is preferable to ask a new question rather than to do, months latter, a massive overhaul of some question that is not ones own. There are exceptions, however, and I feel there is an important detail missing in the description of the specific case. Namely, the question has two (good) answers, one of them accepted. The point of ...

17

I've had calc students make the $e^{x^2}=e^{2x}$ mistake before, as non-associativity of exponentiation does not come up very often in lower level coursework. Beings that $\int e^{x^2}$ is often brought up specifically as a first example of an integral with no closed form, I would expect many users who find this question through search to naturally follow ...

16

Because many times you can get a better answer, you can get more answers, you can change your mind and decide that one answer is better than the others. Because the questions are also for [future] readers, which might come from a different context and a different answer might be useful to them as well, or they might have some different idea. Because this ...

16

FYI, I'm the user who posted the edit that is being discussed here. I completely agree with quid's assessment above. I made the edits because I thought the original question was a good one (even if not adequately described) and that the answers were good as well. However the original question was closed (due to lack of details) so I was just trying to add ...

16

You ask: What should I do when I think that I understand and/or have an answer to an on-hold or closed - and, more specifically, "unclear" - question? You should help to make the question more clear, so that it can be reopened. To do so you can propose changes and improvements in comments. You can even propose edits directly. For larger changes this ...

16

If you voted to close a question and if are asked whether or not it should be reopened, there is no reason for you not to reevaluate it. And if it turns out that the flaws that made you vote for closing it remain there, then go ahead: vote that it should not be reopened. There is nothing wrong with that.

15

You posted Sum of digits, sequence (no theory). You were told, "Please improve the question by providing additional context, which ideally includes your thoughts on the problem and any attempts you have made to solve it." You made no effort to do so. (By the way, you got six answers to this question [two have since been deleted], but you didn't accept any of ...

14

I am all for closing more PSQs, but putting emphasis on the trivial ones. But I also feel that closing should not be automatic. I spewed out my reasoning earlier and those points are not worth repeating. Anyway, I propose a policy: [Edit: Re-examining my motives, what I have written, and the reactions this received, it seems unlikely that this would win ...

14

No. There are lists (on the meta and the main, separately) which you can access if you have 10k points or more, through review and then clicking tools and choosing the appropriate tab. These lists, however, do not include everything, they are limited in both time range and length. The lists go only as far as 30 days the most. On the main site, however, due ...

14

Here is a thought. If you, an expert in a topic, see a problem-statement-question that is interesting, and if you know this question is not a duplicate, and if you judge that adding some context would increase the value of the question to MSE (in part by increasing the chance that someone would be willing to write a good answer before those pesky non-experts ...

13

Flag the question, select "it needs moderator attention" and in the field provided explain that you believe the question is a duplicate of one of the user's deleted questions. We'll then use our superpowers to look into it.

13

Two methods to follow votes are: The standard method to follow a question in general terms is to bookmark it. This also can be used to this more specific end. When one anticipates that one wants to come back to a question-thread (for whatever reason) one can bookmark it. In doing so, one has not only a link to the post in the bookmarks tab one will even be ...

13

Yes, absolutely! All relevant information must be included in the question. Comments are temporary, and are intended to help improve the question or to leave minor or transient information. Relevant content or context should not be left in the comments. Instead, the information should be added to the question. Then, flag the comments as 'no longer needed'...

13

No question in mathematics is unmotivated or intrinsically interesting. Despite the fact that I, myself, often use the phrase "this is a natural question," no question in mathematics is actually natural. A question becomes interesting or natural once one has enough of a background to appreciate where a question comes from. For example, I think ...

12

It is important to keep in mind that a question cannot be bountied immediately. It first needs to "survive" for some time on the site. I think there is some point to preventing closures of bountied questions. The points is they get more visibility by being bountied and thus also more exposure to potential votes to close. That said, if a question is ...

11

I don't know why such a permissive summary was given for this tag. I typed in an extra line, pointing out that a question that asks to "guess the next number in the sequence" and gives no mathematical context will generally be closed quickly. Meanwhile, I recommend http://www.amazon.com/The-Book-Numbers-John-Conway/dp/038797993X which shows some ...

11

Assuming that this is a case of one user serially close voting/flagging the questions of another specific user, the main thing to do is to honestly review each question independently when you see them in the review queue, or otherwise come across these questions. The system has checks and balances to prevent almost all malicious close voting/flagging. The ...

11

The question-post asks three separate questions that are not very closely linked. They are on the same subject but not at all naturally linked. It is generally discouraged to ask more than one question in a post. For one thing, chances are very high that each of them separately is a duplicate. Personally I'd close as "needs focus" (earlier "...

10

When a question is put on hold, the button to add a new answer is removed. However, if you've already clicked that button and started writing an answer, the process is allowed to conclude. This is similar to why an answer to a question on hold can be edited. Update: Tim Post says that if WebSockets are operating properly, a periodic message is sent to the ...

Only top voted, non community-wiki answers of a minimum length are eligible