79
votes
Accepted
Voting to close due to OP's unresponsiveness
First of all, the question got closed only 7 hours after its posting: if this is because it was offtopic, that's fine; but calling an OP unresponsive after at most 7 hours from posting a question is ...
- 34.9k
69
votes
Accepted
Engage with people from the fringes - or not?
Allow me to weigh in, in part as a long time contributor, in part as a set theorist who gets exposed to these type of questions perhaps more than the average mathematician, and in part as a moderator.
...
- 390k
39
votes
Accepted
Why are clumsily formulated questions downvoted & closed so much?
Isn't this just a form of gatekeeping, where you only get to ask a question about mathematics if you've already learnt enough of mathematics to rigorously formulate your problem?
This question seems ...
- 27.5k
26
votes
User answering poor question while also voting to close
This is perhaps a little slanted towards the user who answered the question. Here goes:
I've been caught between a temptation to answer and a desire to close before, and I agree it can be an ...
- 62.4k
26
votes
Accepted
Is there anything to improve in this post which is about ambiguity in question about field axioms?
Is there anything to improve in this post?
Yes. A lot.
Remove your commentary about the downvotes.
Remove your commentary about the close votes.
Move your comment about the cross-posting to a ...
- 789
25
votes
Accepted
Five close votes is not enough to close a question?
Not all users actually had the close privilege thus there were not five votes to close even though the review-ticket lists more than five reviews with that recommendation.
Likely this distinction ...
quidMod
- 41.9k
23
votes
Useful vague question closed?
It seems a reasonable (not overly broad) Question to me. I made an edit to improve it. In the original post the motivation is described, reading a claim about the "foundation" of probability theory. ...
- 36.6k
23
votes
User answering poor question while also voting to close
I would like to summarize the key takeaways from this meta thread here. I will be brief (as I am not an expert meta poster, see my meta profile if you need proof).
So here it goes:
If you vote to ...
- 85.9k
22
votes
Accepted
How to tell a user that his/her actions are inappropriate (and should I)
If you are of the opinion that a vote to close or a review or another action on one of your posts was inappropriate you can signal this to the moderators via a flag, chose "in need of moderator ...
quidMod
- 41.9k
22
votes
Accepted
Why is the number of required close votes constant?
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 ...
quidMod
- 41.9k
21
votes
Close reason: "lack of research effort"
Complementing Alexander's answer, a close reason of "lack of research effort" is, in my opinion, intrinsically bad for multiple reasons: it is impossible to ascertain how much research effort there ...
- 33.9k
21
votes
Non-experts closing questions
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 ...
PedroMod
- 121k
20
votes
Can we please stop voting to close a question just because the question is short?
The question raises a valid point, but does so in a non-optimal way.
Can we please stop voting to close a question just because the question is short?
Yes, sure. Everyone agrees. Let's move on. ...
quidMod
- 41.9k
20
votes
Accepted
How exactly are we incentivized to post links to duplicates?
I think your action to post the link was fine. Thanks for taking the effort to go search for related questions, by the way! Martin Sleziak has pointed out in the comments a couple of misconceptions ...
- 789
19
votes
Is it time to retire the 0.999=1 question (and other historical questions)
TL;DR. Stack Exchange does not have any functionality to "retire" on-topic questions. The "Historical significance" lock reason is for very specific use cases where the question itself is now off-...
- 51.8k
19
votes
Close reason: "lack of research effort"
"No context" does function as a bit of a catch-all, and certainly 90% of the time, it is applied to "do my homework!" PSQs. However, there are several reasons it is stated like it is.
Its "forms of ...
- 26.7k
19
votes
Accepted
"Strategy" for voting to close
A couple of points to consider:
It takes five votes to close any question.
If everyone saves their votes for some greater need, nothing gets closed.
Do your share and vote.
It's a community effort, ...
- 25.6k
19
votes
Engage with people from the fringes - or not?
Inherently, I don't think that "fringe" is a useful category to judge questions - as always, a good test to apply to a question is to consider if it does all it can to support a good answer. Some ...
- 60.5k
19
votes
Why are questions closed?
It seems that the underlying assumption of the original question here is that questions on the main site are closed because they "don't make sense" to the close voters. This is an erroneous ...
- 27.5k
18
votes
Accepted
How should one handle posts offering money?
Deleting a paragraph of the post is the preferred behavior if the paragraph has nothing to do with mathematics, as is the case if it offers money. It's fairly common to remove paragraphs which contain ...
- 60.5k
18
votes
Accepted
What to do with a question that is no longer relevant?
You should just delete it. There is no reason to clog up the site with questions that don't need to be answered. The localized nature of your mistake also makes it unlikely that the question will be ...
- 26.7k
18
votes
Are we closing short questions too hastily?
Thanks for bringing that specific Question (your first example, about category theory) to my attention (it has now been reopened). There is a dedicated thread for asking for reopen and related ...
- 36.6k
17
votes
Why was this duplicate question deleted?
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 ...
- 26.7k
17
votes
Non-experts closing questions
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 ...
- 27.5k
17
votes
Non-experts closing questions
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 ...
- 117k
16
votes
What's the point of closing a question after it has accepted answers?
Closed questions can be deleted more easily. They also send a message to the other users of the site "this is not how you are expected to ask a question".
Moreover, closed questions ...
- 390k
Only top scored, non community-wiki answers of a minimum length are eligible