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While I am preparing (slowly, due to lots of urgent foreground tasks) a longer post about deletion on math.se, let me quickly suggest a simple guideline:
Do not roll back improvements to a question unless they clearly make it worse or conflict with the question's intent.
This means, in particular, to not roll back clarifications and context (unless the ...
55
(Posting as an answer, rather than a comment, because I'm curious how many will disagree.)
I think the "little to do with being elementary" dispute strikes at the heart of the underlying issue here.
We expect our questions to be well-formed, clear, and considered. We like them to have a clear, unambiguous answer. We want both the question and the answer to ...
36
I haven't been here long, and I rarely follow meta. That said, I am surprised and dismayed by what I perceive to be very open hostility among several prominent users here, over something that I consider to be not particularly significant--"contributions" to a site.
No single user, no matter how high their reputation or extensive their contribution to MSE, ...
33
There are so many approaches and reasons to upvoting and downvoting here (=Math.SE, not Meta) that it is IMHO largely pointless to attempt to codify them. A discussion is, of course, ok, if for no other purpose than to vent one's frustration. To simplify matters somewhat let me attempt to break them into three categories. It would be a miracle, if even a ...
29
Thanks for saving me the time to post the exact same question. Let me just add my own examples to the list. My inclusion criterion is "contains a neat proof", which may be more liberal than yours, but I am pretty sure that you will find something worthy of preservation in the list (temp mirrors included if you are not a 10K+ user):
If $a^{2} \mid b^{2}$ ...
28
In my opinion, the author of incorrect answers should, when an error is pointed out, delete their answer unless (or until) it is amended. If the author feels that the error is of value to the site, it is acceptable to edit the post to include a prominent notice right at the top that it is erroneous, and explain where the error is, correctly, and preferably ...
24
It depends. Ultimately it's your decision whether you want to delete your unanswered duplicate questions - within the constraints of the software: you can't delete more than five of your own posts per day; and deleted posts can be undeleted by other users, though for unanswered duplicate questions that's rather unlikely to happen.
But some duplicate ...
23
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 ...
22
Delete your comment, flag any associated comments for deletion.
A toy example:
User 1: "I think there is a mistake on the third paragraph. Not every $X$ is a $Y$!"
User 2: "Sorry, I don't understand. Isn't every $X$ a $Y$ when we are
in a $Z$?
User 1: "No, that only holds for specific $Z$'s."
User 2: "Ok, thanks!"
All such comments ...
21
In the spirit of the question: This started life as more of an extended comment than an answer. I think it has morphed into an answer now though.
Math.SE seems to be based around the idea that every problem is soluble by a single person. This is clearly not the case, as, for example, in research mathematics single-authored papers are the exception rather ...
20
The answer was flagged by several users as spam, and that caused the answer to be deleted as spam by Community♦.
These flags were of course incorrectly used, since the post is not spam according to the definition used here on Stack Exchange.
Since the spam flags were incorrectly cast, I have cleared them from the post. (It has been re-deleted by the votes ...
19
Sometimes I have posted a wrong answer. (Hard to believe, I know.) But it seemed to me that the wrong method might be considered by others, so I left the wrong answer, and added a boldface This answer is wrong at the top, and an explanation of why it is wrong.
You may consider doing that when your wrong answer may still be instructive to others. But it ...
19
If a question gets undeleted, the user who posted gets no notification about that undeletion. But you also get no notification if an answer of yours gets deleted. The only thing that happens (as you were told in the comments) is that that deletion or undeletion may cause a change in your reputation.
Whether a user should get a notification under those ...
18
This issue pops up pretty often with cheaters on homework assignments. They ask a question, and someone answers it. BEFORE the answer is voted up, the OP deletes the question, TAKING THE ANSWER ALONG WITH IT. The OP was likely cheating, as you mentioned.
One way to counter this kind of action is to upvote the first answer you see (usually I do this to stop ...
18
Moderators can undeleted comments that were not deleted by the users. Namely, if you posted a comment and you deleted it, then moderators cannot undelete it. If, on the other hands, a moderator deleted the comment, then they can be undeleted by moderators.
The problem is that you don't have access to deleted comments, so you can't quite edit them, or ...
18
From my experience on Math Help Boards as an admin, I'd say that such behavior is often indicative of cheating. They get help real quick, then delete the post so that their professor doesn't catch them at it (if the prof is even on the ball here).
18
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 useful for future users. It is nice that you are concerned with the efforts of those helping you, but no answer was posted, and comments are intended to be ...
18
Because the post has a positive score.
According to Shog9's answer on Is “recommend deletion” secretly a vote to delete?
Yes, a sufficient number of delete recommendations (currently 6 on most sites, 4 on Stack Overflow) will cause the post to be deleted immediately, provided it has zero or negative score. (If it has a positive score, it will raise an ...
17
Here is some important context. There is, apparently, a massive campaign orchestrated by one user to delete all questions (and their answers!) if the question does not meet his standards of quality. This campaign appears to target not only recent questions, but every question, including questions many years old. As best as I can infer, this campaign has been ...
17
If the question has an upvoted answer, the issue is moot: you will not be able to delete it. Generally, you should refrain from deleting questions with a 0-score answer too (unless the answer is also worthless).
For unanswered questions, a guiding principle can be: what will make The Internet a better place: the existence of your question with a comment ...
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
Deleting posts is a natural part of using a Stack Exchange site. Not everything once written should be preserved, lest we want to create the Library of Babel. Of course, if a post can be saved with an edit, you should do that. But sometimes editing isn't worth it: e.g., what's written is entirely wrong, and the correct points to be made are already made in ...
16
Something in this spirit is being tested on SO — it's called «question triage». If the experiment is successful, maybe we can ask to turn it on Math.SE too.
16
Well, since your question has multiple answers (and upvoted answers, and even an accepted answer) you cannot delete it yourself. Since it is closed 10K+ users can vote to delete it, although presently there are no pending delete votes. And I don't really foresee a moderator casting a binding delete vote on it. So deletion of the question would appear to be a ...
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