I wrote Tom Leinster about this, and he said I could forward his reply: ---------------------- Hi Mike, I'm sorry your friend/acquaintance had this bad experience. It may be that the moderator was overeager - and that particular moderator can be on the trigger-happy side - but having said that, I'm not enormously surprised it was closed. I don't think there was any problem with the fact that it wasn't a category theory question. (After all, number theory is even more popular a subject for Math Overflow questions.) What I imagine went through the moderator's mind was that the question looked like a whole string of formulas with very little context or explanation. It might have helped for the author to explain why he wanted to know, or whether he had any idea what the answer might be - any kind of background, really. As for formatting, I don't know Mathematica notation, but I'm guessing that \x just means x, and of course in plain text it becomes much more readable if you take out the backslash. As I said, Latex is also an option. (In case my meaning wasn't clear, the site does actually compile Latex, so readers wouldn't see the dollar signs etc.) In case you want to forward this mail to him (feel free), I have a couple of other thoughts: 1. Many of the really low-quality questions come from "unknown (google)", i.e. people without logins. The converse isn't true - i.e. not every question from "unknown (google)" is crappy - but the moderators are only human, and I'm sure they can't help forming an association in their minds. In general, everyone's encouraged to use their real names. 2. When the moderator suggested editing and then flagging for reopening, I think that was perfectly sincere. Questions do get reopened, and since there's clearly a genuine mathematical question here, I can't see a reason not to follow this suggestion. There are a lot of smart people reading the site, and someone might well provide a good answer. All the best, Tom PS - Incidentally, the question was closed and the moderator's comment added before I made my comment about formatting, not the other way round. PPS - I have no idea why the word "opinionated" was used. Maybe there was no reason at all. ---------------------- On Tue, Dec 22, 2009 at 6:02 PM, Fred lunnon <fred.lunnon@gmail.com> wrote:
On 12/23/09, Mike Stay <metaweta@gmail.com> wrote:
Yeah, that is annoying. I know Tom Leinster; he's not the one who closed it, just one who suggested some formatting changes that would make people more likely to read far enough to answer it (use latex markup instead of mathematica markup).
Reasonably enough ...
The other guy seems like one of those editors on wikipedia that go around deleting articles just because they can.
Leading one to conclude that spending more time tuning the formatting would be unlikely to prove a worthwhile investment. Shame about that!
WFL
On Tue, Dec 22, 2009 at 4:38 PM, Fred lunnon <fred.lunnon@gmail.com> wrote: > On 12/22/09, Mike Stay <metaweta@gmail.com> wrote: >> Link? > > http://mathoverflow.net/questions/9555/ga-factor-problem-closed > >> >> On Tue, Dec 22, 2009 at 2:40 PM, Fred lunnon <fred.lunnon@gmail.com> wrote: >> > Well, I swallowed my reservations and posted a question --- >> > and it looks like James was right on the ball there. >> > >> > What a strange system! Mind you, they do seem to have an >> > impressive amount of traffic, even if much of it is pretty tedious ... >> > >> > WFL >> > >> > On 12/20/09, James Buddenhagen <jbuddenh@gmail.com> wrote: >> >> That site has a strong /algebraic geometry / category language/ type >> >> flavor and if your question doesn't fit the mold they are likely to >> >> put you down, close the question and send you elsewhere. Maybe just >> >> my experience. Some people here might thrive over there, not me. >> >> >> >> --Jim >> >> >> >> >> >> On Sat, Dec 19, 2009 at 9:43 PM, Mike Stay <metaweta@gmail.com> wrote: >> >> > Have you tried math overflow? >> >> > http://mathoverflow.net/ >> >> > -- >> >> > Mike Stay - metaweta@gmail.com >> >> > http://math.ucr.edu/~mike >> >> > http://reperiendi.wordpress.com >> >> > >> > >> >> > _______________________________________________ >> > math-fun mailing list >> > math-fun@mailman.xmission.com >> > http://mailman.xmission.com/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/math-fun >> > >> >> >> >> -- >> >> Mike Stay - metaweta@gmail.com >> http://math.ucr.edu/~mike >> http://reperiendi.wordpress.com >> >> >> _______________________________________________ >> math-fun mailing list >> math-fun@mailman.xmission.com >> http://mailman.xmission.com/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/math-fun >> > > _______________________________________________ > math-fun mailing list > math-fun@mailman.xmission.com > http://mailman.xmission.com/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/math-fun >
-- Mike Stay - metaweta@gmail.com http://math.ucr.edu/~mike http://reperiendi.wordpress.com
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