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1894 | Confused about bounty points
Related to Should an advisor care if their student becomes overweight?
How do I figure out whether it was the OP who awarded the bounty, the software, or someone/something else?
What happened to the other 25 points? (Or am I mistaken in thinking that the minimum bounty is 50?) I do realize that a bounty can be split between two answers, but I don't see the other 25 anywhere in this question.
From the help center instructions to those who offer a bounty:
If you do not award the bounty within 24 hours of the bounty period ending, half the bounty value will be automatically awarded to the top voted answer posted after the bounty start, provided it has a score of at least 2. If no new answer matches this requirement, no reputation will be awarded at all, and the reputation used on the bounty will be lost forever.
If the full bounty amount is awarded -> the person who set the bounty awarded it.
If half the bounty amount is awarded -> the software awarded it. The person who offered it did not award it to an answer within the deadline, despite several reminders.
Also see How does the bounty system work.
Thanks. I'm still confused, though. It doesn't look, in this case, as though the bounty was awarded to the top-voted question.
@aparent001 "top voted answer posted after the bounty start"
Sorry, I'm still not getting your meaning. Is there some technical thing going on here involving some exact timing?
@aparent001 the highest-voted answer was already there when the bounty was offered. A bounty is only auto-awarded to a new answer.
Weird! --- Thanks for explaining. I never would have figured that out.
This is because the spirit/purpose of the bounty program is primarily to attract more attention and new answers to questions that have so far been lacking one or the other (or both), in the bounty offerer's opinion. Automatically giving a bounty to an answer that was already there doesn't reward new interest. People who start bounties with the intent of rewarding exceptional existing answers can still choose to assign them manually.
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1925 | Badge wrongly awarded to me? Bug in software?
I was awarded the Self-Learner badge for How to say good-bye to an unhelpful and undisciplined professor?
The badge is defined "Answer your own question with score of 3 or more."
I didn't ask the how-to-say-good-bye question, so I suspect a bug. But I wanted to check if I misunderstood something before I file a bug report.
Was this badge wrongly awarded?
To file a bug report, do I just email the team, or is there a better way?
As for point 2: Posting on this Meta (what you did) or [meta.se] is the default way to file a bug report.
You posted that answer as a self-answer to a (now-deleted) "question" that you posted yourself "on behalf of" this OP. (The answer was later merged in to the original question by a moderator.) So it is a self-answer.
Another reminder how unreliable my memory is. It wasn't even that long ago....
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1926 | Write a new question or start a bounty?
I was drafting a question entitled, "How to make a group or department women-friendly?" when I noticed that the wonderful "Questions that may already have your answer" feature was pointing me helpfully to a related existing question: What is being done to make the academic environment more women friendly?.
Unfortunately, the existing how-can-we-make question received very little attention. I would like to start a bounty on that question. My only hesitation is that a user found fault with the question as written.
What would be more effective -- set a bounty on the original question, or write a new question?
I think the real question is this: why aren't you satisfied with the answers to the original question?
If you think that the original question would receive good answers if people paid more attention to it, then set a bounty.
If you think that the original question didn't receive the answers you're looking for because it wasn't focused on the particular aspect of the problem you want, then ask a new question. In the new question, link to the existing question and say why it doesn't answer your question already.
I would only ask a new question, if it is new. If you ask a duplicate question, it will get closed. The original question is not great, but it is not awful either. I would try a bounty, if the question addresses the issue you are after.
I do not think my answer is great, but what type of answer are you looking for?
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2029 | Question regarding paid agencies that help students apply to grad school abroad
In a recent question about applying to grad school, I discovered that the OP was paying an agency to assist with the application process. I suppose, in a way, this is a bit like paying someone to do prepare your tax return for you.
If someone mentions hiring such an agency here at Academia, is it okay to say to the OP, "If you want to skip the middleman and prepare your own application, you are welcome to ask specific questions about the process here as you go along?"
Not even sure why you would ask that; you can definitely do that. The main point of this forum is to provide answers to questions, but frequently people don't realize what their question should be, and comments are often used to help guide the OP towards asking a better question. I say go for it!
I asked to make sure. It would not be nice to offer the help and then find out that's not kosher.
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2093 | How do I flag an improper edit of a title?
In a question (Can I write a paper on a method that is novel but yields similar results compared to existing methods?), someone edited the title and introduced the word "wrong" which I believe was entirely unwarranted by the question. How do I flag this? From the discussion I have had with the person who made the edit, I anticipate that if I roll the title back, that person will just un-roll it -- and then where will we be?
The OP wrote, "In some cases our previously proposed method which uses 2 images gives inaccurate results compared to 3 image solution." Clearly, the OP sees the new method as mildly superior to the previous approach which used two images. However, the person who edited the title created the following title, which I believe is an inaccurate expression of the OP's question: "Can I write a paper on a method that is worse than existing ones?"
The original title was "Can I write a paper to solve a problem which uses 3 images instead of 2 images approach discussed in literature?"
The person who made the edit meant well, I believe, attempting to help the OP keep the question open by making the question more general. But I see nothing anywhere in the thread to suggest that the OP wanted to write a paper on a method that is worse than existing ones.
I don't think one should introduce one's judgment about the merit of a question, or judgment about matters mentioned in the question and its associated clarifying comments.
But I don't know how to flag the comment.
As the person who made the edit, I wish to note that I did not only edited to make the question more general for generality’s sake but also because I consider it a valid generalisation of the question in my understanding of the question (which you disagree with).
FWIW, I declined your flag on the question, as in my original review of the flag I thought "just edit the question yourself, you don't need a mod for that". Seeing the post here, though, I appreciate your flagging it and I shouldn't have declined it.
Note that the situation that sparked this question has now been resolved (at least in my opinion) thanks to clarifications by the OP. (This does of course not invalidate this question.)
To answer the question, this is the right place to bring it up. If two users, or groups of users, get into an editing war, a mod will lock the post until things can get sorted out. Hopefully, by raising the issue in meta the issue will get sorted. I am not sure what the right answer is in regards to the title in question. It might be best to ask a specific question on meta about that question and link to the meta question in a comment on the main question. This current question is probably fine, but not ideal, since it has the needed details.
While I generally agree, in the specific case, I suggest to wait a while before starting a meta discussion to give the OP (who has not opposed the edit so far and accepted an answer based on the same assumptions as the edit) an opportunity to comment on the disagreement and possibly resolve it.
In addition to StrongBad's answer, you can also attempt to "flag" the question for moderator attention, and then provide information about what's wrong under the "in need of moderator intervention" box at the bottom of the pop-up menu.
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3577 | What can be done to address provocative behavior by OP?
Regarding: Am I being a "mean" instructor, denying an extension on a take home exam
Discussion has been extensive and the tone has been ramping up. But that's not what motivates my Meta question. Rather, I am writing because I see several red flags suggesting the OP is behaving like a provocateur. I don't know the gender of OP but for simplicity I will use he.
Here are the red flags I see:
OP has been increasingly argumentative. OP has posted a question on Academia SE. If he is not happy with the analysis and opinions other users have shared, he is free to take them on board or ignore them. Nothing is accomplished by arguing, around and around. When he has disagreed with someone, he has added no documented or documentable information, or new logical points, he has only just cranked up the volume.
As an example, OP wrote a comment in response to the answer by Mayou36 which clearly stated he wasn't interested in other users' opinions. I'm afraid I can't quote the comment, because I neglected to copy it before I flagged it, and it has now been removed.
Currently visible example: "this answer is just trying to demonize me."
OP has been hypercritical of one of his students, which is tangential to his question. This has gotten now to the point of a personal attack on an individual student, who is under age. (To be clear: I am NOT saying that personally identifiable information about the student has been revealed.)
OP's "case" against the student keeps growing, ad infinitum. The OP has been gradually adding scattered additional information about the original question through multiple comment threads. Although the best case scenario is to include all relevant information in the original question, I appreciate that more is sometimes elicited through comments. Then OP should add it to the question, either by incorporating it into the text of the question, or by creating an addendum at the bottom of the question.
More and more disorganized diatribe about the student keeps getting added here and there and everywhere. Examples: "The student did refer to his other classes as 'a joke;'" "I know the school and I can confirm that it is an inner city school with extremely low standards and they teach 99% to just pass the standard exams... I've even heard they give mult choice tests where the answer is always the longest response."
My question: what can be done in such a case, where an OP is baiting SE participants and attacking an individual, who is under age? How can we make clear that provocateur-like behavior is unacceptable on Academia SE?
I just noted that your title and last sentence ask something different …
@Wrzlprmft - Oops, you're right. Okay, I took out the last part because I don't think that without moderator help we would have enough unity of purpose. But I also took out "moderators" from the title, to allow for community support, and to make it more vague.
Re: original title, I think you misunderstand the role of diamond moderators on SE. Moderators have a very specific set of "extra" abilities, mainly: deleting comments, migrating questions, suspending users who repeatedly/knowingly violate SE policies, and seeing parts of users' profiles that are not visible to "regular" users (mostly to aid in finding sock puppet accounts, etc). (Other less commonly used moderator abilities: renaming/merging tags, redacting edit histories to remove personal information at the OP's request, locking posts in an edit war, editing "on topic" page in the [help].)
Most of the "moderation" that goes on here is actually community moderation. If you're asking diamond moderators to do something that doesn't involve one of those special abilities, it might not be something that's within the moderators' role.
I have not followed the question in question very much, but I think a more general answer is more useful and desired anyway. I answer under the assumption that your assertions on the situation are true, but this is not to be taken as an assessment of that specific situation.
There are several mostly separate issues here:
OP has been increasingly argumentative.
When he has disagreed with someone, he has added no documented or documentable information, or new logical points, he has only just cranked up the volume.
This is a typical issue. Do not let this provoke you. If you feel that no new arguments have been added, state this in a friendly manner once. Should the opponent to continue to comment, ignore them. If you feel that the comments degrade into noise or offensive territory, flag them.
OP has been hypercritical of one of his students, which is tangential to his question.
This has gotten now to the point of a personal attack on an individual student, who is under age.
If the attacks happen in the question or answer, edit them to a more neutral description, stating this as an edit reason. Should these edits be rolled back by the author, flag the respective post for moderator attention, and leave it at that.
Should the attacks happen in a comment, this comment is probably leading nowhere anyway. Flag for deletion. Should the comment be relevant, include the information in the respective question or answer and make it neutral on the way. Then flag the comment for deletion.
Sidenote: I do not think that the underage aspect should affect any of this. Whether somebody deserves to be talked about in a condescending manner is irrespective of age.
OP's "case" against the student keeps growing, ad infinitum.
Then OP should add it to the question, either by incorporating it into the text of the question, or by creating an addendum at the bottom of the question.
Addenda should be avoided. There is no reason to document the history of a question as the edit history already does this.
Apart from this, it does not sound as if the information in question is any relevant, so just ignore the respective comments or flag them. Should they be relevant, edit them to the question yourself (see above), then flag.
Should the question change to an extent that the current answers are invalidated, ask the asker to stop editing / adding information. Should this not work, flag for moderator attention.
General reaction to provocative behaviour
Slightly increasing provocations are the hallmark behaviour of trolls¹ who feed on aggressive reactions from regular users. The best behaviour is not to feed the troll: Stay calm and friendly, assuming good intention, in face of first provocations. Most trolls show their real face if they run against this. If this happens, stop reacting, and flag possibly inappropriate content. Should the provocations stop, there was no troll to begin with or they have retreated. Either way, the good guys win.
¹ Just to be on the safe side, I repeat that this is not to be taken as an assessment of the example situation.
"Should the attacks happen in a comment, this comment is probably leading nowhere anyway. Flag for deletion." Does it matter what reason one gives in the flag -- if so, which do you suggest?
@aparente001 either "not constructive" or "too chatty". Probably in these cases "not constructive" as comments are designed to improve the question/answer.
For what it's worth, I don't find the OP's site behavior to be problematic.
Fundamentally the OP did invite critique by posting the question in the first place. (This also serves as a passing comment on another meta question, which I believe is calling me to task for being overly critical of the OP's behavior, including use of the word "obnoxious." But that's almost literally what he asked for: critical discussion of his behavior.) This means that he was fundamentally more open to hearing other perspectives than someone who would not seek to post such a question.
In my dealings with the OP in the course of my answer and other comments, I felt like he was for the most part taking in what I was saying. He was also defending himself, which seems perfectly natural. I know very few people who respond to criticism (even criticism they invited) without some defensiveness.
Is (again, as the question directly asks!) the OP being a bit "mean" with regards to the student? Well, the gist of my answer (already one of my most popular answers on this site, which is a bit weird but so it goes) is yes. But again, the possibility of that is what brought him here in the first place. I don't agree that the OP is engaging on a "personal attack" on his underage student. I would presume that the student is not active on this site or reading this question, and if he is then I don't see how this would cause him any particular distress. In fact the OP doesn't say anything truly personal about the student; he just describes him as a student. Again, I emphasize that much of my answer urges the treatment of students with more compassion, fairness and professionalism than the OP seems to have evinced in the situation...but I still don't see anything out of line or inappropriate here.
In this case, my preference would be to close the question. I am not sure what the actual question is and whatever it is, it doesn't seem like a good fit for our site. Given the up votes, as a moderator, I am not going to act unilaterally. In this case, closing the question as "unclear what you are asking" would probably resolve the situation.
Sometimes when discussion type questions are not getting closed, you can bring attention to them in chat, like I have.
I'm going to ask a question for my own understanding: how would closing the question help? How would that stem the flow of negative remarks from the OP about the student and his school and his cousins and his aunts?
It would either result in an edit making the question clearer which would in turn lead to better more concise answers and less discussion or make the question go away and get eventually deleted.
Sorry if this is a stupid question, but how does it make the question go away?
@aparente001 closed questions cannot be answered, eventually drift off the front page, and high rep users can vote to delete questions that cannot be salvaged.
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3684 | How to avoid edit war?
Participant A suggested I remove a particular paragraph from an answer I wrote; I explained why I was choosing to leave that paragraph in my answer; then Participant B removed the paragraph on his own initiative.
I don't want to provoke an edit war, but I want to reinstate the paragraph. What's the best way to get the paragraph back in without escalating the conflict? In other words, is it okay to just do a rollback, or does that risk escalation?
In general, an edit removing a piece of advice is an edit that is conflicting with the intents of the author and thus not permissible. Therefore you have every right to insist on this paragraph. Of course you have to live with being downvoted or even flagged as a result.
With your specific edit, one could argue that it does not address the question and thus can and should be removed. I do not think that this is the right approach since we allow for such extra advice in general. If somebody think that such extra advice is harmful or too much, they can express this via comments and votes.
In summary, I think that you are fully allowed to restore that paragraph.
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3590 | Please restore "ethnicity" tag in this question
For this question, When referring to races, should 'black' and 'white' be capitalized? (MLA), please restore the "ethnicity" tag which a moderator removed. As my answer shows, this question will be viewed and answered in different ways depending on the reader's racial identity and affinity.
(Should I have flagged the question instead of writing a Meta question?)
I removed the ethnicity tag because, as I noted in the edit summary, the question is
not about "interacting with people of different ethnicities"
which is what the tag excerpt says the tag is for.
I also left a comment just now explaining why I don't think that the question is "answered in different ways depending on the reader's racial identity and affinity".
Please note, I also said "viewed" differently.
I looked at the definitions of the ethnicity and diversity tags. Apparently the diversity tag is not as narrowly defined as the ethnicity tag is. I have accordingly added the diversity tag to the referenced question.
@aparente001 I really don't think the diversity tag is appropriate either. I suggest asking on meta to see what the rest of the community thinks.
ff524 ........ Will do.
In this case, meta is better than a flag since disagreements about edits are best resolved by the community and not by moderators acting unilaterally.
While it was a moderator who removed the tag, it wasn't "moderation", but rather just a user tidying up how they thought best. Had you put the tag back and the user, who happens to be a moderator, removed it again, another moderator would have stepped in and temporarily locked the post and asked on meta for help resolving the edit "war". By coming here first you prevent people feeling attacked and make life easier for the moderators.
As for the tag itself, I agree with this answer that it is not needed.
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3594 | Is dogpiling flaggable?
This question is motivated by an interesting answer to another Academia Meta question.
My question is, if I see "dogpiling" going on, i.e. more and more people are jumping on a bandwagon, ganging up on a user, may I flag the answer? If so, for what reason? Perhaps I could flag it as "not an answer," because it reiterates a previous answer, without adding anything new?
The now famous question about "Should I call out a student who may have behaved in a sexist way?" is not the only situation where I have seen dogpiling. Another recent example would be Am I being a "mean" instructor, denying an extension on a take home exam
Edit:
I found an example of helpful moderator action which was apparently triggered by some "not an answer" flags. Of course I don't know whether the flags were appropriate, whether they were accepted, etc. I'm just posting this example to further the discussion. (Note, I was mistaken in something I wrote in a comment. In this example, the moderator did not delete the answer. The answer was in fact auto-deleted.)
Here is a link the the answer: https://academia.stackexchange.com/a/81033/32436
The body of the helpful moderator comment below the answer:
This has been flagged by several users as "not an answer". I'm inclined to agree; most of this post is about criticizing the OP's activities on this site, rather than offering an answer to the question. The part of this post that is an answer doesn't add anything over other, better answers that offer the same point of view but more details and explanation. I suggest editing to remove that last part, and elaborating on the first part if you have something to add over the other answers. Otherwise, I recommend deleting this.
The post you reference was deleted by the author, not a moderator. It was flagged because some users thought it did not answer the question (because most of its content did not attempt to address the question), not because it didn't add anything new. Finally, and most importantly: writing a comment is something anyone with 50 rep can do. Don't flag for a moderator to write a comment, just write one yourself.
@ff524 - "The post you reference was deleted by the author, not a moderator" -- yes, that's what I said, or tried to say. // The comment I quoted was clearly written by a moderator, which can, and in my opinion, should, carry more weight with a user. Please note that I provided constructive negative feedback prior to yours. Perhaps yours was just the drop that made the glass run over -- hard to know, in hindsight! But I did want to make it clear that in the example cited, there was clear moderator feedback provided, and there was mention of "not an answer" flags.// My hope...
... is that this example can help structure the discussion of the present Meta question.
Flags are intended to alert moderators that they need to take action. In that case, there isn't really anything that we, as mods, should do. You are free to leave a comment along the lines of "OK, folks, enough already", which may or may not have an effect. However, raising a flag is definitely not going to solve anything.
Please do not simply flag using an unrelated flag as we'll simply end up declining it, wasting your time and ours.
Thank you for your response. The second paragraph seems unnecessary, as I have asked for guidance instead of just flagging willy nilly. // I will say I am disappointed in your answer. I think that flagging a redundant answer that adds nothing to the discussion would be a great way of preventing a 100-car pile-up. Also, I did see a mod delete an answer for this reason, I will see if I can find it again. The comment made with the mod closing was written by ff etc.
@aparente001 It's entirely possible that I would leave a comment on an answer suggesting that it doesn't add anything new (as per this, I often leave such comments - which I do in my capacity as a user of this site, since leaving comments is not a special "diamond mod" ability), and then delete it for some other reason.
@ff524 - But I remember recently seeing an answer that was deleted, with a comment from you. I thought it was a helpful action and you were polite and gentle about it.
@aparente001 As I said, an answer can get a comment from me about not adding anything new, and then be deleted by me for an entirely different reason. "Not adding anything new" is not, on its own, a reason for a moderator to delete a post. If you find the example, I'd be happy to look at it and tell you what the other reason was.
@ff524 - It's possible I'm remembering it wrong, but I don't think so. Hopefully I will find it and post a link.
@aparente001 if you see dog piling you could also try protecting the question. This is a privilege you recently earned.
Expanding on eykanal's suggestion of leaving a comment, I sometimes leave the following comment:
It's not clear what this answer adds over previous answers that already address these points.
and, if the author of the answer is new or not a regular contributor, I might also include in the comment:
Answers on Academia.SE are expected to offer a fresh take, rather than just reiterate existing answers; see What are we generally looking for in answers.
I invite anyone who witnesses dogpiling to "steal" this formulation (or some variation of it) and leave this comment yourself :)
Also note that comments that just repeat things that have already been said should be flagged. The appropriate flag depends on the situation, but I find that "too chatty" is often suitable.
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3517 | Can't find my answer after question was deleted; question has now been re-posted
A user is experiencing high anxiety about an academic issue. He has expressed clearly, multiple times, that (a) he is in agreement with everyone who has tried to reassure him, but that (b) his anxiety persists and is acute. He states that he has posted his question and deleted it twice and now here it is again for the third time: Is it unethical of me and can I get in trouble if a professor passes me based on an oral exam without attending class?
I wrote an answer which has disappeared along with one of his deletions. I would like to recover this answer and repost it at his new question.
Can the moderators merge his multiple threads, so my answer would show up? (I'm not sure if "thread" is the correct word.)
Or should I just have flagged his question to try to do this? I don't think my request would fit in the flag box....
I now think a flag would have been a good idea. I'm learning, slowly but surely.
(Posting on meta to learn how to find your own deleted posts was exactly the right thing to do - and has the added benefit that other users can read this meta post and learn how to do this, too.)
@ff524 - apparently, a little slower than I thought -- but I'll get there!
Here is your answer. You have enough reputation to see deleted posts so you can copy and paste it yourself into the new question.
In general: you can see your own deleted recent answers on your profile page, and if you have more than 10k rep, you can use the deleted:1 search operator to see your own deleted questions and answers.
Much appreciated!
One thing you could have raised a flag for would be for the questions to be merged. In general, deleting and reposting questions is frowned upon. Users sometimes do this to avoid loss of reputation from down votes or to bring more attention to the question. In this case, it seems like the user is simply anxious. Which would bring your deleted answer back. That said, the questions are long and you answer is the only answer. When I looked, I decided not to invest the time sorting it out. Another option would be to undelete the old version and close the new one as a duplicate. These options seem like they might further stress out the user with little benefit to us as a community.
Merging is useful when there are multiple answers on both questions, when there's an answer from someone who doesn't have an Academia account (as can happen when a question is migrated and also cross-posted), or if the answers have votes that the owners don't want to lose (although if the answers were upvoted, the question couldn't have been deleted by the owner.) But in other cases, where there's no benefit to merging, I strongly encourage users who can take care of this themself with copy+paste to do so rather than raise a flag.
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3600 | What to do about posts that don't answer the rewritten question?
A controversial question was substantially rewritten, but not before a number of answers were posted and discussed at great length. Is it appropriate now to flag the existing answers that don't answer the question in its rewritten form (i.e. flag as "not an answer")? If not, what should, or could, be done instead?
If moderators already provided guidance about this in the following related Meta question, I apologize and would be glad if someone could please remind me what the conclusion was (it was a very long thread): Why are we challenging the premise rather than answering the question (question on potential sexist remarks)?. (Is thread the right word?)
(Not sure whether this other question is relevant: What to do about old questions whose answers are now invalid)
The answers issueing words of caution and warn to be very careful with slinging around (potentially unfounded) accusations of sexism are still appropriate, even to the current version of the question.
You are writing this meta because the status quo of this site is much different from that in other SE sites. I can't name a site that I read weekly that would let an OP change the nature of a question by giving LESS information after they did not get the answer they wanted. And that's what it comes down to here - the OP didn't like the first round of answers, so she wiped out key information to discredit the people who had upvotes for answers. Why the answerers are being criticized and the OP isn't has me perplexed? Huh....
@blankip Let's keep the focus of this meta post on what to do with the question and answers now that they are in the state that they're in. There's no need to bring up issues that have already been rehashed at length in another meta post.
(takes off moderator hat, puts on regular user hat.) I support the following, as an approach that helps people keep their contributed content roughly as they intend it to look:
Keep the question as is. Clearly, the current form is what the OP wants, and most of the answers do address the general question (even if some also refer to the specific example that has now been removed).
Not forcibly deleting any answers. Authors of answers are of course still free to delete their own answers, if they want.
Add a little bit of context to answers that refer to previous versions of the question, so that the answers make sense. For example, include in the answer a brief quote of the relevant part of the previous version of the question, when it is necessary to understand the answer. But keep the content of the answer as intact as possible while editing.
(If this approach wins substantial community support: Any user with edit privileges can help with this, and add a comment referencing this meta discussion. No need to flag for a moderator!)
How could the current question be left open if it was like this originally. Certainly there is no answer for something this important and vague. I added an answer but by not rolling the question back, this site's policy is different from most other SE sites I look at.
@blankip I don't think the question is too vague to be left open in its current state. As I mentioned on an answer you left in the other meta thread, I think the general question has actually attracted some rather good answers.
I will continue your last sentence... , that don't actually answer the question with the full details. Either way if people think it should be left open that's fine. But the original is still a different question. By allowing the OP to backtrack on key info, the only way to keep track is to create a new question with the original question and slot in the answers. Obviously the answers written to the original would help future readers as they are about a real situation.
@blankip Since we have no way to create a new question and move over answers while still preserving their vote counts, I've proposed what I think is the least-bad way out of a bad situation. You are of course free to argue in your answer that your way out is better :)
So are you saying that you need to be able to add new questions or you need to be able to keep an OP from backtracking on key info to the question?
@blankip I'm not saying either of those things. This answer is about what I think we should do with the question now, not about what I wish had happened a couple of weeks ago when the question was in flux.
Roll it back...
There has not been a strong consensus on the linked meta post on what to do with the existing answers. Many people think that the answers should stay as they are; many argue that they should be deleted. A large number of users have argued that the edits to the question should be rolled back; a large number of other users think the question is better in this current form. It's hard to tell where people stand, also, because some answers to that meta post contain multiple points, and people voting on them may agree with some parts and not others.
Given this disagreement, unilateral moderator action seems inappropriate, so don't flag them.
If at any point you are able to show a strong consensus on meta for deleting them, then they could be deleted. A "strong consensus" would be if you
Posted an answer here saying they should be deleted (and not containing any other proposals),
and it got a large number of upvotes and few downvotes,
and there was no competing answer suggesting to keep them, or a competing answer got much less support than yours.
Thanks for laying out the options. It sounds like this question has the momentum of a Mack truck.
With the question being as strongly edited as this one, I would consider that the new version is effectively a new question to be treated as such.
A rollback with the suggestion to post a new question with the revised text is my recommendation (regardless of the quality of the original question).
This site is supposed to be about questions and answers, not feelings and emotions. That is the reason behind the very robotic up/down tick system and the UX of the Q&A. Input in, answer out. The site is not a free-range forum, if it was the comments wouldn't be wiped, especially those that provide more insight.
There are several sites this meta question would never come up and an example is mathematics. Imagine a person posting an equation that needs to be solved (overly simplistic):
2a + y * 4b -7c = r
Suppose they ask if "a" can equal "1" while giving the number possibilities to the other variables. And then people answer... No it can't be one.
Then the person starts rolling back one variable at a time until "a" could theoretically be "1". Well the question is nonsense. It should be rolled forward with the intent it was made. I am positive these edits on mathematics would be rolled back.
I am not sure what the deal is here. Is it the word "sexism" that keeps it from being rolled back? Has this site taken be nice too far? Was leaving a question alone given more concern than the answerers? I don't know. But common sense says you don't let the OP divulge less information as the question timer clicks down when they didn't get the answer they wanted. If the OP wanted the current question answered that would be a new question, which should be closed due to lack of information.
My proposal = Roll back the question to the point where it had the most information.
It depends: there are rewrites, and there are rewrites. Rewrites which improve a clear, on-topic question (which is not an XY question) are fine. Adding (or preserving) a reasonable level of context is good, too. Rewrites which delete all context, mutate the question into something it never was, and thereby invalidate answers, are not fine. If the rewrites actively contradict each other, that's even worse.
That question is one of the worst examples of rewrites mutating the original question beyond recognition. The original #1 edit essentially said "Student objected to my teaching methods and not my male colleagues, I feel this is sexist". OP's #5 edit changed this to "IF A STUDENT COMMITS A CLEAR SEXIST BEHAVIOR IN FRONT OF YOU...". Totally moves the premise. The OP's own version was not clearly anything, other than an annoying weak student raising bogus objections, by email. Hence, solutions would presumably address those behaviors, not the chain of assumptions about motive. To do otherwise is an XY problem. "commit" is loaded language. Then #9 says "I never said that it /was/ sexist; it occurred to me (based on previous interactions with this student etc) that this was probably sexism.". Again, changes the question, and more missing context. We're now up to revision #12 on the mutating question, and we have all sorts of topics being injected like racism. The question has become a wish object for people to inject whatever perceived type of bias they want to conjecture about or analogize to. No relation to the original question! It's an irredeemable mess. (I hope it's no longer on HNQ and attracting wildly offtopic answers from newbies).
I have to say that the OP's behavior in edits #6, #8 and #9 damage her credibility and don't invite us to take her conjecture at face value. So we end up with three different conflicting versions of a he-says-she-says, which might in any case be irrelevant to addressing the original question #1 that was asked.
v#1 of the question should have been quickly put on hold for being unclear; or certainly by edit #5 which deleted the facts, changed the context and invalidated all the answers. If either of those had been done, this situation wouldn't have arisen. It's now way too late to fix the question.; it should belatedly be put on hold. Blaming the answers is an irrelevant sidebar.
This meta thread is about what action we should take, given the current state of that question and its answers. Since your answer is rather long, could you briefly state the proposed action at the top, before the explanation? We want to be sure that votes on the answer represent agreement with the proposed action.
From reading this answer I think there are only two choices: Close the question, or roll it back to its original form. I DO think edits are good for questions, when you add something to the question to make it easier for people to answer. But when you go about changing the entire situation, removing details and making things more ambiguous, how does that equate to asking a good/quality question. I think both questions and answers should be held to quality standards, regardless of the subject matter, no matter your personal views on a topic.
As someone who arrived in that thread after the edits, the first few top voted answers verge on nonsensical.
I view the Question as the thing of paramount importance, and as such I'd support removing answers that were effectively made obsolete by refinement.
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3624 | Need help deleting a question
I wanted to delete a question, couldn't, and flagged it for deletion (as suggested by the software. But the flag was declined.
I copied the crux of Jake's answer over to my new question, so it is no longer necessary to keep the original answer open.
It took me a little while to think of this solution, and in the meantime, multiple answers of a poorly posed question were received, and one received 6 votes. Thus I can't delete the question.
Related - http://meta.stackexchange.com/q/283118/193412
As per the FAQ:
If I flag my question with a request to delete it, what will happen?
The standard policy for moderators is to decline such flags. The reasoning is as follows:
if you can delete your question (because it has no answers, or the only answer has no upvotes), then you should do it. It does not require moderator intervention.
if you cannot delete your question, then there must be upvoted, or multiple answers. Deleting the question also deletes the answers. Deleting the answers undoes the hard work other people have put in to answer your question, and reverses the reputation they have earned too. This is not fair to the answerers of your question.
Adding the content of the answer to another question, then deleting the original, is not really a solution. First, the author of the answer deserves to have it listed in his account, and to continue accruing reputation points as people vote in it. (Not that jakebeal is in great need of points... but it's nice for both the author of an answer, and future readers, to see how many others have found it useful so far.) Second, it makes the Q&A harder to find, for people who are searching for that question. We are trying to build a library of useful questions and answers for future readers (and many people, myself included, contribute answers with the goal of helping future readers and not only the person asking the question). It's not as easy to find an answer if it's not attached to a question that it answers.
Instead, consider editing your question to improve it. For example, I think the following version of your question would be much better received, and wouldn't invalidate the excellent answer that you received:
Why does an admissions committee need to look at the whole transcript?
Admissions committees look at a student's entire transcript to get an understanding of their academic abilities. Why is it not sufficient to judge a student's academics based on GPA alone?
(and remove the reference-request tag)
"We are trying to build a library of useful questions and answers for future readers" - but with a score of negative 5, my question doesn't appear to have been considered remotely useful. Also, I don't think Jake's answer will accrue more points. (Note that Jake did a great job of restating my question, but he didn't answer it.) // All that said, I'm fine with following your suggestion (even though it's not remotely what I was thinking about when I wrote the question).
I forgot to say, I don't need the reference any more. I found a different way of presenting my argument.
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3649 | Need help editing a question to bring it into clearer focus
There is a question about perceptions of students with disabilities using the "reasonable accommodation" of extra time for tests. That's an interesting question, and sent me hunting for research about perceptions. I found some articles.
But the question asks other things too. Maybe it's asking for tactical advice based on people's perceptions. But it's hard to be sure if that's what the OP meant.
I have not voted to reopen the question because I think it needs to be edited first. But I can't figure out how to do that.
Based on answers and comments received so far, this question looks like it may generate polemics, misunderstandings, things said that people might (or should) regret later, bitter reactions....
I suppose the easy way out would be to edit the question to focus on a reference request, to find out what has been found in studies regarding professors' perceptions of accommodations.
Another way to narrow the focus would be to ask what is permitted and not permitted in the U.S.: is it a violation of 504, ADA and/or FERPA for a reference to (a) flag the student as having used an extra time accommodation, or (b) use the fact of the extra time to un-level the playing field after the fact?
I just wish I knew what motivated the question for the OP. Is it that s/he is trying to decide whether to ask for or utilize accommodations?
They are all interesting questions, but I think that as currently written, the questions is just going to generate nonconstructive debate. I don't enjoy watching respected colleagues here on Academia SE say bigoted, embarrassing things.
So... can someone please help edit the question so that it will not lead to a lot of acrimony?
The question seems quite clear to me; it is explicitly asking about perceptions. We have other questions on this site asking about how "X" is perceived. Some examples can be found here.
I do not think it is appropriate to turn it into a question about the law, as that seems inconsistent with the OP's intent. (Not to mention, we don't even know what country the OP is in.)
Based on answers and comments received so far,
We have systems for dealing with bad content. If you see comments that are not constructive, flag them using the "not constructive" comment flag. If you see a problem with something written in an answer, leave a comment on the answer explaining what the problem is. (And downvote if you feel the answer is unhelpful.) Help good answers rise to the top by voting them up, and write your own answer if necessary.
OP also asked, "If a student is looking forward to requesting a reference for grad school from a certain professor, would it generally be better for him/her not to request exam extensions for this professor's course?" // I'm not sure how to completely set aside the legal aspect of the question, since it could be considered discriminatory (by OCR) to take disability accommodations into account when writing an LOR.
@aparente001 If you feel that a legal answer addresses the question, by all means write a legal answer. You don't have to change the question to do that. Other answers can address the perception question (main question) and/or that "If a student is looking forward" question as they prefer.
@aparente001 P.S. as far as I can tell, the OP on that question has not specified any country.
You're right, but from the way the question was worded, it felt like a U.S.-based question. // "How do professors perceive extra time?" feels like a poll, and an invitation for lots of subjective posts like Pete's for example.
@aparente001 I don't find it different from our other How is X perceived? questions. Most of those seem to do OK.
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3652 | What's up with this bump?
A particular old question was bumped to the homepage by Community. Was this done automatically by the software? Was it a person? Why was it bumped? It makes no sense to me.
I read a Meta outline of reasons for bumping, and none of them fit.
I thought that maybe the bump had resulted from an edit, but the question doesn't seem to have been edited.
The SE Academia Meta answer I linked to wasn't quite as complete as the answer it linked to (which I hadn't noticed until now). Sometimes SE feels like Calvinball. I wish there were ONE help page containing all the basic facts. As things stand one has to hunt around for questions and answers.
@MassimoOrtolano - Okay, I made an adjustment.
Visible on the question right now:
The system automatically "bumps" questions that have answers where some are sitting at a score of 0 and none are accepted or score more than 0. This gives folks a chance to review the answers and vote on them or post better ones.
In this case, it worked - over the past 13 hours, one of the answers has been upvoted.
See also: How can we make the purpose of Community "bumping" more obvious?
Helpful, but zaq's comment was even more helpful. (I don't see why the criteria couldn't be put in parentheses in the bump message.)
Probably could be; debatable how much that matters to most folks. Also, there were concerns about pushing too hard for folks to vote - see the discussion I linked.
Well, people would not be required to read the fine print....
As pointed out by @zaq in a comment to an answer that has since been deleted, this answer explains that to be automatically bumped, a question should
be open (not locked or closed)
score no less than zero
have been inactive for 30 days
have no accepted answer, no answer scoring more than zero, and at least one non-deleted answer with a score of 0
Automatic bumping cannot occur more frequently than one per hour.
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3666 | Could we create a tag to encompass phones and other electronic devices?
Could we create a tag to encompass phones and other electronic devices, including laptops and tablets?
Here are some questions that would fit well with such a tag:
How to deal with uninterested students during an optional exercise session?
https://academia.stackexchange.com/search?q=phone
Right now, "etiquette" is often used for these types of questions. "Etiquette" could still be used for some of them, but "etiquette" doesn't only refer to cell phone etiquette.
We have a technology tag already. See e.g. Incorporating Cellphone use in a Course
However, it should not be applied to How to deal with uninterested students?.
Phones or laptops are not integral to the question of dealing with uninterested students - the question would be the same if the student was reading a book, working on homework for another course, or doing the New York Times crossword puzzle in class. Nor should it be applied to all questions that happen to include the word "phone". Tags should reflect what a question is fundamentally about.
In theory, your idea seems like it might work, with a tag synonym in place; but in practice, it doesn't seem to be working. I just reviewed a bunch of questions that talk about cell phones that don't have the technology tag. I think the term "electronic device" is used more often than "technology."
@aparente001: Then, let’s create a synonym.
I changed the tag wiki accordingly.
@Wrzlprmft - I like your edit. But could you also either give examples (cell phones, laptops, tablets, electronic devices), or else put those in a synonym?
@aparente001: But could you also either give examples […]? – It’s in the tag wiki. I think it would be too much for the excerpt. — I couldn't do it. – Everybody can suggest tag-wiki edits. Almost nobody can suggest synonyms (including me for this tag), because the synonym system sucks. — or else put those in a synonym? – Why not make all those terms synonyms?
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1874 | Where can I ask undergraduate questions?
I recently posted a question about undergraduate acceptance of older students.
Is it much more difficult to enter an Ivy League much later in life?
It is currently on hold because it seems like undergraduate questions are off topic. While I believe that such a question is clearly 'academia', my main concern is where exactly would it be acceptable to post a question like this? Shouldn't 'Academia' be a default forum for undergraduates until a more appropriate forum opens up?
Also see "I couldn't find a better SE site for this question" is not necessarily a reason to ask it here in the Welcome to Academia.SE post.
@ff524 Thanks; I thought I remembered seeing a definitive statement like this, but couldn't find it. Is there any way that we can get the "Welcome to Academia" post into the site help center?
It is a general principle on StackExchange that a question isn't on topic just because it would be more off-topic elsewhere. Thus, there is no such thing as a "default site" in the StackExchange model.
Some undergraduate-related questions are on topic here, if they also strongly relate to non-undergraduate aspects of academic life (see, e.g., this meta question). Unfortunately, at present there is no StackExchange site that is aimed at primarily undergraduate issue---I believe it's been proposed once or twice on Area 51, but been unable to gain sufficient momentum to launch.
For the present then, I'm afraid that you would be best advised to ask this question in a different forum system.
I understand, but it is still strange because it's weird to have questions closed as "off-topic" on the site that fits them best. Especially since it's probably not obvious to many people that "academia" does not include undergraduates (or what counts as undergraduates, for that matter... middle school probably does, and post-doctorals probably don't, but I'm less sure about the intermediate stages).
<continued from previous comment, too long> Are there other big examples of question topics that are off-topic (no pun intended) on their best-fitting StackExchange site? (For that matter, is there anything that's off-topic on its best-fitting SE site but technically on-topic on another SE site that otherwise doesn't fit it as well?) And incidentally, is the "general principle" referred to officially listed anywhere?
Business aspects of music are off-topic on music, and business aspects of video game development are off-topic on gamedev.
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2050 | Need new tag for 504 plan and/or 504 accommodations
Motivated by I could see what part of the exam paper another student seemed to be focusing on, now I'm worried I was cheating
For anyone who is interested in posting a question or answer, or reading previous questions, about Section 504 Accommodation Plans and the accommodations that one might receive under such a plan, it would be very helpful to have at least one such tag.
Anxiety would be a good tag to have too. There are lots of levels of anxiety. We see tons of questions that related to non-clinical levels of anxiety (e.g. https://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/58600/pgre-score-reporting-time-no-longer-pending-but-no-scores-available). I think it's helpful for an OP to recognize that there is anxiety. Also hopefully those who answer will make sure to respond with humanity when they see the anxiety tag.
Do you want a tag for a US-specific law (if it's a law)? Could you please restate your proposal to make it more general?
@MassimoOrtolano - 504 is indeed a law in the U.S. I will pose a question to try to find out how to generalize. It may take a few days, though.
Generally, when creating a new tag, there are a few key considerations (keeping in mind that a question can only have 5 tags):
New users should be able to easily find the right tags for their question. Tag proliferation (having many highly specific tags) makes this difficult for them.
If all of the questions that could possibly have a certain tag are already described well by another tag, then the new tag is probably not necessary. (Unless that "other tag" is extremely broad and has a huge number of questions in it.)
Tags should help with "findability" - we try to use common words for things so that people can find tags easily. If people might search for something with a different name, instead of adding another tag for that name, we add a tag synonym which points to the other name. That way, all questions about that thing can be found under one tag.
Tags are used for grouping questions, so in most cases a new tag should be applicable to at least a handful of existing questions.
Also, tags should describe what a question is about, not what it merely relates to. (By "what a question is about" I mean "what the OP asked us to answer" - even if you believe it's necessary to address something else in an answer, it shouldn't be used for tagging the question.) For example, we only tag a question with a country-specific tag if the question is about the conventions specific to academia in that country. We don't tag a question with united-states just because an incident described in the question took place there.
Regarding the specific proposals:
In the case of this question, the question does not ask about accommodations (whether under Section 504 or not - we don't even know if this person is in the US), so those seem to be inappropriate tags for the question. In general, any question that could be asked about 504 and accommodations is already covered by disability. This tag has only 30 questions, so it doesn't seem necessary to further subdivide it. I can see how people might search for "accommodations", so you might propose a tag synonym for "accommodations" that points to disability.
In the case of this question, the question is about what a particular exam scoring status message means, not about the OP's anxiety, so anxiety would not be an appropriate tag for the question (regardless of the appropriateness of the tag in general.) In general, we have emotional-responses which includes anxiety, discouragement, guilt, jealousy, etc. (See this meta discussion in which we came up with the name for this tag.) (This tag is for questions which specifically ask about dealing with an emotion, not questions that mention an emotion for context.) Given that there are fewer than 30 questions tagged emotional-responses, subdividing into individual emotions does not seem necessary to me. Again, you might propose tag synonyms for individual emotions if you feel it is necessary. (It would certainly help with findability.)
I'll think about your tag synonym idea for disability and 504 or accommodation. // Meanwhile, if you have time to look at either the article or the video about the history of 504, please let us know if that changes your own opinion about my proposal.
@aparente001 I don't see how the history of 504 rebuts any of the issues I have raised in this post.
I just found it influential for my own thinking. Maybe it will be for you too.
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2126 | What should I do if I have a relevant answer to a protected question?
I understand why I cannot answer the question What is behind the “Indian Undergrad Research Experience”-spam?; it is because I only have 1 reputation on this site and the question is protected.
However, I think I have a relevant and useful answer from the perspective of an Indian undergrad currently enrolled at one of the mentioned universities. What would be the best way to contribute? Should I just comment with tl;dr of my answer or should I send the answer to some moderator who can approve it of not being "low-quality/spam" and post it?
It looks like you have 101 rep on this site, no? (AFAIK there is no difference between your bonus "+100" earned from being trusted on other SE sites and 100 earned on this sit.)
No the association bonus does not count. See http://meta.stackexchange.com/a/52765
If you have an answer that raises points not already represented among the existing answers, you should earn 10 rep here so that you can post it.
You can earn 10 rep by any of the following:
suggesting 5 edits that are approved
posting 1 answer (to an unprotected question) that gets 1 upvote
asking 1 question that gets 2 upvotes
(Note that "here" means on the main site, not here here, on meta.)
why don't we temporarily unprotect the question, let the OP answers it, then protect it again? It seems that the OP has abandoned their will to earn rep and answer it.
@Ooker - Questions get protected when they are attracting a lot of activity from newcomers who don't necessarily understand the culture of the Stack Exchange. The threshold is quite low – a mere 10 points – so I don't think there's any need to start temporarily unprotecting questions for people who don't want to earn the 10 points before answering.
@J.R. I don't think it's beneficial to us to prevent an answer from a person who spends the effort to post a quality meta question to show the will of posting a quality answer.
@Ooker, thanks for your concern. I have been trying to come up with a proper question for the past few days (that has not already been asked and answered!) and I have posted one now.
@Ooker I don't think the cost of a mod having to dedicate time and coordinate with the OP for a single answer is worth it, especially when the bar is already so low.
@RogerFan but it's quick and simple
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1742 | Are questions regarding academic internships off-topic?
I recently asked a question that was heavily down voted. I am not fairly convinced that the question that I asked was indeed off topic. I happen to provide a link to a question that was based on undergraduate academic internships.
Avoid spam filters when applying for academic internships
However, it applies to all the students from masters courses too and not just undergrad students.
Personally, I disagree with the close votes on the question. There is a possible case to be made that it is only about undergraduates, but since such academic internships are frequently pursued with an aim towards graduate school, I think that still makes it sufficiently on topic.
I think that your question is based on mistaken assumptions and aims at a rather obnoxious behavior. My feeling is that many of those close votes may have been influenced by a dislike of internship spamming and the attitude that goes along with it (which is reflected in your question as well). However, just because a question is wrong-headed or reflects an odious attitude doesn't make it a bad question. In fact, I think that it is a very good question for that very reason, because maybe some fraction of students who go looking good methods of spamming professors will come across it and realize they are using the wrong tactic.
If others show agreement with this position, then I would vote to reopen.
Exactly. Thank you. I can accept that my question is unethical to ask. However that doesn't mean that it should be closed. Further, I was looking for a possible solution to the problem which has been suggested in one of the answers. Just because someone's approach to a question is wrong doesn't mean it can't be discussed.
The question you have asked is, at its root, not about internships. The reason you have asked it is based on trying to secure an internship, but I could just easily replace "applying for academic internships" with "hawking laboratory supplies" or "soliciting manuscripts for an open-access journal."
Your question can be reduced to "how do I avoid spam filters?" It can't be reduced to "how do I apply for an academic internship?"—at least not in its present form.
(For what it's worth, I've provided an answer for you in that question, but I suspect it's not one you're going to like.)
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3440 | How to handle poster misrepresenting commenter in post
I made a comment on an answer. The person has quoted my comment into her answer in a dismissive way (and out of context) and introduced some meta-discussion about how men cannot understand the biases that women face and therefore it must be men voting the answer down.
I feel that the answer currently implies men in general, and I in particular, are dismissive of bias against women. I find this offensive (and anyone who reads my twitter feed or attends faculty meetings with me would find this accusation surprising). I could go into a long list of discussions I've had where I've argued the bias against women is significant and hard to eliminate without taking proactive steps.
I've asked the poster to remove my name and/or include the context of my statement, but she has explicitly refused.
I realize that it's incredibly frowned upon to edit the answer in a way that the answerer disagrees with, but I strongly object to the way I am presented in the answer. Is there a point that it's acceptable to remove the discussion of me from someone else's answer?
This is the perfect way. Ask about it on meta or chat or flag for moderatorattention. Ideally providing a link so people can find it. Having a 3rd person take care of it reduces the chance of a fight.
I have edited out your name from the answer in question while leaving the example in place. While giving "credit" is desirable in general, this is clearly a case you did not want to be quoted like that.
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3713 | Was there a clear consensus on gender neutral edits?
Following How do we feel about gender specific terms? I surmise that editing in gender neutral wordings is not appreciated.
In the case of this question however, I believe it is one gender neutral edit away from becoming a better question.
It doesn't need a point of view.
There's no reason it should be considered from either person's sexual representation. The answer(s) would apply in any cases.
It could be on-topic
There seems to be some intent on closing it. It is now closed. I'm not familiar with on-topicness here but would it be less appealing for closure, being more of a generic question about a possibly common scenario in this specific aspect of academia?
Actually, I'd have voted to close even if the question were expressed in a gender neutral way.
The consensus seems pretty clear from the votes on answers to
How do we feel about gender specific terms?
Gendered pronoun usage
There seems to be far more support for "do as you like in your own posts, don't insist on gender neutrality in other people's posts" than any other policy that has been proposed so far.
The particular question you reference was not closed for being gender-specific, so there's no reason to think that your edit would help it be received better here.
In general, including specific details in a question is not reason to close it, if there's a good general underlying question to be answered. Similarly, it's usually not necessary to remove specific details from a question, unless they are lengthy or otherwise a distraction from the general question. In this question, that does not appear to be the case.
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2137 | How do I revert edits on my question?
I asked this question How do the advantages of a flipped classroom overcome timing issues? and got some good answers, focussed on my concerns. The title has now been edited to something that is too general. That is, it will encourage shopping lists of advantages instead of 'what are the advantages that offset my concerns'. As the asker, I was notified of the edits, but I don't seem to have an option to reject them and I thought there was a veto power for the asker.
I will end up simply editing the title again to pick up the concerns of the editor but to also focus on the aspect I wan answered. But it would be good if someone could point to how I should have reverted the title.
In general: to revert an edit on your own post, you can click on the "Edited" link to get to the revision history. In the revision history, for every edit except the most recent one, there is a "rollback" option to revert the post to that particular version.
As the asker, I was notified of the edits, but I don't seem to have an option to reject them and I thought there was a veto power for the asker.
If an edit is suggested, you see the notification, and you reject the edit before it is approved, then the edit will not be applied. If the edit is made by a high-rep user and doesn't need to be reviewed, or if it is reviewed and approved before you reject it, then it'll be applied.
The system doesn't wait for the original author to get around to explicitly approving or rejecting every edit before applying the edit. Stack Exchange is big on community editing.
But as the author, you can always revert an edit or re-edit the post to make it even better (just refrain from edit wars, please!)
I will end up simply editing the title again to pick up the concerns of the editor but to also focus on the aspect I wan answered.
In this instance, that seems like a great way to handle it. The new title is more focused (i.e. better) than either previous version.
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1440 | Creation of a Wikipedia tag
sorry to bother you for this little thing, but I would ask you if it is possible to create a "Wikipedia" tag.
I see 71 results querying for Wikipedia in academia.SE questions.
I don't think it's gonna be easy for me to earn 300 rep soon, so I will directly ask here. If created, I can start using it for some of the existing questions. Thanks everyone.
As long as there are many other wiki websites and wikipedia is not the only website of this kind; I think that having a tag with a broader title like [wiki-websites] is more suitable than [wikipedia] for the Academia.
I respectfully disagree :-): Wikipedia is unique in his kind as the biggest crowdsourced encyclopedia online, and his used by half a billion users every month. The scale, the scope, the features (Neutral Point of View, no original research) make it different from other wikis. So a tag on his own is preferred, IMHO.
Also Don't run, walk! Having 71 results does not necessarily mean that the website needs such tag. It is so nice to have your proposal about such tag in meta, but; please don't hurry in such huge edit. Please give some time (about one or two days) to the users to see your post in meta, see for and against to your proposal, see what community thinks about your proposal and then decide to create such tag and do huge edits.
Thanks for this second advice. I'll keep it in mind (next time: if the tags should be removed, I'll do it myself. Sorry for the rush).
@EnthusiasticStudent You should be criticizing me and not Aubrey. I do, however, think we should have that tag.
@jakebeal I do appreciate your point of view, but I insist that if the users are even a hundred percent sure that a tag is needed on site; if their proposal is brought on meta, they should wait for some time to receive the feedback from other users. Also, as mentioned above; it should be proved that the tag is needed on the site, that amount of search results is not a good reason for lacking the tag on site. At the moment, let's think more about the alternative tag titles and let's choose the best tag for the mentioned purpose. We can think and choose the best tag for such purpose.
Thanks, Aubrey - that's a very good idea! I'm surprised actually that we didn't already have such a tag. To get it started, I have tagged a few of the wikipedia-mentioning articles and submitted a tag wiki entry for review.
Thanks you! Let me now when it's ready :-)
I believe that you should be able to start making tag edits now; they will then go into the approval queue. It's good to not flood too many in at a time, though, so that other things aren't knocked off the front page.
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1449 | Can I undo a community wiki answer?
Sorry, this is silly, but I would like to check if this answer from 2010 is still valid: there is no way to undo a community wiki post?
I made a "mistake" tagging all my answers like community wiki, not knowing about the lack of rep. It's no big deal, of course, but I'd like to undo it if possible. Thanks.
Moderators can remove CW status from a post. See this answer:
Yes—community moderators, at their discretion, can now remove community wiki status from particular posts.
If you want to remove CW status from a post, please flag it for moderator attention, select "other," and explain that you want to remove CW status from the post.
Thanks, I'll do it.
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1815 | How to increase the visibility of my academia question and get more responses?
I made a mistake in my thesis and posted a question here, I was expecting to get several (considerable) answers; but unfortunately, I only received two, therefore I invite all academia users to visit that question and let me know what is the pitfalls about it, is it because my reputation is low, it is related to wording the question itself, or it is silly. I found some other simple questions on other sites for example received good responses. Sometimes your question is related to some particular (technical) problem and there might be several ways to solve that problem, in such case it doesn't matter if you get only one answer since I'll solve your problem. On other hands, some problems are opinion-based ( as mine I guess), in such a case one will really be eager to receive more answers.??
Your question has not received a lot of views (currently onIy 172). My guess is people did not find the titular question exciting and therefore did not look at it. I don't think it has anything to do with your reputation or the way you asked the question. While the question is a good fit for our site, I am not sure it is particularly interesting.
Once you have more reputation, you can offer a bounty to call attention to your question. I have offered a bounty, but I am not sure how much it will help. In addition to bounties, talking about the question in meta or chat can also help.
We shouldn't thanks in comments, but it looks I have to so, because your bounty offering which will end tomorrow helps and make sense. I'm grateful for you.
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2038 | Defining shopping questions
I understand there is already a fair amount of discussion on shopping questions on meta and I've read through most of it, but the motivation for closing shopping questions is still opaque to me. This question I asked recently inspired my curiosity: Alternate university course allocation mechanisms.
Insofar as the ideal answer to this question is a list (a list of universities, no less), I agree that it could be called a shopping question, and I'm not arguing with those that flagged it as such. On the other hand, it's not what I usually think of when I think of shopping questions. I usually think of questions that ask for a list of programs that a particular person might want to consider or a list of journals that a researcher might want to consider for a submission. And the problem with those questions, to me, is that the answer is not generalizable or likely to be useful to other readers, not simply that the ideal answer would be formatted as a list. In fact, if you click on the discussion that is linked from the shopping question closure, it seems that most of the concerns on shopping questions are regarding the specificity of the request, not the list format of an answer.
My question, while it does ask for a list, is not just generalizable, it's already general. Obviously the answer is of interest to me, but it is in no way specific to me. It could absolutely be of interest to other users.
I understand that I could probably have it reopened by reframing the question to something like: How should universities assign courses to students? But that question is no more or less valid as a question than the current: How do universities assign courses to students? And it's the latter that interests me, not the former. Isn't this community an ideal place to answer it, and wouldn't members of this community find such an answer interesting? If it's really just a matter of it making the choice of an accepted answer arbitrary, then I think this can be resolved by having a community wiki answer, which is what i started. Or is it just an absolute aversion to lists?
A side note. Your question is a fine example on how far university cultures from different countries can be: I had to reread your question 4 times to understand what you were talking about, simply because we really don't have limited-enrollment courses. Limits can be, in exceptional cases, set for an entire faculty, but I've never heard in my country of limits set for a single course.
@MassimOrtolano That's fascinating. But surely lecture theaters only have a certain capacity. If more students enroll than can fit in the lecture theater, what is to be done?
Several solutions have been employed along the years. 1) You limit the enrollment for the entire faculty, so that no course in subsequent years can have more students than those enrolled from year 1. Selection is done with a test. 2) You run several courses (same subject) in parallel, and you divide the students among them alphabetically (this is typical for undergraduate courses in the first few years). 3) For really huge courses (say 500-800 students), that for some reason cannot be split (e.g lack of instructors), you rent cinemas (I saw it happen in the past in the humanities).
To clarify a bit the solutions above, it should be noted that in my country and probably several others, there is a strong opposition against limiting the access to courses in public universities, because of the cultural role that is recognized to this kind of universities. So, e.g., the solution 1) above is opposed by most people.
To my mind, the core idea of a "shopping" question is the idea that a person is asking the internet to do a semi-subjective comparative analysis for them. These have three core problems:
They are typically strongly individual and opinion-based (e.g., "Is Colorado State better than the University of Missouri?" Who knows, it all depends on how you measure!)
They often show little work before asking and should be solved with five minutes on Google. (e.g., "Can anybody tell me what are some engineering schools in the US?")
We want to stay neutral in such matters. If we don’t, we may become subject to all sorts of accusations, e.g., unprofessionalism and libel. Also, it could lead to unproductive “bashing” of institutions (e.g. “Everybody knows MIT has gone downhill since Marilee Jones left...”)
I don't think your question was a "shopping" question in this sense. It was, however, phrased in such a way as to solicit unproductive "list" answers, which would just say a bunch of schools and methods without saying why they were interesting. Your own wiki seed is a good example of why this is likely to be unproductive: it says things like "Wharton (Course Match, a bidding mechanism)."
Why is this bidding system interesting, relative to your original question? What can be learned from it, relative to actual alternatives?
For this reason, I have edited the question to focus instead on what I think is more likely to be the real question underlying: the main mechanisms clearly are not the only possibilities, so are there others that would be good alternatives for particular uses, and what is interesting about them?
What makes a listing of alternatives unproductive? Given that we don't currently know what alternatives are being used, isn't a first step to discussing what is interesting, what is good, what is bad, and more normative topics to first establish what is being used?
@Shane Let me give an example from another domain: Question: "What are some alternative ingredients to flour, sugar, and water that are used in cooking?" Answer: "avocados, parsnips, panch puran, gizzards." Yes, these are answers to the question, but there is little value in the list since it doesn't provide any insight. Anybody with enough information to answer this much probably also can say something much more enlightening, and it's good to formulate questions to encourage that.
I suppose I agree. But as much as "avocados, parsnips, panch puran, gizzards" (nice list, by the way!) might not be a great answer, a ten paragraph answer on gizzards would be similarly problematic as an answer. There needs to be a balance between going too broad and going too deep.
@Shane: Questions that can be answered with a list of items are generally considered poor fits for SE sites.
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3404 | "Attitudes of academics towards X?" On or off topic?
Is a "What are the attitudes of academics towards X?" question on or off -topic?
The question in question:
What are the social norms associated with stealing free coffee?
OP says:
Note: I'm not 100% sure that this belongs on Academia Stack Exchange, but this is not a question about the ethics of stealing coffee; I am interested specifically in the attitudes of academics towards stealing free food.
To me this question seemed off-topic and I flagged it as such, as per
The fundamental rule is you can't just stick "for programmers" on a question to make it programming related.
At the time, SO had a lot of questions that were, essentially, "What is as a good such-and-such for programmers?" (e.g. "What is your favourite food, as a programmer?", "What is the best movie for programmers?") After a long debate on the SO blog (since Meta didn't exist at the time) it was eventually decided that all questions like this are not programming related.
in What is the boat programming meme about?
but what do others think?
Your last line should have been: “What is the attitude of other Academia users towards this?”
Would asking the harmfulness of the action X to academia be on-topic?
I voted to close the coffee question because:
It is not specific to academia and in fact none of the answers found an academia-specific angle to answer that question. All the ethical considerations can be equally translated to other contexts.
Apart from the title, the question is essentially a poll, which are not a good fit for Stack Exchange in general:
So, how do you think people judge the stealing of free food, and how have you formed these perceptions?
I am interested specifically in the attitudes of academics towards stealing free food.
[…] I was wondering what others' experiences have been as regards stealing free food.
One could consider this as a request directed only at answerers who are very knowledgeable about the norms in question (professional conference organisers?) or asking for surveys of this issue (which probably don’t exist), but the way the question was written, it was inevitably taken and answered as a poll, leading to the plethora of largely redundant answers that we now have.
There is a clear ethical dilemma (stealing vs. wasting) without an apparent solution, on which people will inevitably have varying opinions, which makes the question attract opinion-based answers, unless carefully warded against those.
In general, I think that ethics questions can only work on this site (and SE in general) if they refrain from poll-like elements altogether and instead ask for an ethical analysis of an issue in an established framework (such as authorship ethics, codes of conduct, etc.) or under clear paradigms (such as fairness or neutrality). Any question containing a sentence along the lines of “What are the attitudes of academics towards X?” fails to do this and should be edited early or closed.
This kind of question is just "outside" of what I would consider to be "Academia," but I believe the ethical sentiment behind it has merit.
A slightly more on topic question would be an ethical question directly related to Academia: for instance, "what kind of content usage would Academics consider plagiarism, even though it technically doesn't violate copyright laws?"
Confucius did say in his "Analects" that "goodness was the chief of all virtues (followed by wisdom and courage), so questions about ethics that routinely (as opposed to incidentally) affect Academics are probably good things.
I agree - I think one significant difference is that academic ethics is a field of its own with authorities that can be quoted - e.g. ethics codes and policies - and even research e.g. http://link.springer.com/journal/10805 . So the questions "according to generally accepted academic ethics, would X be permissible?" (normative) or "in what proportion of academic institutions would X be in breach of the ethics code?" (descriptive) seem to me a whole lot better and more relevant to this site than "according to generally accepted academic tastes, which ice cream flavour is best?"
If X is part of academic life or relates very closely to academia (e.g. X = "The notion that the US federal government should should more/less of the budgestary burden of higher education"), then on topic. Otherwise generally off-topic.
But - if the poster can spin the question well enough, it could become on topic, e.g. X = "The claim that the Turkish coup attempt was a false flag operation" would be off topic, but if you add "in light of its use in a blanket travel ban for academics" then it becomes borderline on-topic. Maybe.
I don't understand the example given in the first paragraph. As for the second, I'd consider it definitely off topic, even with the additional specification.
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3349 | Why was the erection question summarily deleted?
The "Controlling an erection while teaching" question was summarily deleted by a moderator. I understand that this question is controversial and that a lot of people have a juvenile response to it, but I think it has value and would advocate for keeping it.
Summary deletion without even a comment, however, is a very strong action that should generally be reserved for trolls and spammers.
Was this positively identified as trolling? If not, I believe that summary deletion without debate is not appropriate, and the community should be allowed to determine this question's fate by the more usual process.
Edit 6/16: Unfortunately, it appears that those who assumed this question was the beginning of another trolling series appear to have been correct: https://academia.stackexchange.com/q/71417/22733
As I commented in chat, if the problem is real (which I really doubt) and not just trolling, the guy needs the advice of a therapist, not of strangers on the internet.
To give my honest impression of the situation: some users just want to get rid of the question as it makes them feel uncomfortable (for varied yet not clearly articulated reasons).
@quid - As former US Supreme Court Justice Potter Stewart once said, "I know it when I see it." Not everything needs to have a written policy, sometimes the acid test is just whether the post feels wrong.
@eykanal it is not quite clear to me what you mean. If you are sufficiently convinced that the post was made in bad faith, that's one thing and easily covered by standard policy. If you are not, then however I would consider the relatively rapid deletion as exaggerated. (For example, I'd assume editing out 'erection' from the title, could have gone some way to address some users problems.)
@quid - I'm trying to say that this post looked and smelled like trolling to a lot of people.
The "Controlling an erection while teaching" question was summarily deleted by a moderator.
To be more accurate, it
was closed by vote of five community members
went through the reopen queue where it attracted one "reopen" vote (yours) and three "leave closed" votes from other community members who hadn't originally voted to close
received several comments from users who explained why they thought it should be closed/remain closed
received three flags from other community members (not the ones who voted to close or to leave closed)
and then it was deleted by a moderator in response to those flags.
So, I don't think "summary deletion without debate" is a fair portrayal of what happened. "the community should be allowed to determine this question's fate by the more usual process" seems closer to what actually happened. The community voted to close the question, the community voted to leave it closed, the community posted comments and raised flags indicating that they do not want the question hanging around, and a moderator obliged.
But Jake Beal's answer was so good :( Also, his answer had like 15 net up-votes, which shows the community welcomed both the question and the answer. And of course, Jake loses reputation points that he earned. Why not keep the question and his answer, while moderating for troll-ish comments and answers? It's a pretty simple and quick deletion process on the moderators' end, so this would be a good compromise, @ff524 :)
@User001 Posts that end up on the "hot network questions" list get a large number of votes from casual visitors who aren't necessarily familiar with the norms of this community. They're not an indication of what the "regular" community members want or approve of. See e.g. this meta.SE post and this one.
As the mod who deleted the question, this is exactly what went through my mind. I think this was far from "summarily deleted without debate"; it had numerous downvotes, more "spam" flags than I've seen in a long time, and a many comments suggesting this was (obvious?) trolling. We do read your comments, folks :)
Thank you both for the responses; that clarifies quite well for me.
@eykanal if it was truly flagged as spam you should seize the opportunity to educate users what spam-flags are for rather than just recount it as a matter of fact. There was nothing advertised there, right? So it is not spam. (An offensive flag, maybe, but spam is just a misuse of the flag.)
@quid - I use the term "spam" in a catch-all sense. In this context, I mean "trolling", not "advertising". Trolls are well-known for not responding to education. That said, there was already a highly-upvoted comment on the question stating that the question smelled of spam. I didn't think another comment was necessary.
@eykanal I think it is not good practice to use the word spam in this sense in the SE network, as it contributes to the existing problem of misuse of spam flags, precisely to mark content perceived as falling in this broader category of "spam."
@quid you are technically correct. The SE network has spam and abusive flags which feed spam and troll detection algorithms. These flags are pretty nuanced and "improper" use is a SE wide issue. As mods, it is pretty obvious what people mean when they raise these flags.
@StrongBad I am not sure what the purpose of your "technically" is. Indeed, it is an SE wide issue, and I think a moderator should not contribute to this issue by using imprecise language.
@quid the technically is that the SE backend treats spam and offensive flags differently from the other flags and from each other (cf. this meta question. Practically speaking, mods tend to treat them pretty similarly (read the post and see what is wrong with it). I really don't care how we use the spam and offensive flags and if SE has a problem with how they are used they can fix the UI.
@quid At the time of the "farts" series, there was a bit of discussion, mostly in chat but also in comments in meta, on which should have been the most appropriate flag for a trollish post. It appeared, if I recall it correctly, that the flag that guarantees the quickest action against a troll is the spam flag. That's why I flagged this last post as spam. I didn't flag it as offensive because I don't think it is offensive, nor it makes me uncomfortable: as anyone who talked with me for more than five minutes knows, there's no word, topic, gesture or behaviour that can make me uncomfortable.
@MassimoOrtolano for what it's worth: the current recommendation is to flag obvious trolls as "rude or abusive" because that feeds the anti-troll filters, while spam flags feed the anti-spammer filters. (Both automatically delete the post after six flags are raised, and penalize the poster.) See this main site meta FAQ. (This is an instance where the names/descriptions of the flags aren't very helpful.)
@ff524 Thank you! I'll update my flag defaults :-)
@StrongBad what's wrong with the UI?
@quid there is disagreement about what the spam, offensive, and low quality flags mean, even among mods. The argument about which to use comes down to the fact that the backend does different things then what people expect. A troll post is not really offensive, nor spam, but is low quality. Yet low quality doesn't feed the troll detector or allow community deletion. To me this is a UI issue.
@MassimoOrtolano it is confusing, the ost important thing is to flag junk so that it can get deleted. Offensive and spam do that.
@StrongBad I do not think there is much disagreement about spam (maybe ignorance or obliviousness, as witnessed by comments above); the description and official instructions seem very clear, and, there is no good reason I could think of not to use "abusive and rude" (aka "offensive") instead, which has a pretty broad official scope too. (It certainly directly violates "Be nice." to try to troll, which is how that flag is explained.) Anyway, I find that entire discussion a bit odd. M.O. said they flagged spam, ff524 said they should better flag 'rude and abusive.' My point all along.
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3235 | Should down-votes be used to punish bad questioner behavior?
A recent question received a number of rapid down-votes, which I guess was likely due to annoyance of voters because it was the third in a sequence of effectively duplicate postings by the same author with different new accounts. The first two (less coherent versions) have since been deleted, but the down-votes remain on the third.
In comments, a question was raised: should down-votes be used to publish bad behavior by a questioner? I see an argument either way:
Argument for: down-votes mean "I think this is a bad question", and indeed, one reason to think something is a bad question is because the person just asked the question already.
Argument against: votes should be on the question, not its context. Bad questioner behavior should instead be addressed through flags.
While I think this is a good question, and thanks for asking it, as per meta voting traditions, I am not up voting because my answer is "no".
I just want to point out that this is not enforceable in any way. (For the benefit of those future readers who read it and say "I believe I was downvoted for my behavior not my post... DO SOMETHING MODS". There is really nothing we can actually do to prevent users from voting however they please, as long as it isn't fraudulent voting.)
@ff524 I think I will expand my answer to include that by "rule" I mean there is nothing mods can do.
I think it's a question of the degree of rudeness, say, you witness. I didn't vote here, but I remember downvoting a question that escalated, in the comments below it, to condescending personal attacks against a high-rep user. That said, I think some people trigger downvotes way too fast - the recent question on serving cookies during an oral exam comes to mind which fit, in my eyes, perfectly under 'etiquette.'
Regardless of previous behaviour, the question is bad and worthy of downvotes all by its very self. I'm astonished a lazy research-less extremely broad question got any upvotes at all.
There are limited rules regarding how users can use their votes. The only constraints I can think of are that the system prevents, or at least tries to prevent, systematic down voting of a user and sock puppet accounts. This means that if a user can down vote whatever they want for whatever reason they want and there is nothing the mods can do about it. Any "policy" we decide on in regards to down votes (and up votes) is completely unenforceable.
I do not think systematically down voting a user's questions to punish them is a good idea. First, they will likely get reversed by the system bot, although in this case with multiple accounts, they probably would not. Second, if a user eventually asks a good question even if it takes multiple tries, we want to encourage the good question.
There is also a big difference between a down vote with a flag and one without a flag and also between a down vote with and without a comment. If you are going to down vote, it is best to leave a comment to help the user, often a new user, understand what they have done wrong. In all cases of bad user behavior, you need to raise a flag alerting the mods. We have extra tools to deal with things like multiple accounts, rude users, and duplicate questions. If you do not flag us, we do not know.
As in every StackExchange site, the rules are pretty simple. You should downvote bad questions.
You could read this blog post by Jon Skeet referring to this issue (it's a bit more focused on programming, but the general rules apply everywhere).
If you downvote a question because the user who asked has done something reprehensible, this is not desirable in SE. The reason is, that a question is a question, no matter who asks. Also, "hating" on a user (even if someone promotes or attemps piracy or whatever), is not constructive. A terrible person, can ask a good question that is helpful to others. Judge the question, not the user.
Furthermore, downvoting should always be revised. Downvoting is not the same as in reddit or other websites. It's not simply a means to indicate poor quality, but a means to provide meaningful feedback, and lead to the improvement of a bad question (or its removal).
By downvoting a user, the aforementioned goal is not satisfied. A user that asks a bad question, may learn that it is not constructive and improve, he also has the right (and should) delete or edit bad questions into good ones. Such behaviour should be applauded, not reprimanded because of past "sins".
The aforementioned question is a good one, and even if previous questions indicate that this user is interested in copyright infrigment (I have no idea about this user, hypothetically speaking), it does not matter. This website is about people coming to read answers to their questions, already posted by others, not about a community and its members' relationships.
It's a bit of a grey area, though, when the same question gets asked three times. In a vacuum, the question might be a decent question, but the third instance of the question could easily be classified at "not useful," and thus a downvote doesn't seem unwarranted – not if the downvoter happened to see the same question get asked earlier.
The question is not a good one because it shows no evidence of research effort.
Coming from the programming SE sites, I totally agree with Gkinis that academia is a special case because people vote with what they like, rather than anything related to the quality of the question or answer. I wrote this answer the other day: http://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/64567
It was the only attempt at answering the question, and also would infact solve the OPs issue. However even I didn't agree with executing the idea for ethical reasons. Nevertheless, votes are cast differently here. The real question is - is that even a problem? Why cant academia do things its own way?
I understand that in the current system, votes on questions and answers are both a way for higher reputation and then more privileges, and a way to punish the poster for any other reason. Probably there should be a punishment (down-vote) mechanism (other than flags) independent of the question/answer votes (e.g., in the user profile page).
If the system wouldn't change, I suggest that question/answer votes should only blindly address the quality, as much as possible, not the context, of the question/answer. As a future content reader I wouldn't care about the context, nor about whether the user is/was rude. I would suggest that the moderators encourage users not to vote for anything other reason than the post quality.
Voting is anonymous, so how do you propose we encourage? I am also not sure why we need a "punishment" other than flags (not that I think of flags as punishment).
I actually don't care about punishment at all, but people anonymously do that. Isn't there something like a policy page new users can read? If you agree with my view on the purpose of votes, when you see anonymous down-votes that are most likely for punishment, you could leave a comment to encourage people not to conflate between reaction to the poster and reaction to the post itself.
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1798 | Just how broadly do we want to construe "shopping questions"?
A recent question is wondering whether there exists any good forum for getting peer feedback on academic job application material. It was closed as a "shopping question," which I really do not understand.
I think that shopping questions are essentially of the form:
There are a whole bunch of academic things of this sort; can you tell me which one fits my needs?
This seems very different to me, since it's asking whether a rather general sort of resource (an online peer feedback environment for academics) exists at all. I think this is a good question and should be reopened.
I had the same thought when I saw it closed. The problem with this type of question is that I think its quality depends on how many "answers" exist. If there are a large number of potential answers, then it seems like a typical shopping question. It seems like it is only a useful question if here are only a couple of potential answers.
In the case of the specific question, asking it as a how question, might make it a better fit. If someone knows a good on line forum, that would be a good answer. Other answers might focus on talking to your friends and advisors.
I've modified the question along the lines you suggest; let's see if it can get reopened now.
To answer the more general question, I think some of us do not realise or disagree that we only close questions shopping for certain types of answers:
"Shopping" questions, which seek recommendations or lists of individual universities, academic programs, publishers, journals, research topics or similar as an answer or seek an assessment or comparison of such, are off-topic here. (See this discussion for more information.)
Nothing in that list even closely resembles the online resources the question in question was asking for.
In order to have more clarity regarding this, I suggest to set up a separate Meta question asking which types of shopping questions we want to close, as determined by what answers a question asks for. Each answer to this Meta question would represent one type of answers and explains why the corresponding questions are not a good for this site. Votes determine whether we accept questions “shopping” for such answers.
This question may then double as a FAQ for users whose question gets closed as it helps them to understand where the problems with their question lie.
Most journals are online resources, these days so, actually, I think that online resources do resemble items on that list quite strongly. I much prefer the distinction that Strongbad makes in his answer: there is a difference between asking "Is there an online resource for X?" versus "Can you recommend an online resource for X?" The latter is shopping; the former is not.
If you wish, you can define journals as a specific type of online resource, but that does not change the fact that the resource the question in question was looking for is drastically different from a journal. — I also disagree with the latter statement. “Is there any X?” will usually evoke the same kinds of answers as “Can you recommend any X?”. More about this here.
I agree that nothing in the list is close to the specific kind of resource being asked for in the question that provoked the discussion. But your post claims that "Nothing in that list even closely resembles online resources" in general. That statement is, in my opinion, wrong.
Perhaps the policy should be that such questions are converted to community wikis by mods whenever they're encountered?
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1819 | Answers in comments
I have noticed a tendency on this site for people to post answers as comments. I don't know why this is, but it happens often, and then the comment gets many "up-votes" as an "answer."
My approach to this has been to ask people to convert their comment into an answer, then once this is done vote it up and flag the original comment for deletion. Here is a recent example (where I haven't flagged for deletion, in support of this question). I'm not happy with that solution, however, because it ends up throwing away the associated comment-votes.
I'd like to understand why people do this, whether others feel it is a problem as well, and if so, is there a better way to handle it?
Note that one can flag an answer as "not an answer", but not a comment as "not a comment". (sorry for the tongue-twister)
This reminded me of a question from the early days of the network dealing with the same topic: Why do some people answer in comments?
answers are indexed in google, but comments not.
At least for me, it is (for some reason) psychologically easier to just drop into a question a leave a short comment than to write an answer. If I write an actual answer, I usually try to put down at least ~15 minutes of writing time (I try to not write very short answers), and sometimes I just don't have the time. For comments, 5 seconds are enough.
However, I usually just leave a short comment-as-answer when I think that the answer is obvious enough that somebody else will write the same as an answer anyway. Hence, I usually don't think in these cases that I have some sort of magical special knowledge that isn't available to many other members of this community.
Why leave such a comment at all then?
Surely by leaving a comment that you think others will put as an answer you are discouraging others from posting said answer as an answer, and hence circumventing the quality assurance (upvote, downvote, accept, flag, etc) mechanisms that SE has in place?
The reason is that one-sentence answers are frowned upon as independent answers on Stack Exchange sites. Therefore people tend to view material that firs into a comment as too short to be a free-standing answer. I don't think there's an easy fix for this, as it's a cultural issue.
I agree with the disapproval of a one-sentence answer. Many times, however, either 1) it's a many-sentence answer pushing comment size limits, or 2) the person is able to very quickly turn it into a multi-sentence answer. Given this, why not just write the multi-sentence answer in the first place?
"I'm not happy with that solution, however, because it ends up throwing away the associated comment-votes"
Good! You should be happy, you are doing the question (and Academia) a favour!
Answers as comments are damaging to SE because they circumvent the quality assurance mechanisms put in place by SE.
The community can’t down vote a comment.
The community can’t edit a comment.
A comment doesn’t move up and down based on votes (i.e good ones to the top, bad ones to the bottom).
A comment can’t be marked as the accepted answer.
A comment doesn’t show a question as having an answer.
The moderation options for dealing with a comment aren't the same as the moderation options for dealing with a comment (including review queues and the like).
All those up-votes you see could just as feasibly be outnumbered by double, triple, octuple, even more! down-votes had the answer-as-a-comment been made as it should have been: as an answer.
The users of Academia do seem to do this a lot, even the high rep members, so it is nice of you to prod people into moving them into answers first. If you don’t mind coming back to the question again then by all means leave a ‘grace period’ between prodding and flagging but if you don’t want to then just flag with a custom moderator flag of ‘Answer in comments’ and the mods will normally clear out the comments and leave a reminder message of what comments are for. After having a handful of "good" answers-as-comments deleted users generally stop doing so.
You could even add a link to the page for the comment privledge into your proddding comment to help remind users what comments are for: https://academia.stackexchange.com/help/privileges/comment
Here are a couple of the key points from that page (some emphasis mine):
When should I comment?
You should submit a comment if you want to:
Request clarification from the author;
Leave constructive criticism that guides the author in improving the post;
Add relevant but minor or transient information to a post (e.g. a link to a related question, or an alert to the author that the question has been updated).
When shouldn't I comment?
Comments are not recommended for any of the following:
Answering a question or providing an alternate solution to an existing answer; instead, post an actual answer (or edit to expand an existing one);
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1981 | Moderator too fast on delete button for new user
On the "unethical restaurant research" question, a new user made a low-quality answer consisting entirely of:
No!!!!!! No!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! No!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
Obviously, this is a poor answer and needs to be either improved or changed into a comment, and it received notes (and presumably flags) to this effect. One of the moderators, however, acted instead by only rapidly deleting the answer.
I think that this is a problem because it is very discouraging for a new answerer, particularly one who might be a genuine expert and simply unfamiliar with our community (this response is basically my own first response---I've just been around long enough that I knew to put my first response as a comment on another answer instead).
Can this please be moved to a comment instead?
As the moderator who deleted the comment, StrongBad's answer was exactly my thought; there were a few comments left immediately after the answer was posted suggesting improvement, which received no response. Even more so, there are numerous prompts to new users indicating that this is not the type of answer we are looking for. When a user ignores all that and leaves an answer of that type anyways, and then ignores comments suggesting improvement, there's really not much we can do.
I would not convert something like this to a comment, because that type of comment would likely simply get "too chatty" flags or "not constructive" flags by itself.
Answers like that are typically from users who read a popular question, post their first thought without reading any FAQ, warnings, or even necessarily the entirety of the question itself, and then never return to the forum.1 I'm basing this on the global experience of the StackOverflow moderation team, who sees answers like this very frequently. If there was any evidence that the new user was interested in joining the forum, I would definitely act differently, but in this case I simply see someone leaving a reddit- or 4chan-style comment and moving on with their life.
1 Case in point: the user in question has yet returned to the site since posting that answer.
I agree completely with your second point. Comments have a specific purpose. Low quality answers don't automatically qualify to be comments, and shouldn't be converted to comments in most cases.
I initially commented on the answer mostly as a notice of why I was going to delete it - I fully intended to delete it, then got distracted by something else. (Comments left by a moderator on a post just before post deletion still appear in the user's inbox.)
I don't really understand the "too fast" thing.
Clearly the answer was not suitable in its current form - I don't think anybody disagrees with this - so it should be removed as quickly as possible. Leaving unsuitable answers up just encourages more unsuitable answers, especially on popular questions.
If a user chooses to come back and improve a deleted answer later, they can flag for a moderator to undelete. The edit will also bump the question to the top of the "active questions" list (even for deleted posts), so high-rep users who can see the answer can also flag for a moderator to undelete.
I also don't see why this post should have been a comment. I mainly use the "convert answer to comment" tool in the following scenario: User posts question with unregistered account, user registers account, user doesn't see any way to respond to answers to his/her question (since it's not owned by the registered account), user posts responses to other answer as an answer.
If I am following the timeline correctly, there were 6 flags raised against the question and a reviewer recommendation of not an answer before the question was deleted. One of the flags was autogenerated, but at least 6 community members asked for mod intervention. All the flags were handled by the same mod.
The mod did not delete the answer until there were two comments left to the poster, one by another mod and one by an active user. I think the comments could have been nicer and more welcoming, but I think the community was pretty clearly saying (1) we do not want this answer and (2) we do not want to be nice.
I think it is reasonable for a mod to delete a repeatly flagged low quality answer when there are two comments explaining the situation. I am not even sure if it is nicer to add a 3rd comment about why the answer is inappropriate.
As the moderator who deleted the comment, this was exactly my thought. Even more so, there are numerous prompts to new users indicating that this is not the type of answer we are looking for. When a user ignores all that and leaves an answer of that type anyways, and then ignores comments suggesting improvement, there's really not much we can do.
Note that the timeline you've linked to is only visible to moderators.
Also note that the second comment on that answer was auto-generated by the review.
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1490 | Flurry of question closing
Similar to this question from two years ago, I've noticed a rapid sequence of close votes over the past little while, many of which I have disagreed with since the questions have a number of up-votes and answers. My questions:
Is somebody doing a systematic purge?
If so, what is your system?
It seems to me that it would be courteous to announce it on meta or at least in chat. Would others agree?
Edited to add the reasons for my concern:
As I am not a moderator, the review software does not tell me who the traffic in the queue is coming from. Also, the review queue presents things one at a time and makes it difficult to go back once you have finished with a review, so it is difficult to consider a set of actions as a batch. I thus cannot readily tell the difference between a batch of curation work by an established user, trolling by a rep 15 user who has gotten annoyed about something, or a mixture of the two.
When there are a lot of items coming through for review, I run out of reviews that the software will allow me to make and cannot review any more items (this happened to me yesterday). Thus, if long-term curation work occurs at too high a rate, it can inhibit the ability of the community to deal with new questions.
I very much appreciate the work being put into curation: it's an extremely important function on this site, and one without a huge amount of reward. My request is simply that people give a heads up (either or meta or in chat, whichever seems most appropriate) when they are about to take a large number of closing or flagging actions, and that they limit such actions to ~10/day, so those of us reviewing can carry out our own portion of the tasks more effectively.
A user has raised a large number of close flags, which causes these posts to be pushed into the review queue. A couple of other users almost always vote to close in the review queue, so these posts often accrue one or two close votes even when most users of the site would disagree. I'm not at liberty to say more (i.e. name names)
Note that if even one reviewer agrees with the flag (which often happens whether it's warranted or not), the flag is marked helpful. So there's an incentive for users to keep raising these flags.
@ff524 So, not a high-rep user or moderator (who would normally be part of curation) but a fairly new user? OK, well, then I guess it's democracy at work and we just judge as appropriate... I would encourage my fellow high-rep users to judge generously though, since the judgement behind these closing nominations is a lot more erratic than I usually see here...
Newness is not always correlated with reputation. (users with really low rep and few previous flags would be limited to raising 10 flags per day)
@ff524 I understand that you may be constrained in what you feel that you can share, as a moderator. I have a guess, though, that there might be a problematic participant at work, who is well-established elsewhere in SE but much less so in this community.
Also, the user who raised the flags and triggered all this did not necessarily vote to close. The people who voted to close in response to the review tasks are the users who have sufficient rep, and anyone with sufficient rep (10k+) can see the vote history here.
Feel free to cast reopen votes for questions that you think are worth keeping.
@ff524 You have successfully anticipated my next question... thank you! :-)
I just reviewed all of the questions that have actually gone on hold so far and so far it looks like the system is working...
I don't know... I think some of the closed questions have good answers, and could be saved with some judicious editing. I "saved" a few of them that way, but I don't have time to do all of them. And I can't cast reopen votes like a normal user :(
Let us continue this discussion in chat.
@ff524: Why do questions have to be “saved”, if they have good answers? Closed questions continue to exist as they do not get auto-deleted, if they have good answers. The main difference between a closed question and an open question is that no new answers are allowed.
@Wrzlprmft I use the word "saved" because closed questions become eligible for deletion by high rep users (and they often are deleted, on this site)
@ff524: Then the deletion of these questions is a problem that should be addressed, not the closure.
@Wrzlprmft this meta question is about the impact on users of having a large number of close votes in a short period of time; the fate of the closed questions is only tangentially relevant. Please open a new meta post if you'd like to discuss deleting closed questions with answers.
A user1 has raised a large number of close flags2. Posts on which close flags have been raised are pushed into the review queue.
Some other users tend to vote to close fairly aggressively in the review queue, so these posts typically accrue at least one or two close votes.
Anyone with sufficient rep (10k+) can see the vote history here. Feel free to review the review history and edit/cast reopen votes for questions that are worth saving. (Either because the question itself is good, or because the question itself can be made "good enough" and the answers are good.)
Regarding your point:
It seems to me that it would be courteous to announce it on meta or at least in chat. Would others agree?
Yes, I agree that large and/or systematic curation efforts should be announced on meta first.
These efforts - no matter how well intended - can often have unforseen and undesirable effects on the rest of the community. It's a good idea to get feedback first and make sure your specific efforts are actually helpful and wanted by the community.
1I'm not at liberty to say more (i.e. name names), although the user who raised the flags is welcome to out him/herself here and explain what's behind it.
2 Possibly badge-hunting? Note that if even one reviewer agrees with the flag (which often happens whether it's warranted or not), the flag is marked helpful. Also, declined/unhelpful flags don't have any negative impact on site privileges or badge progress. So there's an incentive built into the platform for users to keep raising these flags, regardless of what the community does in response to them or whether they're actually helpful.
As an extension of above, a person that starts off fresh (i.e. new account, 10 flags), will, assuming 70% of his flags are accepted a day, and utilizing all of his daily flags, have a daily allotment of 53 flags after 28 days of site usage. This is obviously by StackExchange's design, but due mostly to the smaller volume of postings here compared to Stack Overflow, flags are processed significantly faster, hence the feedback and additional allotment add up faster.
In answer to your sub-questions above, I should mention that from about three month ago, I went on the process of reviewing the older posts on the website. My edits include the following activities:
Edit on the title of the questions; some of the questions posted in the past had no clear title to help the user recognize what the content of the question is. As an example, I edit the title of the questions from something like On doing something to How should I do something in somewhere situation? to help the newer users find questions easier.
I Edit the tags of the questions to improve the searchability of the questions. My edits to the tags is systematic: I choose one tag and once in every 12 hours, I only edit 5 or 6 questions to avoid having many questions bumped to the top list. (At this edit level, I also edit the questions titles and content only if they need some edits.)
In the recent days, I have started to review the content of the older posts. By saying the older posts, I have sorted the display of questions from new to old; and I am checking the older questions one by one. On this process I check the following things:
I check whether the questions is on-topic or not.
I edit the question if it really needs it. To avoid bumping questions to the top-list, I only edit the questions on my tag edits, not at this review process.
I control and raise flags for un-useful comments such as +1 or Thank you comments. Also, for the comments which are obsolete, for instance the ones which are now part of answer to the question.
I raise flags for answers which I think they are not helping the questions.
These are the reasons which I think our older posts need curing:
Older posts should be reviewed sometimes. It is good for the website to dynamically check newly posted questions as well as the questions and answers which are posted in the past.
The users can see the older posts too and if they have something new and helping to the question; when they see those old questions, they will post their new points of view to the questions. So the answers will be updated.
Problematic parts of the posts will be reviewed. Off-topic questions will go for another review process and people again, think about the questions.
Based on the introduction above, in the recent days I have reviewed about 100 questions or more; and I raised some flags on the un-useful answers and comments. However, it was just due to making this website's questions in better shape and quality, not for badge-hunting or making trouble for the site. Also, as far as I am an ordinary user on the website and I really do not know whether another user/s have also raised any flags or not.
As part of these efforts, you seem to sometimes raise the same (declined) comment flag multiple times, even when nothing has changed. Please don't do that.
Also, as you can see from Jake's question, it's considered good etiquette to announce major systematic cleanup efforts on meta first. Please open a new question explaining your efforts to allow user feedback.
@ff524 That has a reason. Once I reviewed the questions for their tags, and I have raised some flags. In the recent days when I went for content edit, I again saw such comments and raised flags for such comments I see. When I am on the questions, I can not see that whether I have previously raised a flag for comment or not (also, I can not really remember for which comments I have previously raised flags). So, it happens that I raise a flag for a declined comment again.
You can look at your own flag history to see if you've raised a flag before.
@ff524 It is not practical, how should the user check each comment one by one in the flags history?
I'm going to continue in [chat]
Thanks for coming forward and being open about this. Please do take on board the excellent feedback above.
@EnergyNumbers The feedback I got from the users of the site was that I am a bothering person and they do not want me on the site. Since then, I did not continue my edits on the posts, tags, etc. I am only reading newly posted questions and answers and reviewing some first posts or close votes. If users think that I should not do reviews too, I won't do it any more.
Note that comments are second-class content by design, and polishing them with flags is essentially wasting mods' time. Unless there's something really wrong with comments (spam, inappropriate or disruptive), I suggest to leave them alone. Several "thank you" comments in a row are disruptive, a single "thank you" comment rarely hurts anyone.
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1315 | Are very specific questions about formatting applications off topic?
This question asks about italicizing adjectives in a "research statement" submitted as part of an application to a PhD position.
While it's true that many users that frequent AcademiaSE might have an opinion to offer on this topic, or how to organize a CV, etc. I don't think there are any principles or ideas specific to academics.
This doesn't seem to be addressed in the on topic guidelines. I think that AcademiaSE users could certainly offer good advice, but it seems to me that statements on this subject would only be opinion-based.
Are these questions something that the community wants to see here?
Are these constructive subjective questions?
To be clear, I think that broader questions about content (e.g., this question) for applications, proposals, etc. can be very productive, but I'm not convinced that opinions on the level of whether to bold or italicize text have any special utility because of an academic context.
Many of our questions have "opinion based" answers in that we draw a conclusion (i.e., come up with an answer) based on available evidence. The best answers draw from a wide range of independent credible sources, but even answers that draw from personal experiences and provide a good explanation of those experiences can be really good answers.
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3573 | Proposal for a new [leniency] tag
There seems to be a common theme among some questions, where an instructor is unsure whether course policy should be strictly applied. I'd like to suggest the creation of a leniency tag. The tag summary would say:
Seeking advice about whether policy should be strictly applied, or whether exceptions should be made for special cases
Examples of questions where such a tag could apply:
How do I appropriately penalize late projects?
Currently tagged: grading
Exam exceptions for student with disabilities
Currently tagged: professors ethics disability
Is "no late work" a common policy?
Currently tagged: teaching grading
How to deal with students who lose their digital work?
Currently tagged: teaching homework
Is this a legitimate excuse for missing an exam?
Currently tagged: teaching
How many excuses are too many?
Currently tagged: policy
Dealing with late assignments as a teacher assistant
Currently tagged: teaching grading homework
In case of in-lecture quizzes, is it unreasonable to fail students who are late or absent?
Currently tagged: teaching undergraduate attendance
Students trying to negotiate away penalties for late submission of coursework
Currently tagged: students deadlines homework
Am I being a "mean" instructor, denying an extension on a take home exam
Currently tagged: ethics teaching students community-college
There would be significant overlap with teaching, but I think that the questions above all relate to a specific teaching concern, enough to warrant the creation of a tag.
Please see related question http://english.stackexchange.com/questions/361833/umbrella-term-for-penalty-and-bonus.
Why not use the policy tag for this class of question?
On the formulation and application of formal rules and regulations by a university, instructor, or publisher.
We can also make words like "leniency" "penalties" and "punishment" into tag synonyms.
At least to me, policy implies that you a predefine a standard on how to deal with a given situation. However, at least some of the questions in question are about exceptional cases that have to be dealt with without such a standard. This does not mean that I am against having all these questions under one umbrella, but policy does not seem to be the perfect name – though it may still be the best that exists.
Policy could refer to policies about encouraging and supporting diversity, sexual harassment, sexual conduct between a student and a teaching assistant, plagiarism, lab safety, leave of absence, etc., etc.
@aparente001 Yes, and all of those policies can be applied with some degree of leniency or strictness. Which is why it seems reasonable to me to keep it all under [tag:policy]. (Other tags on the question, like [tag:grading], [tag:sexual-misconduct], [tag:cheating], can help distinguish between policies in different domains.)
I think that a tag covering this general topic of questions is a good idea since finding other questions on this issue is very difficult due to the lack of a common keyword.
However, I would expand the scope slightly to also cover penalties, since a large portion of questions dealing with leniency are naturally about penalties already. Moreover, a leniency towards one student can be often interpreted as a penalty for the other students. So a question tagged leniency may be a duplicate of one that only considers penalties.
Unfortunately, I am not aware of a good umbrella term to cover both cases (but I am looking for one). Either way, whatever the outcome, leniency and penalties should be synonymised to the main tag.
Are there examples of questions about penalties where "leniency" fails to describe the topic?
@200_success: Depends on how exactly you define describe the topic: In some sense, any leniency is the absence of a penalty, and any penalty is the absence of leniency. But I do not think that the word leniency would be amongst the first to come to anybody’s mind when somebody would ask a question along the lines of: “A student did X during the exam, what is an appropriate penalty?”
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1714 | Before migrating, can we get a grace period to discuss where the posts should be going?
https://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/43976/question-on-galois-theory
This question was migrated to matheducators SE, when it should have been migrated to math SE.
https://matheducators.stackexchange.com/questions/7937/question-on-galois-theory
I feel like we should spend a bit more time making sure we migrate to the right place once; if we don't, then we just kick the can to the next Stack Exchange to have a bunch of users and a moderator on that SE close/migrate again.
aeismail can speak for himself, but I'm pretty sure this was just a mistake in the migration. Matheducators is clearly the wrong destination for this site. I don't think policy is needed to fix what was probably just aeismail's not being aware that the matheducators site even existed.
See below. It was indeed just an accident.
The migration to Mathematics Educators was an accident resulting from trying to do something on a different device than I normally use. I meant to put it into Mathematics (where it has now been sent), but "Mathematics Educators" was selected. I tried to delete "Educators," thinking the system would be smart enough to see the match with "Mathematics," but apparently it's not. You actually have to select it from a dropdown (which is a complete mess on the mobile interface).
I'm fine with it being an accident, but according to Nate Eldridge, it would be unsuitable for migration to mathematics as well, as it doesn't meet their guidelines, as it is homework help. If it's a bad question for the place we want to move it to, then moving it there isn't helping that Stack Exchange either. It's a primary reason why Stack Overflow no longer migrates anything to Code Review, because most of the stuff moved ended up not meeting CRSE requirements either.
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1357 | Reminding Users about Anonymity in their Questions
I know we've had a few questions in the past similar in concept, but this question indicates one of the potential issues with open naming.
Other Stack Exchanges like Stack Overflow, where legal issues and real ethical issues are not being presented, don't have this issue. We can use our real names there, and so on.
In this one, where there are both real and hypothetical situations with major implications, people have been using their real names, their websites, their real pictures, and everything they shouldn't be potentially posting in their questions.
Is there a practical way of reminding the user before the question is posted? I know it's relatively easy to trace a user history back for most people on the site, but when Google caches this question almost instantly, the anonymity factor is immediately gone.
I assume this warning can be provided when a tag is provided, such as ethics, legal issues, or any sort of misconduct. I know StackOverflow has such a feature for tag synonyms.
would you give an example for the warning tags in SO? I would go one further step and ask: is it possible to somehow change/isolate the OP identity completely (make the OP avatar unclickable or something) only for this question - after OP agreement- . People sometimes do not understand the consequences of such questions.
@seteropere I have attached the image. The function is still being developed (the finalized box will probably not be red as it is meant as advice, not admonishment). It's a newer feature that obviously hasn't seen much use, but would be helpful, especially for legal-issues and the other tags we have that likely need a "Just FYI..."
Related in the Mother Meta: Allow users to hide connections between accounts.
I'm not sure how this would be accomplished. Having a warning present every single time a user posts a question leads to the warning being ignored. Users see their name and image every time they log in, which reminds them that their actions are associated with their ID.
Any time a user wishes to submit anonymously they can simply create a throwaway account and post from that. If they forget to do so, or if a question becomes problematic only after comments/answers are posted, users can flag their question and request that it be dissociated from their account; Community Mods (i.e., Stack Exchange employees; not the Academia mods) have the capability of doing that. I would personally advocate that users used those approach rather than add extra text that users are likely to ignore anyways to the question page.
The warning would only appear for high-risk tags, such as legal-issues, academic-dishonesty, research-misconduct, and ethics. It would not appear for stuff like teaching or applications.
@Compass - That does make it better, but I still think it's up to the user to be anonymous when they want to. I guess it's a question of how much you want to protect the user from themselves, and I think this may be just a bit more than is needed.
“Having a warning present every single time a user posts a question leads to the warning being ignored.” This only effects people who have already posted multiple questions. I would expect that many of the sensitive posts are from one-off questioners, who haven’t posted many questions (if any) at academia.se before.
I think "High Risk Tag" would be extremely difficult to quantify without some serious legwork by moderators or the community.
"Any time a user wishes to submit anonymously they can simply create a throwaway account and post from that." Is this behavior generally accepted on SE?
From a personal experience, in some cases you would want to anonymize the post after exchanging some comments or making some edits or updates.. In other cases people are not even aware of the severity of not being anonymous.
Moreover, I don't think that users should be obliged to choose between either keeping and raising their scores, badges and points on one side, or being anonymous.
If adding a customized feature in Stackexchange Academia is possible, I would suggest a voting feature (similar to that of closing questions), such that a question is made anonymous after certain number of votes in addition to being either approved or initiated by the asker.
For example, X posts a question, Y and Z think it should be anonymous, so they vote for that and then X approves or rejects. Or X publishes a question and states his desire that it should be anonymous, then Y and Z would see the asker's desire, and could vote to anonymize it as well.
Setting up a separate voting system for this is pretty much overkill and so is allowing anonymous posts and gaining reputation and badges for them. What could be feasible, is a button for admins to completely detach a post from a user, but whether this is actually worth the effort is upon Stack Exchange to decide.
I would personally prefer that the user ultimately decides the fate of the post. If the user sees a warning and ignores it, then we should move on. The more recent threads we've had, the warning has only been made by a user after it's been posted.
In so much as the poster needs to have common sense to realize they may not want their name attached to something on the internet, I am not sure how much responsibility the site bears towards informing them. It is, in the end, up to the individual to assume as much risk as they want. Although comments to the poster, warning them, might be appropriate. For example, this question How to intentionally get denied entry to the US, without getting into trouble had implications that it was important that no one from the OP's family find out. The account was a throwaway but a lot of people (including me!) posted to warn the OP of being tracked on her computer. In this case it was advice from answerers, rather than a policy of the site.
Giving people the option to post anonymously could help those who do not want to be identified so that they do not have to create throwaway accounts. However, the privilege should be fairly strictly monitored. I am thinking that moderators would be able to see how many flags a person has, if not for what, and strip the user from being able to post anonymously in the future (this would NOT remove anonymity from anything currently posted but these could be deleted), and any further action taken (like putting the user on suspension) would happen as normal except the moderator would not know who it is.
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1344 | Financial Aid Tag?
This recent post is pretty short on tags, and the one it has really isn't that great for it, so I was hoping to add a financial-aid tag since I felt like it is relevant, at the very least, to academia, and several other questions on this site. I was surprised to find it didn't exist and have gone ahead and placed it into the edit queue.
These are the questions that show up for a search of financial aid.
Some of the questions only touch on the issue as, i.e., part of an enrollment decision, but others appear to rely heavily on approaches regarding the handling of financial aid.
A downside for the tag is that some people may see the tag and attempt to use it for "Please help me find scholarships I qualify for", but to be honest, those questions have been asked before without the tag in existence.
Is this tag relevant and helpful?
The funding tag includes financial aid. Its excerpt is:
This tag refers to questions related to source and utilization of academic funding from government or non-governmental sources.
Ah, makes sense. Would financial-aid qualify for a tag synonym then? It currently has grants, scholarships, and fellowships.
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1865 | Should we remove or modify content that distracts from the question?
There have been, especially in potentially controversial posts, several situations where the content of an asker's question has contained what can really only be described as a rant or a subjective statement that is not necessary for the question at best, and completely distracting at worst.
I went ahead and found an example of a question that involved a potentially disgruntled student that I edited after discussing with StrongBad. The revision history is as below, and we'll go over how the question reads chronologically from what it looked like initially to what it looks like now.
https://academia.stackexchange.com/posts/31320/revisions
The original question content contained this.
I have not personally been affected too much yet, but have had one module's continuous assessment removed with no suggestion of replacement. The union in question have poorly planned this boycott and there are currently no plans to remove it. We have had no communication about who is striking and what their alternative plans are if this continues and I am very concerned about this.
I want to express my disapproval with their methods as I disagree entirely with the boycott as I believe using students as pawns is never acceptable. For example they have been told "Examination of dissertations and theses at postgraduate level, as well as vivas, are included in the action." which is much too far. I don't want to damage the relationships I have with my lecturers as I plan on staying in academia, but seeing these actions is making me question my desire to stay in academia.
There's a question in there, but it's covered by something heavily opinionated that pulls away from the question.
One user went ahead and made this change:
I have not personally been affected too much yet, but have had one module's continuous assessment removed with no suggestion of replacement. I am very concerned about this, and I want to express my disapproval with their methods. I don't want to damage the relationships I have with my lecturers as I plan on staying in academia, but seeing these actions is making me question my desire to stay in academia.
So what is the most effective way to complain about this?
The excision sort of kills the question, though! The end result would probably yield a "Why bother?" from the rest of us, since now there seems to be no motivation.
So I went ahead and added back some content, but toned down the language.
I have not personally been affected too much yet, but have had one module's continuous assessment removed with no suggestion of replacement. There are no current plans regarding the future of the boycott by either the teachers or the administration, and it is unclear what the ultimate result and outcome will be at this time, which is very concerning for me.
I want to express my disapproval regarding the implementation of the strike as it puts students in a difficult and non-productive situation. For example, students have been told "Examination of dissertations and theses at postgraduate level, as well as vivas, are included in the action." I don't want to damage the relationships I have with my lecturers as I plan on staying in academia, but seeing these actions is making me question my desire to stay in academia.
This is the end result, replacing the subjective and negative words with more objective or neutral words.
What do you believe is the correct course of action? These are the ones I've discussed.
Leave it alone. Potentially close question.
Excise subjective content entirely.
Edit content to be objective.
???
This is tough to answer definitively, as questions like this tend to lie somewhere on the continuum between "enormous wall of text" to "concise relevant backstory". As bad as it is to say it, my recommendation is "use your judgment". If there's so much text as to make it (1) unlikely that anyone will actually read it and (2) impossible to follow the actual question, you can probably edit without worry. If the details add color but don't distract from the question, leave it there. For those in the middle, trim, and leave the details that make the question interesting. If it's really tough to tell, leave a comment and let the person who posted the question edit themselves.
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1808 | Why was this question closed for "shopping?"
I am still unsure why this question:
List of 2013 US National Merit Scholars
was closed.
Here's the close reason used.
"Shopping" questions, which seek recommendations or lists of individual universities, academic programs, publishers, journals, research topics or similar as an answer or seek an assessment or comparison of such, are off-topic here. (See this discussion for more information.)"
I'm sure the quote here:
Does anybody know of a list (preferably online) of how many 2013 National Merit Scholars attended each university?
didn't help things, but this appears to have been a reference request for actual data, potentially related to academia.
If anything, it could have been closed as outside the scope, but it still falls within that realm in terms of academic metrics and statistics.
So, how exactly was this defined as a "shopping" question as opposed to a reference request?
I find the line of argument in EnergyNumbers' answer (and the accompanying comments by EnergyNumbers, David Richerby, and scaaahu) disappointingly pedantic.
We don't see the same objections when questions or answers refer to NSF grants, even though "National Science Foundation" is just as unclear as "National Merit Scholarship". This is the title of an organization, hence the capital letters; you might find it self-centered of the NSF to not name themselves "United States of America National Science Foundation", but they didn't.
Since there is (as David Richerby points out) no other prize with the title "National Merit Scholar", it is hard to imagine any future internet user being confused by the question or its answer. I would vote to reopen if I could.
I agree. But good news: the question has been reopened.
"Since there is (as David Richerby points out) no other prize with the title" Actually, I'm pretty sure I didn't point that out. If I did, the comment where I did that has been deleted; that seems unlikely, since the comments that remain all say that I've no clue what this organization is.
You're right. It should not have been closed as a shopping question. It should have been closed for being unclear.
No country is specified. It's still unclear, and should remain closed while it is.
By the way, the question has clutter, with a sign-off and signature. When you edit a post (in this case, you retagged it), please remove that clutter at the same time as you make other edits.
I don't think we can still call it unclear when it's got an accepted answer saying "this is just what I was looking for".
@jakebeal a good answer doesn't stop a question being unclear. It might make the asker happy, but it still leaves the question as a poor item of record for the future
@gragas There is no general concept of National Merit Scholars that I'm aware of.
@jakebeal The comment on the accepted answer just means that somebody managed to figure out what was being asked. But questions and answers here are supposed to be useful for more than just the asker. If a question is only clear to a few people, it can only be useful to a few people.
@EnergyNumbers I marked with US and removed the thank you; hopefully that deals with the unclarity concerns.
@gragas There are over 200 nations. Which one are you talking about?
@gragas You did not get David Richerby's comment. U.S.A. Is not the only nation in the world.
@DavidRicherby: I can't understand why you didn't simply edit in the missing 'US' into the title (as jakebeal did), and as for using that as an excuse to close the question, that's absurd. Yes the OP should have written it in the first place, but omitting it is not a close reason. And it's silly to pretend you don't know which of 200 countries is being referenced when the top five Google hits include "The National Merit Scholarship Program is a United States academic scholarship competition..." This sort of behavior is damaging.
@smci Because I didn't know which country was being talked about!
@DavidRicherby: actually you could trivially have found out, in like 5 seconds with Google. And edited in. I equally dislike Q&A which embed country-specific assumptions, but I don't cite those as reason to close. I just quietly fix them and get on with making the SE sites a better place. As to "No country is specified. It's still unclear, and should remain closed while it is.", that's been untrue for three years now since "US" was edited into the title. And spending time arguing "...should remain closed while it is" seems an unhelpful way of saying "Someone please edit US, then reopen"
@smci The name is completely generic and there could be any number of countries with an identically names scheme. The fact that the top Google hits are for an organization in the US is unsurprising and doesn't necessarily mean that this is the right answer. So, basically, you're criticizing me because I didn't make an edit that I wasn't sure was correct. I'm sorry, but that's unreasonable. And I really don't understand why you're making such a big deal of this two-and-a-half years after the fact, when the issue was completely resolved at the time.
@smci By the way, I think the claim in the last paragraph of Tom's answer that I'd asserted somewhere that there is only one "National Merit Scholarship" scheme in the world is incorrect. I don't think I ever said that (it's not in the comments here and it contradicts everything I have said in them). If I had known that, I would absolutely have made the simple edit.
@DavidRicherby: you're misrepresenting me. The top-5 Google hits definitively tell you it's a US-only thing. Specifically the Wikipedia entry says so. In all of 5 seconds. Continuing to claim otherwise is absurd. When you're in a hole, stop digging. Your answer above is still misleading, two-and-a-half years later. I'm criticizing spending more time generating drama and advocating for a pointless vote-to-close, than simply resolving the missing country name, by making a simple 10-second edit. Yes, the OP should have used a clear title.
@smci Dude, the question was reopened in July 2015. And, in any case, it was closed as off-topic, not unclear. I'm not interested in relitigating this completely resolved issue.
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1944 | I am unsure if this question is not being answered due to a specific date
I posted the question How to ask for a change in administrative graduate pay politely?
I am unsure if this question is not being answered due to a specific date. Should I remove the part that mentions my meeting occurring on a specific date, or is there something else wrong about the post? Thanks.
I can't say why other people are not answering this question, but I can say why I wouldn't attempt to answer this question. It's for two closely related problems:
Too much confusing detail: There are a lot of details highly specific to your university's policies, which are difficult to understand and keep track of. If we actually need to know all of those details to answer your question, then it's probably too specific (see "Can I ask about my specific situation?" in the help center.) If we don't need to know all these specific details, then they are confusing and somewhat offputting to potential answerers. (And there are some details we definitely don't need to know, like the details of the specific preliminary exams.)
Lack of general, easy to comprehend description of your scenario: The general question you ask is "How do I ask for a change in administrative graduate pay raise politely to my graduate department advisor with optimal chances of success?" In order to understand what you mean by "administrative graduate pay raise," I have to wade through all the details I mentioned above, because there's no tl;dr description of what you mean.
It might be better if you replaced all the detail with something like this (I don't know if I'm representing your situation accurately, because I find the details somewhat confusing, but this is my best shot):
tl;dr Because I followed a "non-standard" accelerated path through preliminary exams, I am not eligible for any of my department's standard summer funding options. How can I politely ask for a pay raise to help me cover the summer?
Specifically, in my department, graduate students who have not completed preliminary exams are eligible for "prelim funding" in the summer. I am no longer eligible for this funding, because I passed my preliminary exams early. Students who have passed oral exams and completed a certain number of credits are eligible for extra pay in the spring semester to help cover the summer, but even if I pass my oral exams I won't have enough credits in time to qualify for this funding (again, because I am "ahead" of the standard path at my institution). My research advisor has informed me that there is no research funding available this summer, and he has no further advice for me.
The graduate school has informed me that my department has the right to change pay level policy under certain conditions. I have scheduled to meet with my graduate department advisor on Monday. How do I ask for a change in administrative graduate pay raise politely to my graduate department advisor with optimal chances of success?
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1598 | Academia as an Agony Aunt
Consider Should I quit my PhD - workload, self-esteem and social life. It is hard to see how this is other than a request for personal advice. Other sites in the network try hard to channel questions away from personal specificity towards more general interest. Is that the intent here? If not, why not?
The title of this meta question is unnecessarily controntational towards serious people who face some difficulties. Also, the cited question is highly appreciated by the Academia community, and it has equally appreciated helpful answers. So it should have been left alone by people who are not involved/interested in that specific discussion ...
The question you mention was originally closed, by community vote. Then it was reopened, again by vote. Now it is closed again.
There is an existing meta discussion about this particular question here.
The current most up voted answer there (by a margin of 6) makes the following point:
It attracted, and will continue to attract, all the worst of 'personal advice' that one gets in such a situation, ranging from pet-social theories to pseudo-psychology and plain old judgment.
I voted to close the question. While I agree with aeismail that questions and answers on Academia are often more personal in nature, I do not think that applies to the post in question.
The post in question is not about a personal academic problem that is best solved by other academics. It's about a life problem, best solved by people who know the OP or a qualified professional who has met the OP. (The OP mentioned in a comment that she met with a professional and received a diagnosis.)
There are other questions here about "malaise and a dissatisfaction for one's current status as a graduate student" that are truly about common experiences in academic life (such as How should I deal with discouragement as a graduate student?) and those are perfectly acceptable here.
I'm one of those people who sees you through the lense of the horrible hot question amplifier. The fact that your community upvotes items like this gives a certain impression, and also probably attracts more of the same. Over on Workplace, they worked really hard to shift the dynamic.
@bmargulies The fact that your community upvotes items like this - I thought the whole idea of the "horrible hot question amplifier" was that hot questions get votes from outside the regular community that are not necessarily representative of the way the regular community would vote?
You are completely right, and I am completely wrong. Shame on me for assuming that all those votes were, as it were, intrinsic.
@bmarguiles: I might be mis-reading the tone of your comments/question/title (hard to say when only hearing it in writing), but what strikes me as their antagonistic and sarcastic tone is exactly representative for why some (as in, me for sure) stopped frequenting exactly the sites that are particularly active in promoting a rather controversial (at least over at math), elitist philosophy of 'being of general use.' I've come to find both sites unbearably unpleasant, not a shining example. As someone with no other contribution to ASE than this one meta question, why exactly do you care?
Academia.SE is inherently going to be more subjective and personal than other boards on the Stack Exchange network, simply by virtue of the subject matter we tackle here. Consequently, we allow a somewhat wider latitude in what is considered "personal." The basic guideline we have to ask is if the question can be of use to other readers. For instance, the question you've cited is a request for personal advice, but the problems described (malaise and a dissatisfaction for one's current status as a graduate student) is not specific to the original poster.
At the same time, there are four votes to close cast for the question, so not everybody agrees with this view. And that's fine—it's the way the community is supposed to work.
It seems to me that the majority of (newer) SE sites are 'subjective and personal', with the exception of the math and coding related ones. Consider 'Expatriates' and the like.
+1 to @CapeCode's comment. It seems to me like one could take the entire first paragraph of this answer, change "Academia.SE" to "Workplace.SE" and "graduate student" to "employee" and post at Workplace. It would be downvoted there at once. Which reflects not that the content is objectively right here and wrong over there, but that the two communities have evolved very different points of view on this.
These are acceptable to a point. If this one is driving a lot of negative reaction, then it might be better off closed or protected. There's bound to be disagreement over how to handle this. The avenue for this would likely be better suited with an actual counselor, either medical or educational, rather than a bunch of people on Academia that may or may not actually be qualified to provide responses.
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1998 | What explains the occasional bursts of anti-Americanism one finds on this site?
I'm struck by the willingness of some contributors to this site to express, either consciously or unconsciously, views about the U.S. higher educational system that are little more than thinly vailed anti-American rants. For a specific example, see some of the comments left under the recent posting, Why are most of the top universities American?
What might explain these attitudes among otherwise well-educated folk? Is it just basic envy of the U.S. educational system? Sour grapes because they applied but didn't get admitted to a graduate program at a U.S.-based university, possibly years and years ago? A general inability to have non-polemical conversations? Plain old ignorance? Or is it actually considered to be good form to rail against anything and everything in and from the U.S.?
Alas, when it comes to compare different countries some people, even well-educated, simply cannot restrain from expressing anti- views. Sometimes it's US, sometimes it's France, Italy, Germany, UK etc. And it happens even when the critics have never been to that country or tried beforehand that system, whether educational, legal etc.
One data point: from all I've heard, read and seen about/from the US system, my conclusion is that it's heavily overrated. So it's not a per-se anti-American sentiment, as you seem to reflexively assume, but a data-driven conclusion. (That does not mean I'm right as I may be missing facts, but it means that your question may be ill-posed. In fact, I think it's a rant itself.)
You seem to think that the basic assumption in order to leave a comment like that is "American universities are no good", rather than "American universities are great, but there are not enough of them at a high enough level that it would make sense that they make up 50% of a top 100 list". So your immediate assumption that they should in fact do so (despite the "raw" numbers speaking against it" seems to be just as "anti-European" or "anti-Asian" (or put it whatever continent/whatever) as the original comment is "anti-American".
@TobiasKildetoft - Is your comment directed at my posting or at one of the follow-up comments others have left? If it's the former, I must confess I'm not "getting" what you're trying to express. Please clarify.
I am simply getting at the fact that one does not need to be anti-American to look for answers to the linked question outside of what American universities do well, seeing as one can easily feel that American universities are among the best in the world without feeling that they "deserve" to represent 50% of the top 100 universities (note that if American universities were just "on par" with all others, they would have only a few in the top 100, based on pure numbers, so there is a big leap from that to 50%).
I think you might as well ask: "What causes occasional outbursts of pro-Americanism on this site?" A number of the answers on that question also indulge in poorly justified American exceptionalism (e.g., invoking "American spirit") or rank speculation. Basically, it's an inherently highly polarizing question and humans tend to have fairly parochial views on such things. I don't think it has anything to do with anti-Americanism per se.
Mix that with online disinhibition effect, and personally I'm quite happy at the degree of civility that's being maintained.
Wasn't the reference I added for the "American spirit" enough? (and it really does not necessarily qualify as a positive point, at least for a French ear, I actually was thought I got downvoted for accusing the average US Joe of blind optimism. But now I am reassured.) I was trying to stay neutral on it, just underlying cultural differences, which was easy as I personally don't have any opinion on it.
@FranckDernoncourt Not for me: if you'd said "cultural differences," I'd be more inclined to credit it, but in my experience the words "American spirit" are almost always an invocation of American exceptionalism, and thus inherently suspicious unless thoroughly explained to the contrary.
Thanks for the link, sounds good, I changed "the American spirit tends to [...]" to "the American culture tends to [...]".
I'm struck by the willingness of some contributors to this site to
express, either consciously or unconsciously, views about the U.S.
higher educational system that are little more than thinly vailed anti-American rants.
In general, I think that the regular users of Academia.SE are quite respectful of each other. The problem is that we work in several different educational systems that might value different qualities in their students or in their research, or they might be different in the paths chosen to reach their objectives. Sometimes, we simply don't understand or accept these differences, and sometimes we fall into the trap of trying to convince others that our system is better than theirs.
Let me make a totally unrelated example. It's 1998, and I am a PhD student at his second trip to the US. A colleague of mine and I land in New York. Since we are both hungry, we decide to head for the nearest place to the hotel where we can get food: it's a McDonald. We look at the menus, and we find that something is missing. So from the middle of the queue, I ask loudly to one of the clerks: "Hey, do you have beer?". The room falls dead silent and everyone stare at us in disgust. The answer of the clerk is a sharp no, as though he can't even imagine how we dared asking such a thing (in many European countries you can buy beer in McDonalds). A few days later, we received the same look when in a supermarket we had asked where they kept the beers (then, we got the hint ;-) ).
So, it is clear that Europeans and North-Americans do not understand each other when it comes to buying alcohol: for most of Europeans it's quite normal to drink beer while eating a hamburger, or to buy beer, wine, whisky etc. in a supermarket, but for many North-Americans this sounds shocking.
In the same way, I think that there are things that we don't understand of our respective educational systems, and, sometimes, we find it difficult to accept.
"Let me make a totally unrelated example..." Perhaps they were disgusted that you hadn't seen Pulp Fiction, which by 1998 was one of the most foremost films in American culture. (Your larger point about culture strongly informing expectations is completely valid.)
@PeteL.Clark: Ha ha! At the time, I had seen Pulp Fiction, but I completely forgot this scene: shame on me! :-)
It's unclear how this anecdote relates to the question, or what exactly it's supposed to illustrate.
@CapeCode It is supposed to illustrate, in a different, lighter, context that what might seem an anti-something is frequently just difficulty in understanding and accept different educational and research systems.
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3530 | Double degree: why was this question closed as duplicate?
I think that the closure of the question
Double PhD: is it really worth it?
as duplicate of
Is doing two PhD's a good path?
is based on a wrong assumption.
A double PhD degree is a single PhD jointly awarded by two universities on a single topic, and has nothing to do with two degrees on two different topics.
Thus, I disagree with the close reason and I voted to reopen it.
This maybe a case of differences across academia resulting in an unclear question. I have never heard of two universities awarding a single degree and would not term such an activity as a "double PhD". I did my PhD in a strange department in the US that was split across two universities (so very similar to what you are describing). At the point of defending our theses we had to choose which university our degree would be from and we had to format our theses according to the policies of that University. There was no option, nor any discussion amongst faculty or students, to get a jointly awarded degree.
If this jointly awarded double PhD is in fact different from getting two PhDs, I think a clearer description would be very helpful for US and UK academics.
I thought that what a double degree is could have been inferred from my answer to the linked question, and from the other answers too. If it's not clear enough, tomorrow I can expand somewhat the description.
Out of curiosity: are you aware of the existence, especially within the EU, of double degrees in this sense at the Master's level?
@MassimoOrtolano nope. I never heard of anything like this in the US or UK. I need to look it up.
It's quite common in Europe. We have agreements with several universities, perhaps also with one in UK. That's why some students wish to have this possibility also at the PhD level.
@MassimoOrtolano this is a clear misunderstanding. I reopened the question, but if you get a chance please edit something into the question to clarify it.
Thanks. I'll surely do it tomorrow... now time to sleep ;-)
I've edited my answer. Let me know if now there is enough context.
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2159 | Do we have any data (or general idea) on how much Academia.SE is known in the academic world?
When I read questions like this one I wonder if we are aware of the fact that Academia.SE, and the whole Stack Overflow network, might be totally unknown to a large fraction of the academic world, especially outside fields like computer science or mathematics. And even if they knew, they might be totally unimpressed.
For instance, my nearest colleagues know about it just because they happened to look at my computer's screen seeing Academia.SE opened in the browser. And then the conversation typically goes like this (yeah, real kindergarten conversation from 50 years old people!):
Colleague: Academia? What's that, another one of your nerdy sites
like [...]?
Me: This one's international!
Colleague: Ha! Academia?
Me: It's about the academic world: teaching, papers, PhD students etc.
Colleague: So, not only do you pester us and your students, but also them?
Me: Yes, you know that the main goal of my life is to annoy as many people as possible.
Colleague: I know, I know. But do they listen to you?
Me: It appears that I'm a top user... I'll probably even get a t-shirt!
Colleague: Gee.
Me: I'll wear it.
Colleague: ...
Me: I'll ask you to take a picture in the lab.
Colleague: Can't wait!
Hence, the titular question: do we have any data, even very rough, or general idea, on how much Academia.SE is known in the academic world? What is your impression?
Wait till the swag is shipped, then we can run experiments on conferences and similar.
@Wrzlprmft Actually, I think the swag will help get the word out quite a bit. I'm sure I'll wear my t-shirt around campus and to various conferences.
@Wrzlprmft Oh, the swag is on! Mine just arrived!
Is there any way to get IP-based analytics for a SE website, as a non-mod?
Taxpayers and whoever else pays for our salaries surely hope it stays as confidential as possible.
@CapeCode I don't get it: why? My participation to Academia.SE doesn't have any significant impact on my working time; besides, having a wider view on the academic world surely allows me to do a better job. And I think that this is true for many other people here.
Anecdotally, several weeks ago for the first time ever a colleague asked me do you post on Academia Stack Exchange?.
I've met people at conferences who knew me first through my Stack Exchange posts.
@JeffE Your case might not be surprising because CS and mathematics are probably the most represented fields here, while all other fields are probably fairly underrepresented.
My impression is that Academia.SE is virtually unknown, but that this is not a problem for three reasons.
The goal isn't to be famous, it's to help people by building good curated answers, and a lot of people do get helped by our answers, judging by the views and votes. If you google for random academia-related questions, Academia.SE actually shows up fairly often amongst the professional advice-givers.
This community isn't all that old yet, and it is still growing.
The larger StackOverflow community is fairly widely known, and I find it easy to explain Academia.SE by saying it's a topic site as part of that network.
A note: I didn't want to suggest that Academia.SE being virtually unknown is a problem, but (if it's true, indeed) it should be taken into account in answering certain type of questions. In addition, SO is surely widely known, but I suspect only to developers, computers scientists etc. For many other fields, it might be virtually unknown too.
This is my impression too. Indeed, I was talking to one of my (rather tech savvy) colleagues at lunch yesterday. He has seen MathOverflow (which I think is pretty well known in math by now) and MathStackExchange, though doesn't have accounts. When I mentioned Academia, he said "What?"
@MassimoOrtolano StackOverflow is somewhat more widely known than that because many other fields also deal with data these days in ways that cause people to be googling for help and stumbling onto SO. They may not particularly notice or stay around much, however.
@jakebeal Five years on, has your impression changed?
@E.P. Not massively. This is clearly a significant resource with a large community of users, but it's not a "first stop" for the global community like StackOverflow.
Last semester, one of my MS students (an international student from India) asked me a question, and I wanted to point him to an answer I had written on Academia.SE that I thought addressed his question. (And I thought that the other answers to that question would also be helpful to him.) I started to explain to him about the Stack Exchange network and Academia.SE, and he told me he had heard of it, and had used it extensively in navigating the graduate school admissions process.
I don't have any data, but having met someone in real life who used Academia.SE before meeting me made me think we're not as unknown as I had previously thought.
At the moment none of the students I've talked to seem to know Academia.SE, and, when pointed to, they looked uninterested (which is a pity, especially for those who are seeking to go abroad). However, a few days ago an international student asked me if I could write a strong recommendation letter: I've wondered if he could have got that adjective from here, because it's the first time I hear that expression from a student in my university (typically, they simply ask for a rec letter, without any adjective).
@MassimoOrtolano there exist many other websites about graduate admissions.
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2218 | Can visibility and responsiveness of tag warnings be improved?
As per this feature request we now have a warning for the graduate-admissions tag.
I'm happy for the warning, and I thank all those who have contributed, but I'm concerned by its low visibility. Most people, I suspect, add tags after having written the question. I tried, and I got this:
The tag is in the lower right corner and not fully readable. In addition, the tag warning appeared much later than the tag, which means I'd have had all the time to click on the "Post Your Question" button, without ever getting the warning.
Could the warning be placed in a more central position?
Could the delay between the tag placement and the appearance of the warning be reduced?
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3300 | What kind of undergraduate questions are not really generalizable to graduate education? (An "Academia varies more than you think" perspective)
A remarkable point of this community is that it makes people realize that academia varies more than you think it does.
One of these variations is the structure of the different education levels. While the PhD level has a somehow clearly distinguishable character everywhere, the structural difference between the Bachelor's level, which counts as undergraduate education, and the Master's level, which counts as graduate education, might be more fuzzy.
In many European countries, before the Bologna process, there was not really such a thing as an undergraduate education: you would have studied for 4-5 years straight and got a Master's, without getting any Bachelor's.
After the Bologna process, many things have changed, but in several cases the way in which education is organized at the Bachelor's and Master's levels is exactly the same. Master's courses are just more advanced, and you don't get an advisor until the very end, when, once exams are almost completed, you start working on your Master's thesis.
Thus, from my point of view, most of the undergraduate questions are automatically generalizable to graduate education at the Master's level. If a student asks about something that happens in a course, there's no difference whether this course is at the Bachelor's or at the Master's level.
What kind of undergraduate questions are not really generalizable to graduate education then? How can we draw a universal line?
We may want to treat this as a big list with each answer having a single type of question so people can vote.
@StrongBad Yes, that is a possibility, but I fear it might be a bit limitative at the beginning of the discussion.
I am sad to say that so far our "line" seemed to be "does the question claim that this is about a graduate course?".
Why is this question on meta?
@silvascientist Because it's about the on-topicness of undergraduate questions on Academia.SE. Thus, it's a meta question.
Possible duplicate of Why does AC.SE exclude undergraduate students?
I've voted to close this as "possible duplicate" because I believe my answer to the linked question applies in general: this isn't so much about classes as about excluding the vast amount of non-academic aspects of going away to college and college life, which don't have much to do with academia and a lot with the transition from childhood to adulthood.
@jakebeal I somehow agree with the answer to your other question (though, again because academia -- and the world -- varies, in many countries undergrad life does not comprise sports, underage drinking, and living in dorms). However, as xLeitix rightly points out, the discriminant for closure thus far seemed to be mostly that of whether the questioner declares being a graduate or undergraduate student.
Going by this answer, questions specific to undergraduate life (“sports, underage drinking, living in dorms, being able to make your own choices for the first time, etc.”) should be off-topic.
Admittedly there isn’t such a thing as a specific undergraduate life in many countries (including mine), but that’s not really a problem, as this also means that there are no questions to ask about it – not that we get many questions about undergraduate life at all.
I think questions on undergraduate admission exams (e.g., SAT and ACT) and application process (e.g., US common application and UK UCAS) are not generalizable.
In case of a list, it is probably better to have upvote=generalizable and downvote=non-generalizable.
I agree with Massimo Ortolano about the similarity between Masters and undergrad courses, but I disagree with what's off-topic. I think a more important question isn't so much the difference between undergraduate and graduate, but what constitutes academia.
This site is for academics of all levels—from aspiring graduate and professional students to senior researchers—as well as anyone in or interested in research-related or research-adjacent fields. (What topics can I ask about)
It looks like academia is primarily defined by research, not taking classes. I personally think any course-related questions that don't have to do with research or admissions to a research position are off-topic.
So questions about teaching and grading are off topic?
If this were the case, we would probably have to consider as off-topic more than 50% of the (already asked) questions.
It may not be practical, but I tend to agree with this - I think coursework questions are very rarely particularly interesting, and it's even more rare that they pertain very clearly to the scope of this Stack Exchange. However, given that we have a long history of considering course work questions in scope as long as the "sound" like they are about graduate courses, it is probably too late to back out now.
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1992 | What to do with quite substantial edits in the review queue?
It happens sometimes that someone, frequently a new user, proposes a quite substantial addition to an answer. This addition can be a longer explanation of a term used by the answerer, a longer description of a software, etc. At the moment of writing, there is a proposed edit for this answer, with a longer explanation of the word sic.
Though in principle correct, I find these additions a bit too invasive with respect to the original post, especially in the case of a highly-voted one, and I'm frequently undecided on what to do (I sometimes skip the review).
Hence, the question: what to do with this kind of edits? Do we have a general, even implicit, policy on this?
On a side note, this widely popular answer is wrong, in my opinion. But the edit is not making it better.
I generally allow those edits to go through, as long as they are simply expanding on the original idea of the answer. The case you posted is a fine example; the original poster suggested something, but the edit provided a more thorough definition and a few examples of usage. To me, that's a fantastic edit, which expands on the original answer and adds significant value.
However, if the edit either (a) changes the answer in any way or (b) adds unrelated information, I typically reject using one of the canned reasons.
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2214 | What should a reviewer do if an edit changes the possible close reason of a question?
This question has been recently edited by the owner and has now one reopen vote. I think that the question has now essentially become a duplicate of this other one.
When reviewing the question, I left a comment pointing to the possible duplicate and suggested to leave it closed.
Probably such cases are rare, but I was wondering anyway what is the proper way to handle them.
Should one flag for moderator attention?
Should one vote to reopen and then, if reopened, vote to close as possible duplicate?
Should one post a comment and vote to leave it closed anyway?
Of course, I'd prefer a solution that allows the community to decide whether the question is duplicate or worth reopening.
Furthermore, third-party edits to posts which are closed/being closed and which either don't address the reason for closure or change from, e.g., "Unclear what you're asking" to "Too broad" should be rejected as "no improvement whatsoever." Accepting them just wastes people's time with the reopen vote.
Or maybe: 4. User should obtain golden tag badge for some of the tags in the question and then use dupehammer to immediately reopen and close as a duplicate. (More seriously, this is an option too, if the user who noticed the duplicate already has the necessary gold tag badge.)
I think yours is the most reasonable approach.
Should one flag for moderator attention? - There doesn't seem to be any specific moderator actions that needs to be taken here.
Should one vote to reopen and then, if reopened, vote to close as possible duplicate? - This requires more follow-up, for the dubious benefit of having another duplicate hanging around. Unless it's a very good duplicate (i.e. exceptionally well written and likely to come up in searches that could lead to the duplicate with answers) it doesn't seem worthwhile to go to all this trouble just to keep it as a duplicate.
Should one post a comment and vote to leave it closed anyway? - This is what I would do. The OP still gets to see the answers this way (since you have supplied a link to the duplicate).
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1769 | Shouldn't informative comments be left for a sufficient amount of time to be read by the intended reader?
In this question, the OP, who is a newcomer, answered to two questions that have been posted as comments directly under her original question, by commenting jakebeal's answer. This indeed doesn't get the commenters notified of the responses.
I've left a comment to the OP by saying that she had answered under the wrong comment list and that her responses would not have been notified to the other commenters.
My comment was deleted in an hour or so, without giving the OP enough time to read it, moving her comments and avoid this mistake in the future. Moreover, also one of the OP's comments was deleted, while the other was left (it is not clear according to which criterion).
So: shouldn't informative comments be left for a sufficient amount of time to be read by the intended readers, especially when they are newcomers?
In general, of course informative comments should be left. For the record, I did not handle these comments. For the 3 comments you are talking about, the information from the one regarding the OP’s country was reposted (mods cannot move comments) in the correct place. Another comment said "thank you! I will". Presumably this was in response to a comment by Alexandros. Leaving the comment where it was and/or reporting it with a ping to Alexandros from a different user would be odd. Leaving it where it was, adding a comment about what the comment was referring to and adding another comment pinging Alexandros to inform him of the issue, seems overkill for a thanks comment. The final comment about how to properly comment is only useful to the OP of the original question. The ping notification should still show up in the OP's inbox, so there is no need to repost it. In this case I think the way the comments were handled was fine.
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1723 | Reasons to close
I was trying to flag this question as off topic. Recall the Help Center says
However, please do not ask questions about
Undergraduate-specific issues that could not apply to graduate or post-graduate academicians
Suggestions or recommendations for a university, journal, or research topic (a "shopping question")
Preparation for a non-academic career ("What graduate degree will help me get a job as X?")
The content of your research, rather than the process of doing research
and this particular question (at least the main question in this post) is about the 3rd point. Here are the options to select for flagging something as off topic:
Questions that cannot be generalized to apply to others in similar
situations are off-topic. For assistance in writing questions that can
apply to multiple people facing similar situations, see: What kinds of
questions are too localized?
Questions about problems facing
undergraduate students are off-topic unless they can also apply to
graduate or post-graduate academicians as described in What topics can
I ask about here?
This question appears to be off-topic because it
seems to seek specific advice for a very specific situation, and it's
likely that only someone with a good understanding of your situation
will be able to provide an objectively correct answer.
Blatantly
off-topic (this question has nothing to do with academics)
This
question belongs on another site in the Stack Exchange network
I didn't feel that any of these options really get to the heart of why it seems to be inappropriate. (If I'm wrong, please let me know which one does, and why.) Is there a reason they don't quite line up with the off-topic topics listed in the Help Center? If not, is this something we can address by adding more options (I have some vague impression that we have a limited number of reasons we can list, but I don't know if this is true or what the limit would be)?
In part, we're limited to just three custom close reasons.
There should be an "other reason" button on "off topic" that you can fill in whatever explanation seems most appropriate to you. Are you now able to see that?
Kimball: I don't really see why the question is off-topic (Off-center, yes, but that's not the same thing.) Could you explain a bit more why you feel that way?
Added upon more thought: okay, I see that you've pointed to the third close reason, which does apply to the first half (only) of the question. However I have to say that I find the idea that questions like "Can I get job Y with graduate degree X?" are off-topic on a site about (especially graduate-level) academia a bit distressing. Don't we make an academic Q&A site a bit, um, academic by excluding such questions? It doesn't seem so healthy to me.
@PeteL.Clark Actually, I agree. I personally don't think such questions should necessarily be closed, but based on our "official policies" there seems to be a consensus that we should. (Since the title is about preparation for non-academic employment, I took that to be the main question.) I just though to flag it so others can look at it and make a decision to revise, close or keep it. (Should I only flag questions if I personally think they don't belong?)
@PeteL.Clark Though perhaps we should revisit whether questions about "preparation for a non-academic career" are necessarily off topic?
@jakebeal I don't get an "other" reason after ticking "close" then "off topic." Do you? Maybe this only comes with sufficient rep?
@PeteL.Clark I find "Can I get job X with degree Y?" just as problematic as "Can I go to grad school for X with degree Y?" The answer is always essentially: "Sure, I guess, but it's going to be harder than if you had a better match..."
@jakebeal see http://meta.academia.stackexchange.com/questions/787/why-do-i-not-see-an-other-option-when-flagging-a-question-as-off-topic regarding the "other" reason for closing.
I am going to ignore whether the prompting question is on topic or not, as I do not think it is particularly important. There are a couple of things going on here.
The first relates to differences between flagging and voting to close a question. Users with more than 3000 rep can vote to close questions, while users with less than 3000 rep (and more than 15 rep) can only flag posts for attention. When flagging a post, there is a reason of "should be closed", which gives an option of "off-topic" that leads to our three predefined reasons. There are differences between flagging and voting to close one of which is that when voting to close, in addition to the off topic list, there is an "other" box that is not available for flagging. I am not sure if this is by design or not (it might be worth searching and/or asking on the meta.SE).
The second issue is that we are limited to 3 custom close reasons so adding one essentially means removing another. We can do that, but we need a proposal of what to say. Something like New custom close reason (but also listing which reason to remove). Have only three predefined reasons is not a huge deal since users with enough rep to vote to close can vote with a custom reason. Users who only have enough rep to flag, can simply flag it as "other" an leave there reason. That said, in general, if it is not one of the predefined reasons for closing, it might be cleaner to let someone with more rep vote to close because as mods, we tend not to like to unilaterally close borderline questions. That said, by being limited to 3 reasons it means there are differences between the help pages and the flagging/closing pages.
The third issue, and probably worth a separate question, is do we want to reword
Preparation for a non-academic career ("What graduate degree will help me get a job as X?")
Users who only have enough rep to flag, can simply flag it as "other" an leave there reason. I guess you mean to not flag it close > off-topic but "in need of moderator attention." I thought about this, but it seems like an unintuitive and somewhat contradictory solution, as that option says underneath "not one of the above."
@Kimball that is because "other" is different. When you flag it as close, it goes into the high rep user review queue while "other" only goes to the moderator review queue. My personal opinion, and not my mod opinion, is that what SE is saying is that low rep users can help close questions that are off topic for common reasons but not for uncommon reasons.
I think that this means we need slightly better documentation on the flagging help page to explain this fact.
@jakebeal which page do you mean. A lot of the help pages can only be changed by SE employees.
@StrongBad I was thinking the one that explains how the closing-related privileges work, which seems to be where the reasons are listed without talking about "other"
@jakebeal If you mean this page it does not seem that it can be edited by users or mods. I think asking a new question on the main meta.se is the way to go.
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1676 | Asking "shopping" questions, such as journal recommendations
I just happened to come across this question asking for journal recommendations. I was surprised about the large number of upvotes, considering the specificity and these instructions
However, please do not ask questions about
...
Suggestions or recommendations for a university, journal, or research topic (a "shopping question")
...
Possibly a lot of the votes come from supporting an open access sentiment, and/or maybe we have a lot of people on this site in theoretical biology.
Are questions like this considered acceptable, whereas other "shopping" questions are not? If so, can someone explain what the difference is? (Can having many upvotes be a reason for a question being acceptable?)
Note: there was a similar meta question here about why a certain question was not closed. However, the sole answer is not super-conclusive (conclusion: it's borderline) and the question in question was since deleted by the OP anyway, so I don't know that a community consensus was reached.
I dont like the SE attitude of calling everything that has to do with sharing useful information "shopping", even though it has absolutely nothing to do with money or buying something. I d prefer if bystanders who are not interested in the question as such would leave it alone, in particular if the community likes it as expressed by upvotes.
The question you're referring to is from 2012, the early days of this site before the scope was clearly defined.
This question you are linking to is posted about three years ago and has not been active for the last year.
The point that it has received high up-vote is that the community liked the question at that period of time. In my experience, most of the votes on the questions are awarded during the first days that the question is on the active list of the questions. After that period, the number of up-votes do not change significantly.
I have the feeling that users are more aware of the scope of the site and are more sensitive on the on-topicness of the questions nowadays.
As the site grows, we have more users on the site and we have more questions posted than three years ago. So, more active users are on the website and the chance of posting off-topic questions is decreasing. Users have seen larger number of off-topic questions, so they can easier investigate off-topic questions.
Furthermore, the point that the question is still open is that it has not been active for a year, so users may not have seen it to bring it under review and flag it as off-topic.
Thanks. Well, I don't follow the logic about the chance of posting off-topic questions is decreasing, though I can see that the chance they get flagged goes up. But are you saying this should be closed now as off-topic?
@Kimball I voted that question to be closed as off-topic because of being a shopping question; however, questions only get closed by direct vote of diamond moderators or when the number of close votes by users of the site reach a specific number. Closure of that question (like any other actions) depends on decision of users as members of Academia's community.
@Kimball I am not sure whether you have enough reputation and access to see the review close votes report. Currently, there are two close votes on that question and three other users voted the question to leave open.
Thanks for the info. I can see the 3 votes to leave open, and it says the review is completed, but that's all I see (not the 2 close votes). It would be nice if other of those voting users would explain their votes here (that's what this discussion question was for).
@Kimball In the chatroom, I asked the voters to explain their reasons in this meta question.
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3541 | How to suggest edits for locked posts?
I was looking at the question here:
https://academia.stackexchange.com/q/80469/19607
which is currently locked and was rejected for migration from Math SE. I agree the question is not appropriate as is for our site. However, there is a related question (how to find such schools) that I think would be appropriate and is of potential interest to the OP.
Unfortunately, I can neither edit nor comment at this point. Is there a way I can suggest to the OP to ask this? Note in this case the OP does not seem to have a clickable profile.
The fact that the OP does not have a clickable profile here probably means (my guess) that they have removed their subscription to Academia.SE, so I don't think that you can suggest anything to the OP directly from here. There is a user with the same name on Math.SE, but they might not even be the same person.
@MassimoOrtolano Thanks. Do you know, if I had more rep, would I be able to comment on a locked post?
I don't think it's possible to comment on locked posts even with higher rep. if I understood it correctly the lock is automatic after the migration rejection. It seems related to this feature request on the main Meta. Mods will probably have more information,
You should be able to write your comment there
Rejected migrations are locked automatically on the target site.
However, they are not locked on the source site, so you can comment on the post on the source site. (Which would be more useful than commenting here even if it wasn't locked, since the OP does not have an account here and would not get any notification of your comment.)
Ah, now I understand. I thought the message "migration rejected from" Math SE meant someone tried to migrate it from here to there, and that was rejected, not the other way around--as in the rejection came from Math SE. If we rejected it I wouldn't have have expected it to show up in our active questions queue as it did.
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1509 | Is it appropriate to suggest edits to duplicate questions?
This question Can I reference the abstract? is a duplicate but I found it by searching and the title confused me. It's actually about "Can I reference other things in my abstract?". I wanted to suggest an edit of the tile but the question is a duplicate.
Should I suggest edits to duplicate and/or closed questions?
Related: Editing questions that are closed for being off-topic without resolving the reason for the closure
I would distinguish between duplicate question, non-duplicate questions that on hold and could possibly be reopened, and non-duplicate questions that are on hold and have no chance of being reopened (e.g. are wildly off topic).
Duplicate questions are not going to be deleted; they should reflect the quality we expect of all questions on this site, and if they do not, edits are perfectly valid. As with other questions (including open questions), edits should significantly improve the post.
On hold/closed questions that are not duplicates and could be improved should be. That's the point of putting them on hold in the first place.
On hold/closed questions that are not duplicates and will never be reopened in anything resembling their current form (for example, because they are shopping questions, or wildly off topic for this site) and are subject to automatic deletion shouldn't be edited in most cases (removing offensive content or profanities is a notable exception). Editing closed questions pushes them into the reopen queue. It seems pointless to create unnecessary work for reviewers, for questions that are certainly going to be deleted soon anyways.
Your second point is pretty important. People sometimes forget that the point of putting questions "on hold" is to improve them to the point where they can be opened back up.
In general, we will only correct questions placed "on hold" (or closed, or duplicate, etc.) if the title has a grammatical error or typo, which should always be corrected, as the question titles are the main "interface" presented to visitors. Other edits are likely to be unproductive.
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3611 | code vs software tags
I've noticed that there are two tags: code and software. Could someone please explain what is the difference between them? Wouldn't it make sense to merge them?
The tag wiki excerpt for code says:
Concerning computer code written or used in the context of a research project or other academic endeavor. Includes questions on licensing, ownership, sharing, distribution, and formatting of academic source code
Questions with this tag are specifically about things having to do with the source code itself, like
Study of code share practices in science
Advisor professor asks for my dissertation research source code
How to submit code (visual studio projects, C#, OpenCL) with my IEEE paper submission
The tag wiki excerpt for software says:
Queries related to various software used in academia. Questions shall not address highly technical aspects of the software but shall address features/issues highly relevant to academia.
Questions in this tag should be about the software, not the code, like:
Software for extracting data from a graph without having to click on every single point?
Lab colleague uses cracked software. Should I report it?
Popular proprietary program or obscure open source substitute for reproducible research?
These seem like distinct tags to me - I don't see any benefit in combining them.
Thanks - I understood the idea. It could be helpful if the description of each of these two tags could mention the other one - I will suggest appropriate edits.
This. A number of students in my department use very sophisticated software but will never code.
The problem with the 'code' tag is that in the social and behavioral sciences, "code" means something different.
You might argue that in academia, that "computer code" is the minority form of coding.
Are there any examples of anyone using the [tag:code] tag on this site for the other meaning? We don't seem to have enough questions about any other kind of "code" to make multiple "code" tags necessary. (If we did, we would rename them so as to disambiguate them; the current "code" tag could be "source-code", for example.)
Well, it's a chicken and an egg problem. Some sociologists or linguists concerned about coding might post if they thought it applied. But in general, I think all forms of coding are too discipline specific for "code" to even a tag in the first place.
I don't think the ambiguity of the tag name is the problem here; renaming it to "source-code" would resolve the ambiguity, but I don't think it would help increase the representation of sociologists and linguists here. (If only it was that easy...)
Ah, and there is also a tag 'programming' - "The development and use of computer code for academic research." Maybe that one means the same as "code" and these two should be merged under "programming", to avoid 'code" being misinterpreted?
@AlexanderKonovalov Many of the "code" questions are not about programming. For example, questions about sharing code, or asking other researchers for code, are not about "programming".
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1896 | OpenScience and Academia Q&A sites
It is interesting to learn what is the viewpoint of Academia.SE community on the following situation.
There is an Area 51 proposal for OpenScience which recently went into the private beta. As we have learned today, it will be closed this Friday.
There are now two alternatives:
Second start (think what we can do better and retry by starting another Area 51 proposal here)
Use Academia Q&A (this is not suggested for the first time, similar idea already has been expressed here)
Please follow the links from this question to read further details, but to keep all discussion in one place, I suggest to express your opinions as answers to this question here.
I do want to ask whether many open-science tags are actually properly tagged. The first questions with the open-science tag that I see is "I want to open source my code. Is it legal?" From the looks of it, that's an Open Source question (we have a site for that, for which I moderate). Therefore, (I haven't fully read the question bodies) I need to question the definition of Open Science on Academia. Most of these questions are about source code, which means that they would fit more appropriately on Open Source. I'm not sure that Open Science is established on Academia SE.
Is there any way to share the key content here for those of us who aren't part of the beta site?
@Zizouz212: If you have in mind this question, then reading it further one could see that it perfectly fits into Academia.SE too: it relates to a specific situation that arose during PhD studies, and both the question and the answer attracted many votes. You're right that some other questions under "open-science" should be re-tagged - of course, one could edit them, and also improve the description of this tag here.
@jakebeal: you need to get an invite - see this Tweet or tell me your email address please. Without that, one could access all links from the question above, except "it will be closed this Friday".
Links are broken.
@Nemo - thanks, for me just one link from "it will be closed this Friday" does not work. It is no longer accessible since the proposal has been closed :(
Looking at the proposal questions for OpenScience, virtually all of those would be on-topic here, as they all relate to academic-level research—specifically, open-access academic research, but still academic research. Heck, some of those questions have already been asked.
So, with that background, I suggest that people looking to ask those types of questions just post here. If it turns out that there's a subset of questions that I'm missing that are distinctly not related to academia, we could bring that subset up in Meta for inclusion in our on-topic list at that time.
How about question about research that is not necessarily academic?
@FranckDernoncourt - I'd need some more details. In the past, we've allowed some industry research that were specific to the research process, but not about seeking industry jobs. High school science fair research would be a no-go.
@FranckDernoncourt: perhaps anything that may be relevant to knowledge transfer activities and increasing the non-academic impact of the research would be on-topic?
@eykanal Thank you, good to hear this! FYI, there is now a post here to shortlist questions to be migrated from OpenScience to Academia SE.
What about the attitude towards questions like this by @FranckDernoncourt ? Is it worth to try to revise this policy? For example, Math.SE has a tag big-list for similar questions, many of which perhaps would be viewed as "Shopping" here, and it's common on Math.SE to mark those questions as community wiki. For Academia SE, I'd very much agree that shopping for individual universities, academic programs etc. is not acceptable, but IMHO the question on platforms is different.
@AlexanderKonovalov - That should be it's own question, not a comment here. Can you post that separately?
Done - http://meta.academia.stackexchange.com/q/1902/
Looking at the questions posted on the private beta site, it looks to me like the vast majority of the questions there would fit quite well on Academia.SE. Perhaps they could even simply be migrated over here?
Examples of questions that would fit well:
What should I do if I cannot afford a journal Article Processing Charge?
How to protect scientific open research from being patented?
How to deal with sensitive individual data in open science?
How do I get a DOI for a dataset?
Percentage of the world population with subscription journal access?
What is the difference between “Green” and “Gold” Open Access?
Others look like they'd currently be closed here for being too broad, too dependent on particular regulations, or too opinion-based, but could probably be adjusted to be answerable within the rules and customs of this site. Examples include:
How much does it cost to publish an academic article?
What criteria does a research project need to match to be called open science?
How can one share data for open science?
Only a few appear to be too far off-topic for this site, primarily because they concern technical details, such as:
Using knitr to produce multiple output documents
Publishing location based data in Easting and Northing, Longitude and latitude, or Addresses?
Is there a specification for versioning a dataset?
Thank you! I've created this post on OpenScience meta to collect list of questions that may be migrated (not only to Academia SE, but perhaps some to OpenData and OpenSource).
The "Publishing location based data" one probably sits better on open data anyway? (I'm not involved with that site, so I don't know exaclty what's on topic)
@SimonW: or maybe even at http://gis.stackexchange.com/, but I'm also not involved there, so can't judge for sure.
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1902 | Shopping questions revisited
This question arises from the discussion on OpenScience and Academia Q&A sites. In particular, looking at the possibility of migrating some questions from OpenScience to Academia, one could ask which questions from OpenScience would be off-topic in Academia (or would have no home at StackExchange at all).
It happened that "Receiving comments on one's article" was not received well on Academia and was put on hold as a shopping question. That's why I'd like to ask whether the policy with respect to shopping questions may be revised.
For example, Math.SE has a tag big-list for similar questions, many of which perhaps would be viewed as "Shopping" here, and it's quite common on Math.SE to mark those questions as community wiki.
Maybe Academia's guidelines on what's considered shopping and what not could be revised to be more tolerant to "big-list" questions (if they are not asking for lists of individual universities, academic programs, etc. of course)?
From what I have observed, this community has developed significant cultural antibodies against requests for lists of options because our equivalent of "plz send me teh codez" appears to be "plz tell me teh choices."
Good versions of such questions, however, tend to not really be about getting a list. Instead, they are often looking for some functionality, and can generally be rephrased from "Can you list options for X?" to something like "Is there a good way to do X?"
This also tends to improve answer quality, because then people focus in on the best ways of doing what the question asker is looking for, rather than a scavenger hunt to see how many half-abandoned artifacts originally intended to do so.
For the linked question, I think it's a perfectly good question if it can be rephrased in such a manner. I did not do so myself because Franck is a regular poster here and I figured that I would give time for him to modify it himself as he thought best.
Thanks, it's a good explanation - this makes more sense to me now.
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1774 | Why was a previously closed question reopened
This question concerning the value about traditional lecture, which was posted by me a long time ago, was closed due to being too broad. However, recently the question was reopened and, judging from the downvotes, it is clear that the question is still not well-received. Would someone (maybe the person who reopened the question) care to explain the rationale behind reopening this old question?
I am the person who first nominated the question for re-opening. Questions typically should eventually progress toward either reopening or delation. I always did like the question (I am one of its up-votes), so I edited to try to make it more focused and neutral in tone, then reopened. Apparently enough others liked the question now to reopen it---though it seems to still be somewhat controversial, given the ongoing accumulation of up and down votes.
As the OP, of course, please feel free to further improve the question: I tried to preserve your intent as much as possible while decreasing the "rant" perception that helped cause it to be closed in the first place.
Thanks. I'll leave the question as it is, lest my edits make it even more ranty.
Thanks for editing and nominating for reopening this question. I find the question very useful and appropriate in its current form and have upvoted it. (And thank you for your efforts on behalf of orphaned questions more generally!)
@StephanKolassa Thank you; I appreciate the encouragement.
@Drecate: I tried to edit the question so that it would be better received (and thus stop accumulating down-votes) without changing your intent. Feel free to revert if I failed. (My edits are currently in peer review)
@LindaJeanne Thanks. The revised version seems to work very well.
Down votes are not "wiped out" when a question is reopened.
In general, though, any question that had an answer can be reopened if it is edited, made to fit site guidelines, and enough "reopen" votes are cast.
I'm not talking about past downvotes casted before closing the question. Several of the downvotes are made within the last two days.
I didn't vote to reopen the question, but members of the community (with enough rep) are allowed to vote to re-open it at any time. The ethos here is that questions are owned by the community, and the community are free to vote on closing and re-opening questions based upon their own view about whether it meets the standards for this site. Folks who believe the question is a good question might have decided to vote to re-open it, on the basis that they believe the question is on-topic and suitable and helpful. Hopefully that answers your question about why people might have voted to re-open the question.
Of course, re-opening the question also bumps it back to the front page, which might cause it to be read by new people who didn't read it previously. That can cause it to receive additional votes (whether upvotes or downvotes).
I suspect your secondary question is: why am I getting these downvotes, and how can I avoid getting more of them? I can share some thoughts on that.
First off, remember that upvotes increase your rep more than downvotes decrease it. It looks like you have received more upvotes than downvotes, so just to keep things in perspective, any loss of reputation due to the downvotes is outweighed by the increase due to upvotes.
Second, the best way to avoid downvotes is to edit your question to improve it based upon the feedback. The #1 piece of feedback you got is: "The rant/question ratio here is quite high.". As I read the question today, I still feel that this feedback remains pretty relevant. So, if you'd like to avoid future downvotes, arguably the best thing you can do is edit the question to address this feedback. You might try deleting some of the opinions (they can sometimes be perceived as "rant", even if that was not your intent), and focusing on the specific question. At the risk of exaggerating and over-simplifying a bit, consider the difference between "I see a phenomenom that puzzles me, I assume there are probably good reasons behind it, I want to learn, can you help me understand?" vs "I see a phenomenom that is stupid, look how stupid it is, why are universities being so stupid?"; you want to be as close to the former as possible, and avoid any opportunity for people to misconstrue the question as an instance of the latter. This is a matter of tone, and tone is always delicate, but it can affect how people view your question.
The other thing you can do in your question is to show your research. We expect you to do a significant amount of research before asking and to tell us about what research you've done. As explained here:
Have you thoroughly searched for an answer before asking your question? Sharing your research helps everyone. Tell us what you found and why it didn’t meet your needs. This demonstrates that you’ve taken the time to try to help yourself, it saves us from reiterating obvious answers, and above all, it helps you get a more specific and relevant answer!
https://academia.stackexchange.com/help/how-to-ask
So, those are some concrete steps you can take that might avoid future downvotes, if that was part of what you were asking.
(1) I acknowledge that my tone was abrasive, but I failed to see which part of my question is "subjective". Everything I wrote was either my conclusion or evidence used to support the conclusion. People clearly disagree with the evidence and the conclusion, and I'm fine with it. But I don't think anything I wrote was purely opinion-based. Please point out specific sentences that you think are overtly subjective.
(2) I explicitly stated at the end of the question "Is it because reformations take a long time, or is there some unique benefits of attending lectures that I may have overlooked? If it is the latter case, is there any systematic, empirical evidence that supports the widespread use of lecturing?" Clearly I think there is a chance that I am wrong, and I'm willing to learn other's perspective. Please do not put words in my mouth and assume that I believed universities were "stupid" (which I don't).
(3) At this point there are 28 people who upvoted the comment "The rant/question ratio here is quite high". Indeed, that is more votes than any answer received. I personally find this dismissive attitude quite unconstructive. The community clearly spent more time complaining about writing issues such as how ranty the question is instead of taking actions to either deleting the question or making it better.
@Drecate, (1) Forget the word "subjective"; I shouldn't have used it, and I removed it from my answer. The key word is "opinion". You state many opinions in your question. However, a question that contains strong opinions can sometimes be (mis)perceived as a "rant", even if that was not your intent. One way to avoid this (mis)perception is to remove the opinions. This is about tone and perception. In general, questions on this site should be used to request information. You can do that without expressing an opinion. BTW: I don't feel that your tone was abrasive, personally.
(2) I apologize if my answer made you feel like I'm putting words in your mouth. I don't assume that you believe universities are stupid. Please treat this as a rhetorical device to contrast two imaginary extremes, and help you understand which extreme you want to be closer to.
(3) One lesson one could draw is "28 people are dismissive, unconstructive, unhelpful, and like to complain." A different lesson one could draw is "if 28 people felt that way, it's possible there could be something to that comment". If your goal is to avoid downvotes (and it's fine if it isn't), then the latter might be a more useful angle, if only from a purely pragmatic perspective.
(3) I think you set up a false dilemna here. Deleting your question or editing it for you to make it better are not the only two ways that people could offer assistance. A third option is to provide a comment to help you edit your own question to improve it. This is not necessarily unhelpful, dismissive, unconstructive. Of course you don't have to edit your question if you don't want. I'm just providing tips that might help make your question better-received, if that's something you're looking for; you're certainly free to ignore them.
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1332 | Are questions about citation style on topic?
I see questions from time to time about citation styles. For example,
Should the fullstop go inside or outside the brackets for Harvard in-line citations?
How should 'van'-names be ordered in a bibliography?
I have never really seen these as on-topic for this site, but I could not find discussion about them on meta, and they don't seem to be closed very quickly.
It seems to me that:
Many of these questions apply equally to writing at all levels, particularly basic questions about particular styles, such as this question about APA style: APA: How to cite chapter and edition in book . These are not really about academia any more than questions on proper grammar would be.
When there is more than one reasonable possibility for how to format something, the answer will almost always be "follow your discipline's style manual" or "follow the instructions of the journal"
I, at least, see these as borderline but fairly harmless. There are many questions about citation practice that I feel are clearly on topic (e.g., this recent question that I answered), because they deal with issues that aren't simply and routinely settled by style guides. Even something that may seem cut and dried like the "van Names" question that you reference ended up teaching me something interesting about how customs differ in different countries. I don't see them showing up at high frequency, and they usually seem to get answered pretty quickly and non-contentiously, so I see no harm in letting them stay even if some are a bit borderline.
These are indeed almost always off-topic, as they're simply reference questions; the questioner can (and should) look up the answer and go on. As you suggest, there is nothing about these questions that suggest they're about academia, they're about grammar and/or writing in general.
History suggests otherwise. Traditionally, questions on how to apply a citation style to particular situation have not been closed here.
@ff524 - Fair enough, I didn't check history before posting this. However, I still stand by my answer, I don't think they're really adding much to the forum.
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1107 | How to use Stack Exchange answers in the Tags wiki?
It is sometimes an answer to a question on academia stack exchange website is perfect to be put on the wiki of a tag. Is it a good idea to use such answers in wiki? If your answer is positive, how should it be cited? Is the example bellow enough or some citation note should be added?
According to an answer on Academia Stack Exchange, [Question Title]:
A paragraph from an answer to that question is block quoted here.
The answer to this question may help to two other questions about tags.
Tag excerpts and wikis, should citations be fully addresses?
Tags edits and a question about excerpts
To start with: as far as I know, tag wiki excerpts are not places to share comprehensive information about subjects.
It is a short description so that when people add tags to a question, they can judge wether the tag is appropriate (e.g. that masters is about studies leading to M.Sc., not - the best and the brightest ;)).
Consequently, I find most of you edits (albeit well-intended) providing extraneous information.
Especially it is not their place to judge any topic, or provide too much of extra information and distracting from the short, concise definition (1-2 sentences long).
As a short example, IMHO the current version of united-states is better:
Topics specific to the United States.
In your edit there is a lot of repeatings (this site is about academia, so there is no need to add clauses about education and academia to each tag; on the other had, the last sentence "Use this tag..." may be beneficial):
Questions specifically about universities and academic institutes in
the United States of America and higher education at this country. Use
this tag alongside other tags to mention that your question is related
to this country.
For the longer tag wiki - I don't know if it is that useful and worth spending time on it. In any case:
If do verbatim copy form Wikipedia, use > (and provide a link to a particular Wikipedia page).
If it is only tangentially based on Wikipedia, it is so general knowledge stuff that should not attributed at all.
Could you please show me one or two more examples from my edits? I want to become more aware and understand your professional attitude. [I also want to thank you so much for your precise answer, it was great, well organized, exactly showed me the weaknesses of my edits.]
Also it would be great if you take a look at these questions too: Tag excerpts and wikis, should citations be fully addresses? and Tags edits and a question about excerpts
@Parsa Edited accordingly.
Thanks, I think that a good excerpt should be something between the first and the second excerpts which you have in your quotation. As I understand, something in two or three short sentences, describing the tag, no judgment and no extra information. The extra information goes into the second part, wiki.
Do you mean that we may not need this sentence that exists in wiki of many tags in newer wikis Note : This tag wiki has content adapted from Wikipedia, used under the CC-BY-SA 3.0 license. and a > with a link to a particular Wikipedia page is enough? The same as this tag: phd?
@Parsa IMHO for such a short thing as a tag wiki, when we explicitly link to Wikipedia, this note is too formal.
...especially as you can quote any content, even copyrighted (e.g. as stated by Microsoft, Windows Vista is... "[short quotation]"). You don't copy whole Wikipedia pages or anything.
What do you mean by IMHO?
"In my humble opinion": http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/IMHO, http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=in+my+humble+opinion
Thank you so much.
I actually disagree with the example you gave. "Topics specific to the United States" does not help anyone understand whether their use of the tag is appropriate, while the more verbose version does.
@ff524 You may be right, and maybe it was not the best example. My point was that appending words that are a requirement on Academia.SE (i.e. that the topic is related to academia, higher education etc) to every question is, IMHO, counterproductive.
I noticed that many of the off-topic questions that have nothing to do with academia at all are tagged with only "country" and/or "discipline" tags. so I think for these tags, specifying how they are used in the context of academia might be helpful.
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1690 | Proposal to make decision about 'retraction' and 'withdraw' tags
Today, I made a new withdraw tag with aim to be pinned to questions about withdrawing papers in the process of their submission or withdrawing an academic position such as admissions offers. I suggested an excerpt for it which is now approved:
Questions about withdrawal of books or papers from journals and
conferences or withdrawal during admissions process to academic
programmes.
However, after some hours, when I was reading the tags list, I found that we have a retraction tag with similar scope.
Ethics and logistics of withdrawing, refuting, or amending published
work.
The retraction tag seems a little vague to me, as it's scope may cover questions which are only about retraction of published work, not withdrawing manuscripts which are under review process or even questions about withdrawing an academic position such as withdrawal during postgraduate admissions.
I did some searches in the questions which include these word. By searching the website for questions having these word in their body and title, the following results are accessible:
72 questions have withdraw (56 questions) and withdrawal (16 questions) in their body and 17 questions have withdraw (15 questions) and withdrawal (2 questions) in their title.
39 questions have retract (18 questions) and retraction (21 questions) in their body and 7 questions have retract (4 questions) and retraction (3 questions) in their title.
Making one of these tags synonym of the other and edit the main tag's excerpt. (Based on the search results presented above, I think that the withdraw tag with its current excerpt is more popular word and can be the main tag and retraction tag can be a synonym of it.
Having both tags on the site, but we can edit their excerpts to have withdraw tag for questions which are about withdrawing academic positions such as a student withdrawing a PhD position during his admissions process, and to have retraction for questions about withdrawing papers, books, etc. during their review and publication process.
Delete the newly proposed withdraw tag and have previous retraction tag as it was before without any edit to its excerpt and wiki.
Although I am so sorry for making a new tag without searching the tags' list carefully; I think that it does worth that the community think about these two tags with similar scopes and not just vote the withdraw tag to be deleted. In my opinion, the first option discussed above is a better choice for the site.
As far as the meaning and usage of two tags were misunderstood by me, we will keep both tags on the site without any significant change into their excerpts. Therefore, I am asking one the moderators to kindly pin a status-completed tag to this question.
Retraction and withdrawal are not the same.
Retraction refers to expunging of papers from the literature, usually for reasons related to fraud or error.
Withdrawal of a paper can occur for any reason. Withdrawal can also apply to conference papers, posters, and oral presentations.
I am assuming that voting for this post means option #2: keep both tags and adjust scope if needed.
@jakebeal With this answer, I think that we should have both tags on our site, with no significant change to their excerpts. I had misunderstood the meaning of these two words.
Withdrawing from a course in progress, withdrawing an application for admission, withdrawing from a degree program (quitting), and withdrawing a paper submitted for review are not the same thing.
There should not be an ambiguous withdraw tag applied to all these different scenarios.
I do not agree with quitting tag. Quitting tag does not have any clear excerpt but it is currently applied to the questions which are about leaving academia. For instance, questions about students who are in their last year of PhD programme. It is not about stopping and withdrawing an admissions application.
@Enthusiastic that's exactly my point. These are all completely different things, and you're putting it all into one tag. A single tag should not apply to so many unrelated situations.
I do not recommend to use withdraw tag for questions about leaving academia. (If I have wrongly applied, I apology.) I recommend withdraw tag to be used for questions about stopping an admissions application or withdrawal of manuscripts, papers and generally publications. Retraction for removing publications out of literature as described in the other answer, and quitting for leaving academia.
@EnthusiasticStudent this question and this question are about quitting a program in progress. this question and this question are about leaving a class mid-semester. Those are not about stopping an admissions application or a paper submission.
I did not pay attention to this point and did not know that we have a quitting tag. But without having a clear excerpt for quitting tag, every user may fail to correctly use the withdraw and quitting tags.
@EnthusiasticStudent I think a 'withdraw' tag that applies broadly to all these different scenarios is bad, and I think a 'withdraw' tag that applies to exactly two kinds of withdrawal but not others is even worse - very confusing! If anything, I think for publications there should be a 'paper-withdrawal', and for applications 'application-withdrawal' - for the other scenarios, I don't think a tag is necessary.
On the contrary, I think that we do not have so many questions in the scope of these tags to separate the withdraw tag to specific paper- and application- withdrawal tags. Withdraw tag and the other retraction and quitting tags are enough to cover existing questions on the site.
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1135 | Lack of a tag related to social media on Academia
When one is asking a question related to social websites on Academia like the cases which are found by searching keywords like Facebook with almost 85 results, LinkedIn with 53 results, etc. s/he has only website option to choose a suitable tag for the question which seems to be too broad for the purpose of the social websites and is not specific enough. There are also some other tags like community or society but none of which are so relevant to those question types.
Should a social-website (or an equivalent tag) be created on the Academia and if creating this tag is reasonable, what would be a good Tag-Excerpt for it?
update and conclusion
After a few answers are posted to this question with positive vote rate; now, a tag suggestion (including the tag title, tag excerpt and tag wiki) for social-media has been posted in this answer.
Please post your suggestions and comments to that answer to improve the suggested tag title and excerpt.
Note that there is a [tag:facebook] tag. And of the 85 search results for "Facebook" there are actually only about 16 questions, of which 7 mention Facebook only tangentially.
@ff524 what about other social websites like: LinkedIn, ResearchGate, academia.edu, etc.
While this question may receive down votes suggesting people do not think this tag is needed, I would like to say this question represents an excellent example of how to ask/propose a new tag.
I would strongly recommend against a tag, and instead go the other direction: have only a tag called "internet". Let academia SE stay specific.
Please put your proposed excerpt in an answer instead of in the question, so that people can vote on it independently.
Tag Title Suggestion suggested in this answer and this comment
After a few answers are posted to this question with positive vote rate, it seems that the social-media is a good choice to be created.
Tag Excerpt Suggestion suggested in this answer
Use of social media (e.g. Facebook, blogs, ResearchGate) by academics to engage with other academics or students and to disseminate their research.
Tag Wiki Suggestion
Social media is a collaborative internet website through which users (both administrators and visitors of the website) can exchange and share ideas and information such as academic topics.
I don't think this proposed excerpt reflects the kind of questions people ask about social media here, so it doesn't seem very helpful for deciding whether to apply the tag to a question.
I agree that it may be good to have a related tag. How about social-media or maybe even better web-presence (or internet-presence)?
Does not media refer to other means too? I mean, media is also used for newspapers, tv, etc. We should find a tag specially used for Academic Social Websites.
@Parsa What are examples of social media which are not websites?
@TobiasKildetoft I checked wikipedia and I also think social-media seems to be a good tag.
If we are going to have a social-media tag, I think the tag excerpt should describe social media in a way that reflects the kinds of questions people ask about it here. For example:
Use of social media (e.g. Facebook, blogs, ResearchGate) by academics to engage with other academics or students and to disseminate their research.
May be we put your suggestion as excerpt and my answer suggestion as the tag wiki. I edited my answer, please check it.
@EnthusiasticStudent Generally on meta, we put one proposal per answer so people can vote and comment on things separately. There's no reason to edit other answers into your question or answer; if you agree with an answer, just vote it up, then wait a little to see what others vote. (That way, if someone disagrees with my excerpt suggestion but agrees with your wiki suggestion, they can vote on each separately)
I would strongly recommend against a tag, and instead go the other direction: have only a tag called "internet".
Let academia SE stay specific to larger academic issues.
My preference would be to improve the tag wiki excerpt for website rather than create a new tag. For example, the website excerpt could be changed to:
Websites for a research group, conference, project, or individual academic; social media and academic community sites like LinkedIn, Facebook, PubPeer and ResearchGate; or sites and blogs about academia and higher education.
This, because I find it ambiguous as to whether certain sites are "social". It's easy to say Facebook is social, but is a blog social? What about a class forum on an online LMS? In academia, there are many cases like this where one person might categorize a site as social and another person wouldn't.
I think your suggestion to excerpt edit of website is more practical. And, is there any need to merge existing tag for facebook on academia?
I guess where I think the line should be drawn here is ownership: are you responsible for the content and maintenance, or are you just a user of somebody else's site? There's enough of a difference there to make it worthwhile to keep them separate, I think.
@aeismail I don't think "social" implies that difference. And some kinds of websites can go both ways; you can be a reader of blogs about academia, and you can also write one. Is one "social" and the other not?
Perhaps "social" doesn't encapsulate the difference, but "website" becomes too expansive if it includes questions about self-run academic websites, external repositories, social sites, and everything in between.
As stated in the question, I also think that website tag is a little broad.
I would say the distinction between [tag:website] and [tag:social-media] is that the first refers to a unilateral communication channel (appropriate for, e.g., publication lists, contact details, presentation of research groups), while the latter refers specifically to bilateral channels. For example, a blog is a website as long as you only post content, but becomes social media once you regularly interact with your readers via comments.
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1131 | Questions without citation
This is an answer to one of the questions in Academia. Although the writer has supported his answer with good references, but he has never brought a list of the papers he has cited at the end of his post.
Is there any need to rise a Flag to inform the moderators about such problem in the answer or one may just leave a comment on the answer and wait for the writer to provide required citation information (if he edit his answer or not)?
You can request that other users add complete citations. You cannot demand it, and it's not a "flaggable" offense.
How others are sure, which exact publications he is referring to? I mean, this seems something that the writer himself should edit.
Yes, and you can ask the author of the answer politely in a comment to do so. But the point is that it's unreasonable to delete an otherwise acceptable answer because the author used "short" citations instead of full ones.
OK, I got it. Thanks.
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1623 | Is it ethical to promote another Stack Exchange website in about me section of the users' profiles?
I like one or two other Stack Exchange websites but they have really low user participation. I want to promote those websites by mentioning their names with a link in my User's Profile about me section. I have seen some users doing this on our site on their profiles.
Is it ethical to do such thing? Doesn't it conflict Academia's website policies?
related question, but not a duplicate: Why no link in the header of the main site to our 'About' page?
You might get a better response if we migrate this to the main meta. Is there a reason you want to limit the question only to AC.SE?
@StrongBad Not any special reason. Just because the Academia is the website I visit more often. However, I am not sure there is not any duplicate questions there.
From the help center:
Your user page belongs to you — fill it with information about your interests, links to stuff you’ve worked on, or whatever else you like!
To me, the question is this: where is the line between appropriate promotion and spam / single-purpose-accounts? I have noticed that when an account is centered on a link in its user profile, that can be considered evidence of inappropriate promotion. If the promotion is just a small part of an otherwise well-rounded account, however, I see no issue at all. For example, in your own case, you are a well-established contributor to this site who is known for doing a lot of different constructive work. Adding clear, transparent lines in your profile that say, "I like this stuff, and think you should check it out too" seems to me to be no problem at all.
Is it ethical to promote another Stack Exchange website in about me section of the users' profiles?
It doesn't trigger an ethical question. It's fine.
Thank you for your answer to my question. Could you please expand your negative answer a little more and give some reasoning why you think it is unethical to put another Stack Exchange website's link in the user's profile section to promote them and to increase their visitors?
@EnthusiasticStudent I think you misinterpreted the answer. The answer, at least to my reading is that there is no reason to think it is unethical, or without the double negative, there is every reason to think it is ethical.
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1269 | Should tags' wiki include 'Related questions'?
By clicking on the tags links, the user moves to a list of questions which are tagged by that specific tag and a list of related questions appears to him relatively. As an example, see the wiki of the reputation tag.
Do we need a list of related questions in the wiki of the tags?
I think this list of related questions is not only unnecessary, as the users have access to a complete list of related questions of the tag; but also it is harmful and misleading to the users and should be removed as the list may not include good questions which present the concept and use of the tag.
EDIT: A list of good examples of on- and off-topic questions on each tag does not have any harm, on the other hand, it really helps the users to know the tags and their usage better; but I think the list of exemplar questions on the tags can be harmful as we have them on the site right now. They are not well organized and reviewed. The list of the exemplar questions on the wiki of the tags may be harmful because:
As stated in this answer, Some will be "bad" examples - usage that is wrong, or not necessarily wrong but not perfect either.; the user expects the sample questions be really on-topic and wants to learn from these sample questions about the sites policy on each tag; so, by reading wrong examples, they will be mislead and consequently;
From the usage perspective;
user will tag the newer questions wrongly;
user will do edits on questions and re-tag questions with the wrong concept;
by reading wrong examples and having wrong concept about the correct usage of the tags, and wrong usage of the tags, the user may face down-votes and major edits on his question and this is absolutely discouraging to some (not all) of the users.
From the maintenance perspective;
we should put extra time and effort to list the best and most on-topic questions in the wikis of the tags; if we don't pay enough attention to these lists, then we will not have good/working tags wikis at all;
choosing off-topic and on-topic questions for each tags needs some time and discussions between users, as we have not finished our edits on the tags of the questions yet, thinking and working on finding best lists for tag wikis will be waste of time;
reviewing the existing lists of exemplars in wikis needs another attention, who guaranties that the existing exemplars are well-chosen?
Can you clarify how a list of exemplar questions might be harmful and misleading to users? (Assuming it's a list of good questions with the tag, and not a list of bad questions that shouldn't actually have that tag.)
@ff524 I edited my question relatively, but I think I did not well answered your concern.
You seem to be responding to the possibility that the list of "Related questions" includes bad questions. If that's the case, it should be edited to only include good questions - that's not a reason to eliminate this list entirely. Have you seen any such lists that include bad questions?
If this is a serious problem - that there are, in fact, tag wikis that include bad or irrelevant questions on their list of "Related Questions" - then you should be able to identify some tag wikis that have this problem and link to them here. As far as I have seen, our tag wikis are actually reasonably good in this respect.
@ff524 In the reputation tag, we have four questions listed as exemplars, and I really don't think that the last two questions are good questions to be listed in the tag's wiki. Those questions will not help the users significantly become familiar with the usage of the tag. They may be on-topic for the tag, but they are not that much on-topic and not at the level to be put on the wiki. I think, questions which are outstandingly on-topic for the tag should be well-chosen and put on the tag wikis.
If you think those specific questions are bad examples of "reputation" questions then you can suggest an edit to remove them from the list (mentioning in the "edit summary" why you think so). I happen to think those questions are good examples of the 'reputation' tag.
@ff524 You are at a higher level of English knowledge and if you think they are good, they are good; I will not edit the wiki. But, I really think that the exemplar lists should be well chosen. We need to put some more time and effort to choose the best examples for such lists. I think that the existing lists are just in the wikis, because the editor of the wiki wanted to put something in the wiki and not to leave it empty, they are not well-chosen or at least they can be reviewed in the future.
If your argument is that people should choose "Related Questions" thoughtfully, fine, I agree. If your argument is that people shouldn't put any "Related Questions" in tag wikis because someone might put one that isn't the best example possible, I disagree. If your argument is that many of the current "Related Questions" in tag wikis are very bad, I also disagree.
@ff524 My arguments are: people should choose "Related Questions" thoughtfully and some of the current "Related Questions" in tag wikis are very bad and should be edited in the future.
As currently written, your question asks "Do we need a list of related questions in the wiki of the tags?" - which is a completely different question from "People should choose 'Related Questions' thoughtfully, because some of the current 'Related Questions' in tag wikis are very bad and should be edited in the future"
@ff524 your question about harms of bad lists brought us to this point.
The purpose of a list of exemplar questions in a tag wiki is as follows:
As we know, not all questions are tagged perfectly. Sometimes, people use a tag that is incorrect, or not really necessary.
When a user clicks on a tag, they see the list of all questions with that tag. However, not all of these are necessarily "good" examples of usage of the tag. Some questions on the list of all questions with the tag will be "bad" examples - usage that is wrong, or not necessarily wrong but not perfect either.
In your own words, the reason for listing some exemplar questions in the tag wiki is exactly what you said: to show
good questions which present the concept and use of the tag.
That is, to show how the tag is intended to be used (which is not necessarily how it was always used in practice.) That's why it's not a comprehensive list of every question with a tag - it's a selected list of a few that exemplify what the tag is about.
All of the possible negative effects you mention are general side effects of any community-prepared resource, including the entire tag wiki (not just the list of questions). We deal with this the way we do with any community-prepared resource: users can suggest edits to improve anything that seems wrong to them, and the community reviews the edits and approves the ones that they agree with.
There is never any "guarantee" of quality with anything on this site; that's why we have lots of eyes to review things and fix anything that needs fixing.
So in summary,
If your argument is that people should choose "Related Questions" thoughtfully, fine, I agree completely. People should make all suggested edits carefully.
If your argument is that people shouldn't put any "Related Questions" in tag wikis because someone might put one that isn't the best example possible, I disagree.
If your argument is that many of the current "Related Questions" in tag wikis are very bad, I also disagree. The ones I've come across seem fine to me.
I am looking for the answer to the following question: Is it a good idea to have such lists of questions in the wikis? and I think you don't see any problem having such kind of wikis on the site.
@EnthusiasticStudent I gave reasons why it is a good idea to have lists of such questions in the wiki, as long as they are chosen well. I also gave reasons why the possibility of someone not choosing well is not a good reason not to have these lists at all.
I got my answer. Thanks. :)
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1834 | What issues should be addressed in meta questions with FAQ tag?
Compared to other Stack Exchange website, we do not have many questions under the FAQ tag (only 3 posts, compared to 17 FAQ posts on TeX.SX or Mathematics.SX). These questions really help users (newly registered or older ones) to get more familiar with site policies and disciplines.
What are the characteristics of a good FAQ post? What issues do we need to be covered on this website as FAQ? What topics are not covered in the current FAQ posts? Do we need a wiki-type answer to this question as a to-do list of topics which need to be answered in form of FAQ? Or kind of tag on meta for posts which propose a FAQ issue?
Also, I think that it does worth if users find some good questions in meta; (if these questions have minimum characteristics of a FAQ post) propose them to be tagged with such FAQ tag to make them easier to be found by other users.
As an instance, Mathematics.SX has a tag on its meta under which users can propose FAQ topics called faq-proposed.
Well... what Questions actually get Asked here Frequently?
I think your heart is in the right place here, but you're probably overthinking things a bit. FAQ entries can be generated on an as-needed basis, just like tags are, and things seem to be running just fine around here at the moment. It doesn't seem to me like actively looking for FAQ entries to write would be a particularly good use of anyone's time right now.
As you may know, a moderator is needed to apply the faq tag, but there's nothing special about the faq-proposed tag; its usage is just a convention. If and when you (or someone else) do produce a proposed new FAQ entry, it would probably be better to just flag for moderator attention than to use a special tag, at least for now.
One thing I would like to see answered in the FAQ is the difference between good and bad opinion based questions. I think some questions that seem to be asking about opinions are really asking about academic culture, while others are asking for personal opinions. I think we have covered this in a couple of meta questions already, but having a nice answer would be great
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1619 | Successful combination of poll + answer approach to suggestions and discussions on Academia's meta
Last week a question was posted on Academia's meta to ask the community whether we need the created women tag on site or not. As it was a discussion, I thought it may be a good idea to create a poll like comment under the question to be able to have the statistics of the for and against of idea of having such tag on the site.
I think it was a good idea to have a combination of a poll and answers to such suggestions and discussions on meta. The reason is clear when we look at that question;
Not all the users have time or enough amount of reasoning to post a separate answer to the question. On the other hand, users can easily click to up-vote comments which had made like a poll under the question. Besides to allowing the users to easily express their ideas whether they are for or against the idea which is being discussed; having a clear result as poll to the suggestion will allow the moderators and users who have to make decision on the idea to decide with much more firm reasons, as they have clear number of votes whether the community likes the idea or not.
As a discussion and suggestion here, I want you to discuss whether the combination of a poll + answer to the suggestions and discussions are beneficial/productive for our website or not?
I also created a poll under this suggestion to allow users to easily vote whether they like the idea of having a poll under suggestions and discussions or not.
I like the idea of having a poll under the suggestions and discussions.
I do not like the idea of having a poll under the suggestions and discussions.
I do not like the idea of a poll. While a poll will help determine the community consensus, it does not provide any means to understand the consensus. If we use your linked question as an example. With the poll we would simply know that AC.SE does not need a women tag, but with the highly up-voted answer we see:
I strongly believe that a women tag is both duplicative of gender and counter-productive.
the answer then explains the issues.
To me that is way more valuable than simply knowing the answer. It is also the reason, that I felt that I needed to provide an answer to this question and not just vote.
Also, once answers exist, they can effectively act as a poll in any case...
But what I suggested is not a poll only, but decision making based on polls and answers together. Having a poll will not disturb the decisions at all.
@EnthusiasticStudent if "a poll will not disturb" (and I am not sure what disturb means in this sense) the decision, then I do not see the point of the poll at all.
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1629 | Are we paying less attention to the meta.academia's tags?
When I look at the tags and their wikis and excerpts on meta site of Academia on Stack Exchange and I compare them to other meta websites at Stack Exchange such as meta.mathematics, meta.tex and etc., I can easily understand that we do not have so rich wikis for the tags on our meta website.
Should we review the tags, their wikis, excerpts and descriptions on the meta site of Academia? If yes, what policy should this review have?
This site is referred to as just "Academia", "Academia.SE", or "Academia Stack Exchange" - the phrases "the Academia" "the Academia website" or "the Academia's website" are not grammatically correct.
@ff524 Thank you but, In which part of this question did I use those wrong phrases? Also, why are those phrases grammatically wrong? Because I have seen that the TeX website on Stack Exchange is referred to by TeX.SX.
@ff524 I opened a question on meta about the correct way to refer to the Academia to have it available to all the users. Please kindly take a look at it or post an answer there.
That comment was in reference to the tag excerpt edits you suggested connected to this post, not the content of this question. (Minor grammar details like that don't really matter in posts, but tag wiki excerpts should really have correct grammar.)
The Academia.SE meta is a lot less active than many of those other ones, so I suppose it's not surprising it it's got less structured and organized tags as well.
I'd say: if you're psyched for it, go for it! As always, of course, it's a good idea to post your plans to chat and/or meta to get a sense of how well they agree with the rest of the community before making big changes.
I basically have OSD about tracking, organizing, classifying, and taxonomy-ing stuff, and it has even leaked into my research. But what I have learned the hard way is that there is no point in providing a lot of organization if you are not actually using the resulting classifications. Basically, write-only metadata just produces overhead.
Hence, I would not ask what kind of tags we do not have, but rather what kind of tags are missing from a user perspective. Do we have indications that people are not finding the meta-questions they are looking for? If yes, I am all in favor of adding more and better tags. If no, why bother?
I don't think "why bother if nobody will use them" is a great argument. But "adding unnecessary taxonomy makes tags harder to keep track of and makes the site less intuitive to use" might be.
@ff524 I am not sure if I understand. Are you arguing that we should create tags even if they are not needed, or that there actually is support of the idea that specific tags are missing?
"I don't think "why bother if nobody will use them" is a great argument." - To be fair, "Let's create more tags because others have them as well" isn't a great argument, either :D
I agree with you that we shouldn't create tags that are not needed. Your main argument seems to be "it isn't worth the effort to create tags that aren't needed," which isn't a great argument if someone likes creating tags and wants to expend this effort just for fun. I think a more compelling argument against creating unnecessary tags is that tag proliferation makes the site more confusing and less intuitive to use.
@ff524 ok, I did not consider the case that somebody would want to create tags for fun, no matter if they are needed or not. If this is the case, they can of course go ahead.
I don't necessarily think they should go ahead. A very detailed, planned-out taxonomy can be difficult for newcomers to use (compared to a taxonomy that evolved more naturally out of the natural ways that people tag questions).
(Although actually, I think this question is about tag wiki excerpts for existing tags, not new tags)
@ff524 Actually, my question is about creating and editing wikis and excerpts for existing tags.
@ff524 I agree with this part of your comments: I think a more compelling argument against creating unnecessary tags is that tag proliferation makes the site more confusing and less intuitive to use.
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1631 | Is it a bad etiquette on our site to simply welcome new users in the comments?
In other Stack Exchange sites (mostly on TeX website), I have seen that the users with longer period of membership welcome newer users. I really like this action as this warms the new users' heart and helps them to feel safe to stay in a friendly environment website.
However, I can see that welcome comments are rarely found on our website. They are only posted when we want to inform new users that they have to edit their questions or improve their answers. Simply welcome posted comments are also in the danger of being flagged and deleted as a too chatty comment.
By posting this question, I want to ask users to welcome new users by posting a simple Welcome to Academia website! comment and we leave them and do not delete those comments. This will help our community be more friendly and have nicer look.
Please post your answers if you feel this suggestion is a bad etiquette for Academia, or how we can build a more friendly community.
I remember the discussion on meta.tex.sx : the point was that people would say "welcome" and make that welcome a link to the "read before posting" post. But it doesn't really make sense to welcome only people who need to read that post. So some people (no idea how many) decided to add a welcome comment, with or without additional comments, on every "First post" that they review. ( As I'm not really active on this community, I don't want to "run around and give advice about policy", so it's only a comment, not an answer. ;) )
Relevant discussion: http://meta.tex.stackexchange.com/q/3503/9517
@T.Verron Perfect link. Thank you. :)
I could probably find a hundred comments in an hour that are more chatty (and/or obsolete) than a welcome post. However, in TeX-SX it serves the nice purpose to hint to special markup that is used on the site. In chemistry we do the same, because a lot of new users do not have any experience with mark up. I also find it a good way to improve the accepted answer ratio, but I guess this is of minor concern here.
I usually don't post these Welcome messages because, well, I see no real purpose to them, and if there is a policy to post them always, the entire exercise becomes incredibly fake and dishonest fast.
I have no quarrels with a policy of always welcoming new users, but frankly I remain unconvinced that this will make new users somehow feel more at home more quickly.
I normally (on all SE sites),
post welcome messages of the form.
"Welcome to X.SE. Your question is a bit too Y for our format. You could improve it by doing Z."
The welcome message is not there to welcome them, but to soften the blow when giving (constructive) criticism.
So as not to drive the new user away, while they are still learning the ropes.
I usually welcome the OP if I have something to say in the comment. But I guess it's to everyone's taste. If this is to become a trend then the only annoyance would be skipping one more line of comments, which is not a big deal.
There are a few thoughts:
Most of the time when I see those "welcome" comments they are from users with, say, around 100-200 reputation and I feel kind of weird about that. Like someone just visited you in the morning and by afternoon he is running around welcoming guests for you.
It's a Q&A platform. I'd rather express welcome by putting more thoughts in the answers and comments, give them what they asked for rather than just a plain welcome. Sometimes I saw questions with no answer but a 100-reputation user's "Welcome!" comment, I couldn't help but felt kind of sad.
Another more practical way to welcome newcomers is to upvote their questions given their questions are good. This is a lot more welcomed (pun intended): by giving them more reputation they can unlock more functions and get to integrate into the forum faster.
I am feeling uncomfortable with your last point of view. Not all the posts by new users are worthy for an up-vote.
@EnthusiasticStudent, edited. I agree. And perhaps same goes for welcoming. There are also malicious flaming trolls or users with irrelevant rantings whom may not deserve a welcome.
I think welcoming new users with a comment is fine. I think it is also fine to flag welcome comments as "too chatty" a few days later. At that point the comment has served most of its purpose (i.e., welcoming the new user). I guess the argument for keeping it longer, is to let other new users know we are welcoming.
I tend to only welcome new users when I have something else to tell them. Typically, I welcome them as I am telling them I am deleting or closing their question/answer. Generally my welcomes include asking them to look at our help center.
I would have no problem with new users getting a welcome comment in general.
Why is it problematic to leave welcome comments un-deleted?
@EnthusiasticStudent I don't see it as a big problem either way. If the community wants them to stick around, then that is fine. If we want them to stay for at least a day and then be flagged for deletion, that seems reasonable also. I do not have a personal preference.
Exactly. There are a number of users who will go through old (>1 month) content and flag "thanks!" and "hi!" comments as "too chatty"; based on previous discussion, I usually delete those.
I have known new users to mix up comments and answers. That's one argument for deleting comments: make sure not to distract anyone from the important information in the answers.
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1104 | Tag excerpts and wikis, should citations be fully addresses?
While bringing a note from a website or a book, is it enough to make a link to the website in which the words are borrowed from or it is better to use a separate sentence to mention the citation?
As mentioned in Wikipedia; this tags is about...
or this way:
As mentioned in Wikipedia [ * ]; this tags is about...
--- Quoted tag wiki goes here ---
[ * ] footnote or citation indicating that the wiki is brought from a website page.
P.S.: Take a look at the tag for phd and research as examples of this question. Which one is preferred?
I am not sure we really need quotes in our tag wikis. Can you give an example? Why not just paraphrase the material for our tag wiki?
@StrongBad take a look at the P.S. I added to the question. Specially in the info of research tag, there is a note and the end.
See http://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/214337/what-is-a-tag-wiki-how-do-i-write-a-good-one
@StrongBad this question also helps the topic: Would it be OK to paste content from Wikipedia into a popular empty tag-wiki?
@StrongBad I read the two pages, I think it is OK to put a direct link to the Wikipedia and block quote a paragraph or less. Am I right? (the same as this tag: phd)
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1464 | Proposal of creating manuscript tag
I have searched the website for the questions about manuscripts and I find 39 questions which have this keyword in their title and 796 questions which have this keyword included.
Should we have a separate tag for questions about manuscripts?
I am not confident enough about what a manuscript (What are the boundaries between draft, manuscript, preprint, paper, and article?) to want it as a tag. As long as the tag wiki was clear enough, it might be helpful ...
I am thinking about a tag to cover questions about papers which are prepared but not submitted to a journal or conference yet. We may create a manuscript tag and make draft a synonym to it.
Since many people don't read the tag wiki excerpts, I think a tag whose usage is ambiguous to many people is asking for trouble.
In short, I don't think it would be helpful to introduce a new, very broad, tag that does not have a clearly defined scope distinct from existing tags.
There are three reasons I am not in favor of this proposal:
1) There is not much consistency in how people understand the word "manuscript," which makes it a bad choice for a tag name. We've even had a question asking about the distinction, as StrongBad brought up.
In my field, for example, I never hear people use the word "manuscript." People use "paper" when they are talking about an article in any stage of the publication process (both before and after publication).
Tag wiki excerpts are great, but underused, so if we think very few people will correctly understand a tag without referring to its excerpt, it's probably going to be a badly used tag.
Good tags should be easy to use and understand; "manuscript" vs "publication" is a distinction that means different things to different people, so it's not a good distinction to make in a tag.
2) We already have tags more specific than "manuscript" that I think would make the manuscript tag redundant. Questions about a manuscript would probably be about
writing them, in which case they'd be covered by the writing tag
circulating them, which would be covered by preprint
submitting them for review or publication, which would be covered by paper-submission
etc.
When the more specific tags are used, they implicitly include "manuscript" - e.g. if a question has paper-submission, it is obviously about a manuscript.
You mentioned in a comment that it is wrong to use publications together with these tags. I don't think it is wrong. People use publications to distinguish between, e.g., questions on writing content that is intended for publication and questions on writing content that is intended for a thesis. It's a useful distinction.
3) Massive changes to the tag taxonomy need massive benefit to justify. This change would apply to a lot of questions, and I don't see massive benefit to this proposal.
It's not very disruptive to suggest and apply changes to tags on a small scale (i.e., less than a dozen questions). Changes on a large scale are more disruptive to existing users, and I prefer not to do them unless there's a very good reason. (And of course, large changes should preferably have a lot of support on meta before anyone undertakes them.)
We have many broad tags such as [tag:publications] which I believe that should be broken into more precise tags and manuscript is one of them. A researcher writes a manuscript, circulates his manuscript and submits his manuscript to a journal or a conference. If we don't have a manuscript tag, the user probably goes for a publications tag or a paper tag incorrectly.
@Enthusiastic I updated my answer in response to your comment.
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1184 | What is the website policy on naming brands in questions/answers?
I was reading the question Should I inform students that there are cheaper alternatives to the on-campus book store? and I saw that some brand names are included in the posts. Even after it is edited and the brand names are omitted from the title of the question, there still we see some brand names in the question text and/or in the answers posted to it (such as this answer, this one, etc).
In that question it is being asked about informing students about cheaper ways to buy the books and mentioning a website's name or a book store does not make any essential improve to the question, so it seems it is not necessary to mention those brand names and omitting them from questions/answers does not disturb the question at all.
Because I think mentioning a particular brand name is not always the main point to be mentioned and the question is about something more general, I think the correct way to edit such posts is to make the post more general like this:
before edit:
I think the [Brand Name] has some advantages in a particular area.
after edit:
I think one of the brands (which it's name is not mentioning) has some advantages in a particular area.
Is it ethical to include brand names (such as universities, trademarks, companies, etc.) in questions and what is the website's policy on such issue?
Should they be edited or not? And how is a correct sample of edit to such posts? (Please give an example to show the correct edit of such questions; like: before edit and after edit)
I was the original poster of the question. I don't believe I did anything unethical, but I certainly don't mind that my post was edited.
@Anonymous I am bringing your question as an example, take a look at this question. I see many other questions in which the poster names universities, brands, etc. and his question may have negative impact on the reader's opinion about that name. For instance, somebody says, University A is better than University B; this may have bad effect and bad-advertisement of a good university which may suffer from problems in only specific areas compared to university B.
@Anonymous In my opinion, you could ask this way: The bookstore at my university is an outpost of a well-known publisher/bookshop, charges much higher prices than can be found on an online book store [...] This will not name any brands, also will not disturb to your question too.
There is no universal right-or-wrong answer here. The issue is that users should not be "promoting" products and companies on the site—including their own universities and departments!
However, so long as the poster isn't promoting, I don't see a huge problem to leave specific manufacturers and brands in a question or answer—particularly if there is some relevance to the question.
I think the user should not be slandering the product/company either.
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1106 | How to precisely know which question is opinion-based and how to avoid conflicts
In this question of mine, something is asked which I strongly believe that it is not opinion based and can be precisely answered by members of academia. However, one of the users thought this question is basically opinion based and became so angry with it. His main problem seems to be that if the person asking question is not a faculty member, it is not his duty to ask why something seems odd in the university and because he is a student, he should never think about the logic behind the actions.
My question here is, even if a question seems opinion-based; the memebrs of community have some strong reasons for and againts it. If every one has his own way of doing something, it does not mean that everybody is right because it depends on the opinions. Even there are different ways of doing something, by comparing the reasons and experiences, we can reach the point that there is an answer to the questions (which are almost seem to be opinion based).
Could you please help me understand what the problem is with this question and how should I avoid such conflicts in the community?
Disagreements are not considered conflicts here, and in fact are part of the expected behavior on this site. Unless someone is speaking in hostile or rude language (that is, the words they use are offensive, not the fact that they disagree with you) in which case you should flag those comments, always assume that no one is angry at you, no one is trying to upset you, etc.
@ff524 thanks for your comment, you are right; but in some cases I faced high degrees of angriness rudeness in the comments. I'm coming to the point that Q&As are preferred to be asked or replied by professional researchers; not a masters student whose job is thought to be only "studying for masters" not thinking about "why"s and "why not"s or about a correct and normal way of teaching and he is limited to these his cheap questions, nothing more. Even I ask for the problems in my questions, it is assumed to be ingenuousness.
Unless someone uses hostile or offensive words, the fact that someone thinks your question is not suitable, and persists in thinking it is not suitable even after you present your opinion, is not anger or rudeness. Someone misinterpreting your intent in asking a question is also not considered anger.
Furthermore, don't take one person's comments as a general statement of the opinions of the site. Anything said in a comment or answer on the main site is the opinion of an individual. The place to get a feel for site-wide opinions is on meta, where people vote up/down to indicate agreement/disagreement.
If your question simply asks "Which is better, X or Y?" then it is vague and should be closed for that reason. It does not make clear what you mean by "better". Here are some ways that it could be clarified, and the likely results:
"Is there a general consensus in the community as to which of X or Y is better?" That may be a reasonable question, but very likely the answer is just "No, there is no consensus". If you already know a significant number of apparently reasonable people preferring each alternative, that pretty much establishes that there is no consensus and you don't need to ask.
"Would lots of people please state their preferences between X and Y, so that I can try to get a sense as to which is more preferred?" This is a poll question. Not acceptable.
"Have controlled surveys been done to determine what fraction of people prefer X over Y?" A reasonable question, but may not get an answer if no such surveys exist or nobody here knows about them. (You might get an answer explaining why nobody is likely to ever to have done such a survey.)
"What are some arguments in favor of X and Y, respectively?" Probably an acceptable question, but note that it does not attempt to give a conclusive answer as to which is better.
"Is there objective evidence as to which of X and Y is more likely to result in desirable outcome Z?" Here you have an objective question that may have an objective answer. Notice that the subjective term "better" has been replaced with a specific criterion. In the question at hand, for instance, one could ask "Is one of these approaches to choosing thesis topics associated with higher graduation rates?" Or, higher job placement rates, more publications, etc. Note that you could get different answers depending on which criterion you choose: maybe one approach makes it more likely that you will graduate but with fewer papers. And in many cases it may be that no study has been done, or nobody here knows about it, and in that case you will probably not get an answer. (You might get an answer explaining why such a study is not likely to exist.)
"However, one of the users thought this question is basically opinion based and became so angry with it." I explicitly commented that I was not angry. "His main problem seems to be that if the person asking question is not a faculty member, it is not his duty to ask why something seems odd in the university and because he is a student, he should never think about the logic behind the actions." That is again something that I mentioned in a comment that I was not saying. I am starting to wonder if there may be language issues here.
Anyway: a discussion about whether opinion-based questions can indeed have objective answers is surely not going to ensue. If the community feels the question is too opinion-based then it will be closed; if not, it won't.
As is -- in my opinion, obviously -- the question lacks nuance in a fatal way. There is not an abstractly, globally best relationship between advisor and student. Thinking that there might be is: well, I can't think of a word other than naive. A similar naivete applies to the person who thinks that there is a best way to teach or TA a class, or that all women (or all men) want the same thing in a dating relationship, and so forth. What a master's degree is, and what constitutes a master's thesis, is probably the most highly variable quantity in all of academia. Even within my own department, the variation in standards and approaches to master's theses is extreme. In fact, with respect to the dichotomy that the OP proposes, most people who have advised several students have done both practices, because each is appropriate in some situations. Many advisors and students adopt a combination of the two alternatives within the course of the thesis work. The idea that advisors do not act based on some globally held "strong reasons" is an important nuance that the OP seems to be missing.
My discussion in the comments with the OP as a master's student was an attempt to find an acceptable question behind the question asked and an attempt to find out how the answer to the question would actually be useful to him in his current situation. (As written, the question is either from an "abstract" perspective -- which, as I have tried to explain above, I find almost wholly vacuous -- or from the advisor's perspective. Since the OP is not actually advising master's students but in fact is a master's student, there is a certain disingenuousness here.) This did not go well: he did not want to do this. That's fine, but of course it makes the question more likely to get closed.
There's no best TA method but there is a balanced way of teaching. I'm not trying to be ingenuous, I directly told that I'm a masters student, not advising any students. That's a question which I couldn't understand which method is more accepted by academica and why. That's why I asked for other's experiences. OK you are right, I am not even as a brave masters student to ask nice questions which a masters student at this level should ask. Could you please tell me how this question should be edited or how should I change my attitude in asking questions that this conflict doesn't happen again?
There's no best TA method but there is a balanced way of teaching. — No, there are thousands of balanced ways of teaching. Some would be more effective for me as an instructor; others would be more effective for me as a student.
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1116 | Question about some rejected Tag edits
Many of my tag edit suggestions are rejected. Despite the fact that some of them are correctly judged, for many of those rejections I can not find any good reason. Could you please explain your reasons for rejecting some of them?
education
What is the reason that the tag edit is rejected because of incorrectness and minor edit? Which tag excerpt is better? The previous five word excerpt or the suggested one with two exact sentences that address the questions under the tag?
homework
Where is incorrectness in my edits?
repository; recommendation-letter
Looking at the proposed edits to these two tags, I can not understand why that edit is too minor; why the suggested edit is not substantive improvements addressing multiple issues in the post. The question here is was the previous tag better than the suggested one?! I don't think so.
publishing
Why do we need the exact copy and paste of excerpts and wiki notes? The reader goes to the excerpt and reads the exacet copy of the wiki. I think the excerpt should be deleted and give the chance to the tag to be seen and better excerpts be provided to it. Exact copy and pasting was useless so the excerpt was deleted.
poster
In this question, why do we need to always have the word "Questions about..." or "Queries about..." every body know that this site is a Q&A website. The only use of excerpts are to give a clue to the reader that what is being questioned. So, those extra words are omitted.
nsf
in this tag, the complete information is written in the wiki, so in the excerpt we only need to attract the reader's attention to the abbreviation of NSF, why do we have extra information in the excerpt?
I think there are two issues at play here:
None of the above edits are substantial. They are all adding very general, basic knowledge, which doesn't really serve to add anything to the page.
For some of the edits there seems to be a language barrier as well. The education and reference letter ones specifically stand out to me as containing awkward verbiage and grammar.
For the NSF tag specifically, you seem to have removed useful information. Not sure why you did that.
As with other types of edits, tag edit should substantially improve the content. Wordsmithing and/or minor changes will likely not pass the bar as a useful edit.
We should compare the suggested edits with the previous ones; as if they are adding something to a very basic excerpt or they are editing a good one. Specifically, in the education, what's the use of previous excerpt "General questions on higher education"? Or exact copy/paste of the wiki text, or constantly using the "Questions about...". According to this question, there are good tags in this site
@Parsa Even if the previous tag wiki was not great, if you are not significantly improving it you shouldn't edit it. Otherwise we would waste a lot of time reviewing edits that change a few words without making anything better.
Reviewing edits that are trying to improve the structure and punctuation of a tag is not waste of time at all. As good instance of tag excerpts, Stack Overflow has perfect tags, none of the excerpts in the Academia similar to those tags. By such rejections, the tags will never be improved anyway.
@Parsa the idea is that you should not make edits only for minor improvements, since they take time and resources to review. You should make "minor" improvements when you anyways are also making "major" improvements. That's the site policy.
I am not convinced at all. I repeat, just compare tags in Stack Overflow web site and Academia. Most of the tags in academia are too basic. Most of such minor edits will significantly improve the existing good tags on this site.
@Parsa - Just because an edit was approved doesn't mean it should have been approved. If you will improve them, make it substantial.
@eykanal I agree and that's why I am saying the previous tags should be reviewed; even minor edits.
@eykanal all the suggested edits in the tags mentioned in the question are substantial (as the previous ones are not comparable to the style of the tags in other websites on StackExchange). As it is obvious, they are rejected by preference of the moderator.
@Parsa - Moved discussion to [chat].
I rejected education because the questions in this tag (and in general, the word education) are not about "period of time in a person's life when he attends academic institutes." They are about education as "the process of receiving or giving systematic instruction" (Merriam Webster's definition). Therefore, the suggested edit is incorrect.
Other edits were rejected because they did not constitute a substantive improvement (as eykanal explained). (It shows that I rejected homework for being incorrect, but I meant to reject it for being minor; just clicked the wrong button.)
The criteria I apply for deciding whether an edit is a "substantive improvement" or not is as follows:
Is the new tag excerpt/wiki better than the old one at helping users understand how/when to use the tag? Then accept.
Does the new tag excerpt/wiki fix a major error? (Not just a matter of style, but something that is actually not correct). Then accept.
Else, reject.
The other edits you list did not meet either of the criteria for being a "substantive improvement," and so they were rejected for being "minor."
Finally, some edits were rejected because they remove useful information. I'm not sure why you would do that. If you think the information could be better, then improve it, don't just remove it.
Thanks, but I am not convinced with the answers at all.
@Parsa Please feel free to discuss in [chat]
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1128 | How to decide for tag delete action
I have noticed that the moderator has deleted the tag I created contribution.
The process was this:
She felt the tag is duplicate;
She posted a question on Meta to ask about the usefulness of the tag;
after less than one day (22 July), without any answers supporting to delete the tag The tag is deleted.
I want to know, how many answers in a delete proposal on meta is required to delete the tag?
I am feeling that the moderator is having wrong adaptation of the site's policies and is imposing her personal desires on new user; which she directly brings the user's problem to meta or chat and after one day, she does every thing she wants. Where is this policy written on help center, I have read the help center triple times and found no sign of such policy and process that described above.
This action is against the following instructions on help center because it was not patient, respectful, did not led by example and more important it was not fair.
When I read the help center for this moderation action,
We generally expect that moderators:
- are patient and fair
- lead by example
- show respect for their fellow community members in their actions and words
are open to some light but firm moderation to keep the community on track and resolve (hopefully) uncommon disputes and exceptions
In that short time the answer by the same person calling for the deletion received 6 upvotes, which clearly indicates that there were people in agreement. And since it seemed quite clear that people agreed, it is usually a good idea to get rid of the tag before too many questions are tagged with it.
@TobiasKildetoft I have no complaint about why the tag is removed. I am arguing that such rapid actions is never indicated in the help center "as the only reference to site policies"; even, there is no answer supporting the idea of deleting the tag. It is clear that personal preferences are assumed to be the site policy which are completely against the written introductions in Help Center.
@Parsa: You have said below that you understand why the tag was deleted—because it was a duplicate. If that's the case, then how are "personal preferences" involved?
@aeismail Because I don't find any written instruction to the moderators to quickly do their preferences or whatever they want. It is written in help center that moderators are expected to be patient (as cited above). Do you assume such rapid action a patient one?! I don't think so.
"Patient" does not mean "wait for the community to make up its mind." "Patient" here means something closer to "help users work within the guidelines, even if they keep running afoul of the guidelines." That does not mean, though, that we just leave what we perceive to be in error to stand in the meantime.
If you do not "wait for the community to make up its mind.", bringing what you want to do to the meta to see what community thinks about is useless.
@Parsa historically anything on meta with more than 5 up votes represents a pretty clear consensus. There are not many things that have more than 10 up votes. Waiting longer doesn't seem to provide benefit and if a mod misjudges the community desire, the community can reverse the decision.
@StrongBad If we refer to help center of site, there is no regulation on deleting tags. There is no defined procedure like "bring it to meta and delete it immediately".
@Parsa: There's a clear strategy for expressing disapproval with an action—you post a question on meta about it, which you've done. You've also seen already that the votes are pretty strongly not in your favor. A moderator not handling things the way you feel they should be done is not a violation of your rights or privileges.
I am feeling that the moderation action towards me is not in the way described in help center: Who are the site moderators, and what is their role here?
In your view, what should someone do if they think there is something wrong with something you've done on this site?
@ff524 Moderators/Users have equal right on flagging.
I don't really understand what you mean by that. This isn't a question about flagging, it's a question about retagging. Any user with at least 2k rep can retag a question exactly as a moderator would (and any user can suggest a retag). There were no special moderator privileges in play here.
You asked about something. The problem here is that as a normal user you brought the problem to meta which was completely a right action. But in less than half a day, you used your moderation privilege to delete the tag (to reach the thing you personally wanted). This is completely against the normal behaviour which is expected from a moderator. You bring the problem to meta, and you solve your problem yourself by deleting the tag?!
Deleting a tag is not a moderation privilege. A tag is deleted automatically when there are no questions with the tag on them, which any 2k user can do by retagging the questions (which is exactly what I did). So actually, everything that happened here involved me acting as a normal user, not a moderator.
Being a moderator or a high reputation user makes no difference. Your impatience in deleting the tag is more important. Moreover, the un-used tags are automatically deleted in 6 months not in half a day!
And as a normal user, when still there is a discussion on the usefulness of tag, why did you re-tagged rapidly to delete the tag?! It is kind of bad use of a privilege.
The process that automatically removes unused tags runs once per day (possibly a different time of day on different SE sites). It takes less than 24 hours for an unused tag to be deleted (depending on what time the tag becomes unused, and what time the process runs on that site). Definitely not 6 months.
@ff524 1 hour, 1 day or 1 year; we are not discussing the time; why did you retag all the questions just to delete the tag you prefer not be in the site?! As a caring user you are trying to show, why don't you take a look at non-useful tags?! I am wondering, you say that you have no enough time and effort just to review the user's minor edits on tags, what was the reason that you spend time over bringing a problem to meta, discussing and answering it and in less than an hour, re-tagging and deleting it?! Seems you spent lots of time! Your wrong action and attitude towards me is so upsetting.
Your question seems to be: why did I address problems with this tag instead of other, old tags? The answer is, because your edits bumped the questions with those tags to the top of the list, and so I noticed them. I'm not under any obligation to go hunting for old things to fix on this site; I fix problems that come to my attention, and this came to my attention.
It is better to bring your wrong actions to your attention too. Moreover, it is also your wrong prefer that you don't like the old questions be bumped to the top of the list! It is a nice feature of the website that bring the edited questions to surface and encourages users to take a look at older questions too. Besides, if somebody wants the newest questions in the list, he can also use the feature to see the newest one. Remember, as a high reputation user or as a moderator, you have no duty to avoid any questions to be bumped to the top of the main list.
I'm not sure how bumping old questions is relevant here. I saw your new tag because it was at the top of the list; I realized it was a duplicate tag; I made sure the community felt the same way; then I fixed it. None of these actions were wrong. Your accusations against other users and moderators on this site of being "uncaring" "impatient" and "disrespectful', when we have spent a lot of time trying to help you understand the site governance and policies, is really not helping.
Yes, I accuse you and other moderators trying to show that your rapid action was a right thing, I accuse you for your every wrong action towards me (from the first day of being here), I accuse you for just giving the sense of "we are right and you are always wrong". I insist you are disrespectful, impatient and uncaring.
@Parsa Those "wrong actions" are purely so in your opinion. You are obviously very enthusiastic about participating in this site, which is great, but please try to slow down a bit and get to know how things are generally done around here before doing too many "moderation" things (such as editing things).
@TobiasKildetoft I appreciate this comment of yours indeed. But, doing edits is part of the privilege available to new users, so let's don't assume it "too many moderation things"; if new users were not allowed to do edit actions, they were banned by the website, not by these moderators preference that want to sit new users down and force them to stop and do whatever they want, not whatever is described in the site's help center. [continue to the next comment]
If it is too many edits, why the website has not put any limit on the number of edits each person can do on a day? They say we don't have enough time and effort to review your edits (!), if you don't have time why did you accept moderation responsibility? They have to review users edits, not just to reject their activities, not just to delete them. By this way, little by little, new users get used to the website's collaborative feature of edit. [continue to the next comment]
You think I'm wrong and I think their moderation behavior toward me is their pure opinion, not the website's policy. In the case of that tag, when she posted a question about the usefulness of the tag, I found it constructive. I was waiting for comments and answers to the question. But she rapidly answers her own question and suggestion to delete tag in less than half a day! I came back to work and saw she did what she wanted! It was amazing. Users should be respectful to each other by their actions, when she does not tolerate a new user's suggestion, how can I assume it a respectful behavior?
The tag was deleted because it was a duplicate. There is nothing unique in the contribution flag that is not already covered by authorship. I tried to find a counterexample under which such a tag would complement rather than simply "fork off," and couldn't come up with one. Moreover, I do agree that I don't see how the tag fit the questions you applied them to, which is also not a good sign.
One important point also to make: please don't treat "rollbacks" of your actions as personal attacks. The moderators are trying to make the community as useful as possible for everyone. One of the ways we do this is to keep things simple is to keep tag proliferation to a minimum. (Hence the decision to delete the tags.)
I have no complaint about "why it is deleted" but I don't find any reason to that rapid delete action; moderator should give time to discuss on the reasons. If every moderator does such rapid action, what will be the use of a "community"? There is no even a supporting answer to the suggestion in that short period of time!!
There was no additional answer—but why should there be? A sizable number of people "signed on" to the existing answer. Why should I or someone else post an additional answer that basically says "I agree with what's been said here." (Or do you mean an answer supporting your viewpoint?)
But the point of moderators is to enable community moderation. You can't always wait for the community to develop a consensus. That's why Stack Exchange has moderators and "power users" to handle such issues.
I posted no answer, because I opened the tag; why should I support my action by extra useless supporting answers? When somebody opens a tag, it means that they are supporting the idea of a new tag.
You could have laid out in greater clarity why you thought the tag was needed in addition to the [tag:authorship] tag.
The problem here is not the tags or suggested edits, but rapid and impatient action of the moderator.
@Parsa based on your past behaviour, if we waited longer, you may have added the tag to tens of questions, making a lot of work to clean up. In general, as a new user, you may want to ask about things before acting. A meta question proposing the tag and highlighting some example questions to apply the tag to would have been very useful and avoided this issue.
@StrongBad Based on "you may have done something" you can not judge me. I am not an annoying or interrupting person. Moreover, as a moderator, you should be patient and show respect by your action and I don't think this comment of you shows respect in action to me.
@Parsa: You did "do something"—you applied the tag inappropriately to two of the three questions you did apply it to. That's enough.
@aeismail in which part of the help center is it written that two or three irrelevant application of tags should result tag delete? Also, there are many non-useful tags in the site that are linked to non-relevant questions, based on your comment, they also should be deleted but never deleted! Never edited! Even a new user edits them, he is banned and rejected!
It's written here: "As a general rule, you should avoid creating new tags if possible, and new users are not allowed to create new tags." The tag was clearly not needed, and ff524 was well within her rights to act.
And if you feel tags are being improperly used, flag them. If enough of your peers agree, things can be changed.
@aeismail New users with 300 reputation or less are not allowed to create new tags automatically by website. Why are you referring this to answer me? Was I a user with less than 300 reputation on the day I created the tag?!
Since you have the reputation, you can create tags. However, the tag was a duplicate, and therefore unnecessary. ff524 was therefore free to delete the tag without notification or warning. You are free to make changes subject to what your reputation allows, but the mods and power users can "veto" changes they feel are not constructive. Those are the rules of how Stack Exchange sites work. If you don't like them, there's not much we can do about it—but you are no more entitled to exemptions from the rules than anyone else.
"[...] but you are no more entitled to exemptions from the rules than anyone else." Who wants exemptions from the rule?! I want the moderator and high reputation user to decide based on the written policy of the site, not her preferences; and to be patient, fair, respectful by her actions exactly as described in the help center of the site. Why don't you even think that rapid action rose such issue and you are just trying to say that everything we do is right and everything you do is problematic?
Your actions were wrong here, not hers. No amount of arguing on your part will change that fact. Her actions are consistent with the policies, yours were not, as I have shown you. If you are unwilling to see that, I cannot help you any further.
@aeismail "Her actions are consistent with the policies, yours were not [...]" You'd better to refer to written policies in the help center, not what you think is correct or your/her own preferences.
In this community, it's not about waiting a specific length of time, but about waiting until we can see what the community wants. Once it is clear that there is community agreement on something - whether closing a question, deleting a tag, or something else - we act.
If there is a lot of disagreement on something - for example, a lot of back-and-forth between many users in the comments on whether to migrate a question - it's usually a good idea wait a bit before taking action. If there is not much disagreement - for example, if something has many votes in one direction and only a couple in the other direction - it's clear what the community wants, so we can take action more quickly. There is nothing to gain from waiting in that case.
In this case, the answer suggesting the tag is not useful or necessary had 7 upvotes and one downvote. There were no answers suggesting that the tag is useful or necessary. It seems like the majority of the community agrees that the tag is unnecessary, and there wasn't any ongoing debate on the issue, so I took action to delete it.
Note that tag deletion - like virtually all action on this site - can be undone. So if it turns out after a few days that the majority actually wants this new tag, we can reinstate it.
I can not see this policy in the "help center" but I can see there an instruction for the moderators to be patient and to respect the user's actions not only the way they talk to them, but also by their actions.
Moreover, why you should always be the one who is proposing deleting of my actions? If the other users of the community feel like my question needs any rapid action, they will propose it on meta or tag it. As an instance, how many users have proposed an edit on my questions in meta? I mean, how many of them brought such discussions about my posts on site to meta?! I can not understand why you always want to conflict me and show you are the powerful moderator who has the right to stop me?!
@Parsa When you comment on a new user's question that you think it needs improvement, or flag it for closure, are you trying to show that you are powerful and can stop them? Or just trying to improve the site? All I'm trying to do is help this site run according to what the majority of the community wants (as expressed through the community's flags, votes, and meta participation). I'm sorry if you can't see that.
Flagging or commenting is something different from rapid actions, making problem bold, bringing the problem to meta, etc. There are many many other tags on tag list which need more rapid action, why don't you take a look at them?!
And the situation becomes worse when a new user like me does review on the useless tags and you, again, stop me; constantly reject and ban me from doing further reviews for at least seven days (as a consequent of your impatient and not light and respectful moderation as described in help center of site). What happened next? I have no courage in reviewing tags anymore! This is the effect of your model of moderation and your preferred method of moderation under the shell of the policy of the site!
@Parsa: The SE review system is automated—we don't choose what comes up for review; that's determined by the users interacting with the system. When you change a tag, we get a notice; when a user with insufficient reputation edits a post, we get a notice; when someone casts a close vote, or recommends a question to be placed on hold, we are notified. The banning likewise is not imposed by the moderators, but is a consequence of having the changes rejected. (cont.)
@Parsa: As I mentioned in my reply above—we are not attacking you. You are clearly a motivated member of the community, and your participation is welcome. However, moderators need to act in the best interests of the site, not of individual users.
@aeismail I'm in favor of reviewing the user's activities as you described above; but rejecting the activities based on your preference of the policies is something non-constructive. As I mentioned here, the moderator doesn't care about the site's problematic tags, when something is proposed she bans it. I do not assume it to be a caring moderation act. Also I assume it to be using moderation tools to stop an enthusiast new user. If she is caring about the contents of the site, she'd better allow caring user to do his edit activity and put time and effort to review the edits, not just reject.
@Parsa: What is the more likely scenario: (a) Moderators have vendettas against an "enthusiast[ic] new user," or (b) moderators make decisions in the best interest of the site, and reject changes they feel are inappropriate, incorrect, or otherwise not helpful?
@aeismail Basically the second one but based on my experience, I am in doubt.
@parsa a number of your actions have resulted in regular users raising flags to alert moderators to possible issues. Most of the regular users chose to flag issues rather than bring them up in chat or meta. Many of these flags are for issues that are borderline and it is not clear if a moderator should take unilateral action. Based on when the flags are being raised, this results in ff524 handling most of these issues and therefore needing to raise the issues on meta to try understand the communities view.
@StrongBad I don't agree with you in the case of that tag which she brought to meta. It was her personal bad feeling about that tag not a moderation action.
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1138 | An excerpt/wiki improve suggestion to [tag:LaTeX]
When a user wants to ask a question about latex then he probably goes to tag his question by latex. In the excerpt of such tag we read:
LaTeX is a document markup language and document preparation system for the TeX typesetting program. Note that http://tex.stackexchange.com is specifically dedicated to LaTeX (and TeX) questions.
Even in the tag wiki there is no exact guide to the user which are the on-topic questions about TeX for Academia.
This tag excerpt/wiki may have to be improved in the following areas;
The user is very probable to be mis-understood into which website should s/he ask the question. As in the excerpt does not distinguish the exact questions which are on-topic for Academia. I think that the excerpt should include the following points:
The user may ask about the use of LaTeX in his academic publications; such as the use of LaTeX in preparing manuscripts for the journals.
Technical issues should go directly to the LaTeX.SE and are off-topic Academia.
When the link to http://tex.stackexchange.com is mentioned, the link may be better to be replaced by TeX/StackExchange or something similar to avoid using direct links.
Also there are some questions about other typesetting softwares like Microsoft Word and Libre Office which there is no tag for them.
So, the question here is whether there is any need to improve the latex tag and if you are positive with this edit, what should be the improved tag excerpt/wiki look like?
Or, Is it a better idea to create a new typesetting tag and merge the existing latex into it to avoid misunderstandings of the existing tag and also cover other typesetting questions.
In general, I think that the current description is fine (maybe "Technical questions should be asked on [site]" instead of the current form). Ad. 2. Why?
@PiotrMigdal what about the typesetting tag?
I am not sure. Could you provide example questions that would benefit from this tag? If it is less than 5, we can use our time more efficiently than discussing it.
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1658 | How should users correctly refer to Academia website in their posts on Stack Exchange websites?
One of the users commented on one of the meta's questions;
This site is referred to as just "Academia", "Academia.SE", or
"Academia Stack Exchange" - the phrases "the Academia" "the Academia
website" or "the Academia's website" are not grammatically correct.
Is there any preference, policy or regulation, may be a page in the help centre or a question on the main site's meta; to help the users about the correct way of calling Academia's name in the users' comments, question and answers?
Here is the tour in the help center.
You can see that it refers to this site as "Academia Stack Exchange" (full name) and "Academia" (short name).
"Academia.SE" and "Academia.SX" are popular abbreviations for the full name ("Academia Stack Exchange").
There are various grammatical rules about using definite articles (like "the") before a proper noun (like "Academia"). We don't use "the" before the name of a website, book, movie, etc. Hence "the Academia" is wrong. It's a matter of English grammar, not an Academia-specific preference, policy or regulation.
You could argue for "the academia Stack Exchange" as a short way of saying "the Stack Exchange site about academia," but that would not apply to "the Academia." (And it would generally be strange to refer to this site that way while on this site. It makes more sense to use this if you're writing for an audience that might not know there is a Stack Exchange site about academia.) This would also not apply to "the academia website" (as a short form of "the website about academia"), because there is more than one website about academia - this would be an incorrect usage of "the."
"Academia website" is also wrong. "Academia" is the name of the website; in English we don't follow the name of a thing with the type of thing it is. (Unless the type of thing it is happens to be part of the name, like "Columbia University".. or "Academia Stack Exchange"!)
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1577 | What to do with unanswered questions?
I did a search to find unanswered questions on website and found about 141 questions which have no answers and are still open, these are the questions which seem to be on-topic on site because they are not closed as off-topic or duplicate.
How can users be encouraged to take a look at these questions and answer them, or review them to find out whether there duplicates of them available on website? Should some of these questions reviewed to find out whether they are eligible to remain opened?
In my opinion, some of these questions are good ones, however some other may not be so good to remain opened.
I don't think that the number of unanswered questions that on Academia.SE is actually a problem. The current percent answered is 98%, which is quite healthy for an SE site (see the site rankings by percent answered). If the percentage starts climbing, it would be worth thinking about what to do, but at least for the few months I've been here these numbers have been pretty steady, so I don't think there is any harm in letting them be handled (or not) by the natural dynamics of the site.
How can users be encouraged to take a look at these questions
There's already an "Unanswered" tab that directs some attention to these.
If you think a question is especially interesting, you can offer a bounty to get it more attention.
Should some of these questions reviewed to find out whether they are eligible to remain opened?
I don't think unanswered questions deserve extra scrutiny.
"Abandoned" questions are already deleted automatically as follows:
If the question is more than 30 days old, and ...
has −1 or lower score
has no answers
is not locked
...or...
it was closed and migrated to a different site
... it will be automatically deleted.
If the question is more than 365 days old, and ...
has a score of 0, or a score of 1 in case of deleted owner
has no answers
is not locked
has view count <= the age of the question in days times 1.5
has 1 or 0 comments
... it will be automatically deleted.
A systematic effort to close old questions in large numbers would probably be disruptive, since new questions would take longer to close.
I don't think such a systematic effort is necessary, but anyone undertaking it anyways should rate limit so as to avoid disruption.
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1538 | Why Academia.SE does not have events on chat rooms?
Looking at the chatroom's events section, we can see that there are many events available for other stack exchange websites; none of which are for Academia.
Is there any reason (or possibly kind of policy) for not having chatroom events for Academia or is this because the website does not need such events? Can we have some events for this website too? What advantages or disadvantages would it be for the website by having events for this website?
It's been suggested before here and here.
Nobody seemed interested enough to organize it at the time.
As has been stated there, if someone goes to the trouble of organizing an event and demonstrates that there is community interest, a mod can create the "event" in the software.
People are not interested and it is asked previously. So downvote my question and vote it to be closed.
@EnthusiasticStudent: Those questions are about specific types of event and thus not necessarily the same. Also, you can vote to close your own question, if that reflects your opinion. Finally, just being a duplicate is no reason for a downvote.
@Wrzlprmft If those questions are not necessarily related to this one, why this user is posting them as examples to this suggestion? I think that if they are irrelevant, the user only posts them to say that my suggestions are always useless. Also, this person most of the times tries to stop me on this site, that close comment was due to her previous behaviour towards my activities on the site.
@EnthusiasticStudent This is the answer to the question "Why Academia.SE does not have events on chat rooms?", not a comment on the premise of the question. The reason we don't have events is because although events have been suggested, the suggestions have never yet matured into fruition.
If anyone has any interest in chat room events, please post a new question here in meta with a suggestion! We're definitely open to hosting these if there's interest!
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1268 | Should the reputation tag be edited to cover questions about individuals too?
By reading the tag excerpt about reputation;
The perception of the quality of a journal, conference, or university
by a specific community or the general public. Also: how reputation
develops and factors influencing reputation.
it seems that this tag only covers questions about reputation of journals and research institutes; all but individuals. By reading a recent question about the reputation of individuals;
How to judge the reputation of a research group or professor for good quality research for PhD?
this question comes to mind that;
Does this tag cover questions about persons too?
If it should not be used, the question should be edited and if it is allowed on the questions about people's reputation, we should change this tag's excerpt.
I don't think that list ("journal, conference, or university") was ever meant to be exclusive.
In any event, now it reads:
The perception of the quality of a journal, conference, university, or other academic entity by a specific community or the general public. Also: how reputation develops and factors influencing reputation.
so as to not exclude questions about the reputation of: an individual, research group, department, group of universities, type of journal (e.g. open access), publisher, preprint repository, or anything else that might be relevant to academia.
There are currently (April 2020) 94 questions with this tag and it is used inconsistently. The alternatives seem to be to edit the wiki to include personal-reputation as well or to create a new tag for that. At the moment the solution is tractable either way. But journal reputation and personal reputation or academic reputation seem very different.
I suggest that this needs some resolution. The answer of ff524 suggests expanding the definition. I'd be fine with that, but would like some guidance first.
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1270 | What's really wrong with bumping questions to the active questions list?
I can not understand what is wrong with bumping older questions to the top active list of questions by editing them.
If somebody wants to reach the newest questions asked on Academia, he can move to the Newest Questions page and read all the newest ones.
I think it's a good feature to have older questions be bumped to the active list; some of these questions have been inactive for more than one or two years. Most of newer users may have not read such questions. They can read them and answer some of them. Some of these older questions have problems such as tags, typos, etc and users may see them in the active list and edit them as well.
Could you please declare me, what harms can bumping older and inactive
questions to the active questions list have to site? and what benefits
has not-bumping to the Academia?
ff524 has the situation nicely condensed. It's no big deal to bump one or two questions now or then. It's a problem to edit a whole bunch of old questions in this manner, for the reasons ff524 suggests. (Also, remember that edits to old questions should be substantial, not simple formatting or typo corrections!_)
Why down-votes? I am asking for reasons of a policy. I am not suggesting something! I am asking a question.
Well, you were laying out an argument for why you think "bumping" questions is OK. The downvotes are expressing disapproval of those ideas.
@EnthusiasticStudent meta votes are a little different than votes on the main site. Generally it is inappropriate to down vote a good answer on the main site that you disagree with, but on meta votes are typically used to express agreement/disagreement with the content of a post.
@StrongBad I see, but in my main question on this post, I am asking: Could you please declare me, [...] I need a declaration on a policy. I can not understand whats wrong with it, which has 4 down-votes! Shouldn't I asked this question?!
The downvotes probably indicate disagreement with the opinion that you state in the post: "I think it's a good feature to have older questions be bumped to the active list" There's nothing wrong with getting downvotes on meta; it doesn't mean there's something wrong with the question, or that you shouldn't have asked it.
Here are all the reasons a post could end up on the top of the "Active Questions" list:
New question (also visible at top of "Newest Questions" list), which hasn't gotten any attention/answers at all yet.
New answer (to an old or new question), which users should vote up or down to show whether it's a good answer or not.
Major edit to clarify or add new information to a question or answer, that might make users want to revise their original up/down/close/delete votes.
A question that was closed (and therefore, didn't get any answers before) has been fixed, and so it's reopened.
User added bounty to question to get it more attention (also visible on "featured" questions list)
Unanswered old question is automatically bumped by Community user to get it more attention.
An edit to an old question that already got a lot of attention and has good answers (or an edit to one of its answers) that is a non-trivial edit or retag that adds value. This is bumped to the top so users can review the edit and make sure it was correct, and revert it if it was not.
All of these kinds of posts/edits need some kind of attention from other users, and should be bumped to the front page.
But the things at the top of the list are generally considered more in need of attention than category #7. It's fine (even good!) if a few questions in category #7 are bumped here and there, but not if it's so many that most of the questions in categories #1-6 are pushed down the front page.
For example, imagine you spent 45 minutes composing a great, well-researched, targeted answer to a question. Then, immediately after you submit the answer, someone else bumps 20 old questions to add a tag. Nobody sees your answer now that it's all the way down the "Active Questions" list, and you don't get any upvotes for this amazing answer that you worked really hard on. This is obviously discouraging and demoralizing, and makes a good contributor not want to contribute anymore.
Or imagine you're a new user, and you posted a question because you really want an answer. But the question needed improvement, and was downvoted and closed. You work really hard to understand why the question was closed, and put in a lot of effort to improve it. Finally, after four days of working on the question, it's reopened! But 20 old questions that were edited right after your question was reopened have bumped yours all the way down the "Active Questions" list so it doesn't get any answers. As a new user, you feel discouraged, and wonder if the time and effort you put into learning how to use the site was a waste.
On the other hand, if those 20 old questions were spaced out a little so they didn't flood the front page and knock posts in categories #1-6 too far down, I can't think of any negative effects.
TL;DR: Basically, it's an issue of degree. Edit one question to bump it to the top of the page? No big deal. Edit 20 questions? That's much more problematic.
I'm a mod at one or two of the other sites, and in my experience it comes down to how people use the site. This is entirely unscientific and anecdotal
Most people skim the front page, and look for new questions to answer. One bump pushes off a newer question off the front page. I generally do say 5 in the space of an hour (which is ok). If you did 20, the front page is nearly entirely unusable. Nearly no one actually uses the newest questions tab by default. Humans are lazy, and the front page, by being the first port of call is the place most people will be.
I think another issue you should consider is why the edits, and how you can minimize the disruption. In normal situations, you come across a question, see something that needs a fix and you do it. Things that need edits in bulk are uncommon, and are rarely urgent. There are exceptions of course, but even then its something for the community to decide, organise, and carry out.
Trickling edits are polite - you get to do edits that are needed and other folks aren't inconvenienced in any way. You can't expect folk to change their behavior, but you can adjust and make a difference
Thank you so much for this answer. Could you please take a look at another question on Academia and possibly, answer it too? Suggestions for avoiding disruption when retagging?
Hardly anyone uses the "newest" tab because it's not straightforward to see it. There is no "newest" on the top questions page, which is the page you land on when you enter the site.
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1288 | What are specific considerations when reviewing posts on Academia.SE?
As the users gain higher reputations, they have access to some moderation tools which allows them to review the posts of the website. When reviewing some posts from on Academia.SE;
Basically, what odd things should a reviewer look for and edit or even rise a flag upon?
Is s/he required to leave a comment when reviewing posts? If so, please give some template comments (for probable cases).
We have a question on the main site's meta as stated in the comments, so please direct yours answer to your specific considerations about reviewing posts on Academia.SE.
This is covered in some detail at the main site meta.
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1239 | Are there any rules of thumb for choosing best tags for questions?
Choosing good tags for questions is a little hard for me. Despite reading the What are tags, and how should I use them? entry in the help center; choosing best tags is a little vague for me.
Could please give me clear clues on how to choose correct tags in an easier way? Please provide examples in your answers.
If you click on a tag, you get a list of questions using that tag. Before applying the tag, ask yourself the following question:
Would I expect to see this question in a list of questions using this tag?
For example, I removed the "grades" tag which you applied to What, if any, roads are open to graduate schools for athletes with borderline grades? because the question is not about "grades" and "grading." I would not expect to see such a question come up in that context. I would expect to see it in a question about graduate admissions. I might also expect to see it in a list of questions about athletics.
However, don't tag or retag a question if you're not certain if a tag should apply. It's better not to edit tags, particularly on old questions, if you're not positive the tags you're adding are relevant. If you think something needs new tags, then you could suggest it as a comment instead of retagging.
The guidelines I recommend are:
First read the tag wiki excerpt for the tag you are thinking of very carefully. In particular, some words have dual or ambiguous meanings (e.g. our law is about the academic discipline of law, as described in the tag wiki, not about legal problems faced by academics.) The tag wiki excerpt is supposed to define the scope of how the tag should be applied. If the tag wiki excerpt does not do this, either propose an edit to it (if you think you know how the tag should be used) or ask about that tag on meta (if you don't). If you think the excerpt does not match the way the tag has been applied, ask about it on meta.
If you're going to apply a tag, first check if there are multiple tags that cover the same meaning and scope (in their tag wiki excerpts and/or in how they are applied). If so, apply the better one (the one that's been used most consistently so far). Then propose a tag synonym (or if you don't have enough reputation to propose a tag synonym, propose it on meta).
Don't add tags that are tangential to the fundamental question at hand. For example,
If there is a question about teaching, and the OP mentions that the class is a physics class, but the question and answers would be exactly the same if the OP was teaching engineering, don't add physics.
If there is a question about applying to a PhD program, and the OP asks "I saw on the program's website that applicants are encouraged to contact potential supervisors directly - what to write on first contact?" - this is not a question about a website.
Re-tag only if you are adding meaningful information by doing so. For example, almost all of the questions on this site could potentially have phd, research, university, or professors. But adding these to a question after the fact - even if it's not really wrong - often adds no useful information. (This is, unfortunately, a somewhat subjective judgment call that not everybody will always agree on.)
Finally, as with everything else on this site, don't be upset if someone disagrees with your tags, changes them, or applies tags you think are wrong. If someone changes or removes a tag you've added, take some time to read the tag wiki excerpts, look at the questions the tag has been applied to, review the above guidelines, and try to understand why. After doing that, if you still don't understand, ask on meta. (I suggest to ask on meta, rather than in a comment or in chat, so that the discussion is preserved permanently and everybody can learn from it.)
| Stack Exchange | 2025-03-21T12:54:48.698550 | 2014-09-12T20:06:33 | {
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1306 | Do we need a tag entitled language-tests or something similar to it?
We have some questions about the minimum language requirements and also the English tests the results of which are required to be sent by students to the universities for their admissions.
We have toefl and ielts tags, but regarding the questions which are about language testing but not about those two tests, such as
Is the Cambridge Certificate of English accepted in US?
we don't have a tag to cover questions about language tests and certificates other than toefl or ielts.
Is it a good idea to create a tag entitled language-tests to cover questions with following scopes and possibly merge the toefl and ielts tags into it?
Questions about English language tests such as TOEFL, IELTS, FCE, CAE, CPE, etc.
Questions about non-English language tests
Questions about the English tests which are designed by universities
I am in favor of making toefl and ielts synonyms of language-exams.
But, I believe the appropriate way to enact this is to propose it as a tag synonym. If the synonym gets enough upvotes from users, it is activated automatically.
I just wanted to first ask it here to make sure it is relevant. Because I did not want to propose an irrelevant tag synonym...
@Enthusiastic I'm not saying that it was inappropriate to bring it up for discussion here, just that the best way to enact it would be via tag synonyms.
OK. I will propose a tag synonym.
I proposed [tag:ielts] and [tag:toefl] tags as synonyms of the [tag:language-exams] tag. Could you please up-vote them?
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1248 | Proposal to create Archiving tag and merging self-archiving tag to it
By searching the website for the term Archive, we have about 41 questions in which the archiving (directly or indirectly) is being questioned. However, in most of these posts we don't have any precise tag about archiving at all.
On the other hand, the only existing tag about archiving is self-archiving which is awarded to only two questions none of which are really about self-archiving and also, the tag does not have any excerpt and wiki.
Here is the proposal:
Creating archiving or archive tag and merging the existing self-archiving tag into it.
Some example questions which are eligible to the archive tag:
How to archive an academic blog or website?
ePrint Archive for PhD Dissertation in the Social Sciences
Archiving papers, simulation and experimental data, etc?
If you like the idea, please also include an excerpt and wiki into your answer posts; otherwise, please mention why this proposal is not benefitial to Academia.SE.
Can you identify specific questions that would benefit from an 'archive' tag? Or at least describe its potential scope in words? Right now this proposal does not explain why we need such a tag, what it would be for, and especially, how it would be different from tags like [tag:repository] and [tag:digital-libraries]
@ff524 I added example questions for the tag proposal.
The word 'archive' is used in a few ways on Academia:
as a synonym for repository, a place to which one can upload code, manuscripts, data, or other materials for storage.
as a synonym for digital-libraries, a curated collection of publications.
in reference to an 'archival publication', where 'archival' denotes that the paper is published, referenceable, and retrievable. We've had a couple of questions on this one, I don't think we'll get many more; I definitely don't think it needs a new tag.
Multi-purpose words like 'archive' are bad for tags because then the tags end up with a high level of entropy. That is, the tag is not useful for discriminating "questions about one thing" (whatever that thing may be).
Of the two questions currently tagged self-archiving, one refers to the digital-libraries meaning and one to the repository meaning.
The other questions you mention all mean 'archive' in the sense of a repository.
It doesn't seem we need a new tag for any of these, since we already have repository and digital-libraries.
Maybe it is better to edit the [tag:self-archiving] excerpt and wiki, instead of creating or merging tags as proposed in this question.
@Enthusiastic why? It's a bad tag. It doesn't carry useful meaning and it should go away. In fact, it was already on my list of retags to do; I just haven't done it yet because I'm spacing out retags so as not to flood the front page
At least we should have one tag for related questions. What tag should a person use, if he wants to ask a question about storing a webpage, paper, etc on his own laptop?
@Enthusiastic Definitely not 'archive', since that's not a common usage of the word! I'm not aware of any questions like that, so I can't comment further on what an appropriate tag might be
We should definitely think about a good tag for such usages.
@Enthusiastic can you identify such questions? I'm not aware of any, and if there are none, we probably don't need to worry about a tag for them yet
we have many examples on this search list as stated in the question.
@Enthusiastic as far as I can tell, those are mainly about [tag:repository] or [tag:digital-libraries]; if there's a substantial number that isn't, you should edit your post to list those.
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1080 | Unfair and emotional moderator decisions
My question is about how the moderators decide on the questions and comments.
Every person has the right to express his opinion. In case of the questions posted on this site, the opinions can be either in favor of a comment or question or they may not be.
Moderators have that much access that when they feel that a question is out of the policies of the site, put the question on hold. But, this should happen in case that they find a question in direct conflict to the policies of the site, not in direct conflict to what they prefer or their emotions.
Because of the level of access these guys have, when they find a question either in conflict to the policies or what they like, they immediately put the question on hold. So, how the website minimizes the moderators' faults and tries to avoid them from emotional decisions. We are all human and we all may make mistakes in our decisions.
I think that putting the questions on hold or locking the questions should not happen immediately and this level of access should be decreased.
Moderators should express why they think that the question conflicts the policies, put their opinion on poll and if some number of other users and moderators agreed, (for instance, two moderators and two users who are not moderator's access) then they put the question on hold. The site can even put some keys on each comment that the users tell that the question is broad, the comment is impolite and this way moderators can be informed what other users think about a question.
I am posting this because something like this happened to a question of mine. The moderator put a comment that this question is too broad and subjective. In this link we read:
Constructive subjective questions:
inspire answers that explain “why” and “how”
tend to have long, not short, answers
have a constructive, fair, and impartial tone
invite sharing experiences over opinions
insist that opinion be backed up with facts and references
are more than just mindless social fun
When you read that question, If we consider and accept that the question is subjective (while I do not think so), it can be assumed that it is a Constructive Question because; It inspires answers that explain “why” and “how”; tends to have long, not short, answers (as some answers were discussed on the page); invites sharing experiences over opinions (as users answered the question with their experiences); and is more than just mindless social fun (the question is not for fun at all!).
That is why I think the question has never had to be locked and put on a hold. I explained this to the moderator and they did not pay any attention to this comment.
I do not think that this question needs any edit for being completed and come out of the hold. It is a complete question.
This is what happens to the similar questions: One moderator marks the question as problematic question, two or three other moderators come and give minus mark to the question and use their access to put the question on hold. Nobody even thinks about that their decision (even it is the decision of two or three moderator) may be wrong and can be discussed more.
I think that the way moderators lock a question should be revised, their access on locking the questions should be limited and become dependent on a different policy; moreover, they should be advised to be more polite to the users (regarding to the words they use and they way they treat them and their actions).
After discussions:
The post on Academia edited thoroughly based on the discussion made here on Meta and the title of the question changed to How to encourage researchers to make more use of online resources to improve their career?; however, with respect to the people who talked about the problem here and made policies more clear; I am still not convinced by the behavior of the moderators who acted on that question.
Just to clarify: the question was put on hold because two people (not me) voted to close it as "too broad," not for being subjective. (I still think the question is subjective, but it wasn't put on hold for that reason)
Two moderators (not two ordinary users), of course, with full access to do whatever they want with the questions.
One non-moderator and one moderator, actually.
I think the immediate unfair action of the moderators without any respect to the user's excuses matters here, not counting the number of people.
@Parsa One thing you should consider is that this is a community-driven site. While there are rules, we, the community, agree with them and debate them when we disagree. Your concerns are always welcome, as long as they are reasonable. It does seem like you are trying to re-shape the site to your liking but you can see from all the votes (against your original question and in favor of the answers and comments here) that there is general agreement from the community. NOBODY here is against YOU. We are happy to have you here but you should consider the recommendations to improve your question.
I'll edit the question because it's broad and needs more examples; but, still I insist that moderators' action was problematic; besides, they have never expressed what where the points that they come to put the question on hold. In the case of such questions, if they be specific, talk about their reasons and not just being silent won't only help the users to become more familiar with their way of judging the questions, but also the discussion between the users will lead to shape a friendly community, not a police and citizen website that users should obey the moderators in anyway they behave.
I just thanks StrongBad and aeismail who patiently explained site policies in this specific case.
Coming to the question, I would have likely voted to place it on hold because I don't understand what your question is. Let's look at the last paragraph, which I think is where your question is defined:
Keeping in mind that each academic person has some careers and responsibilities, but he has to be up-to-date and pay enough attention to online life and internet; does being online improves our career or is it just a waste of time and the person will be more successful being focused on hard copies of the publications; how much is it normal for an academic person to be online?
You're asking us to answer way too many different questions: should one be online at all? Should we avoid internet use? How much should someone be online, if they're online?
Asking people how much they're online is a poll question, which is not what the Stack Exchange question-and-answer format is designed for. Similarly, there's no "experience-based" answer for if being online is a good thing—unless you're looking for a list of useful activities (which is also against the general guidelines).
The question is not a bad one in general principle, but it is a poor fit for this site.
Dear @aeismail, I agree that some changes should be applied so that the question fit the website; but the way the moderators treated the question is so upsetting to me and I do not understand this policy.
Actually, putting questions "on hold" while they're being edited is recommended SE practice.
There is a lot in your question and I am only going to tackle a bit of it now. There is a big difference between locking a question and putting a question on hold. Any user with sufficient reputation can vote to reopen a question that is on hold even if the question has not been edited and was closed by a moderator. This is a nice safety net in case the moderator acts in a manner that goes against the views of the community. Your question currently has no reopen votes or up votes, so it seems the community thinks your question should stay on hold until it is improved. At this point you should consider using the comments, chat and meta to look for ways to improve the question, or rally support to reopen the question. All you need it 5 users to vote to reopen it.
That said one moderator and one regular user voted to close the question, another moderator voiced support in the comments that the question needed to be improved, and a third moderator is now chiming in that the question seems too broad. That said the 4 of us could be wrong, and if you can find 5 people to support your cause the question can be reopened.
The question seems too broad to me because "online" really encompasses a huge number of activities. I search for research online, I mark papers online, I teach online, I review papers online, I do committee work online, I waste time on AC.Se, etc. trying to sum up the time spent on all these activities, doesn't seem right. I think the question would be better if it was narrower and only focused on one online activity.
I can not imagine when somebody doesn't check his emails, then spend time to teach online courses or to do e-reading. Some questions are inevitably about broad disasters. In case of that question, it is asking exactly about the people who don't pay attention to internet as a mean to update themselves, and how this adversely have some effects on their careers. The question is not about being online itself. I think thinking about questions like "what are the benefits of being online?" will show the difference between a broad question and the thing which is being questioned in that post.
@Parsa but I still think it would be better if you focus it on benefits of email, or online literature searches, or online feedback, or some other focused aspect of online presence.
When you use "it would be better" statement, I think we came to the point that the question is not that much broad but better things can happen. We can say that some examples of being online can be added to the question. But counting the question as a broad one without any patience was so so unfair. Moderators should hear the users, be specific and pay attention to comments and excuses of them. Give some time to the question and discuss these neat examples; not going straightly to their "put on hold" access just to say that we are so strong to make your question off!
@Parsa No, what I am saying is the question as it is currently framed is too broad in my opinion and also that in my opinion it can be fixed.
The question is about the academic people who do not pay attention to update themselves being online, it is not questioning about "being online" itself.
One of the issues raised in this post is
they should be advised to be more polite to the users (regarding to the words they use and they way they treat them and their actions).
Since I have cleaned up comments on the original question, I am posting them here for the sake of transparency, so others can decide if anybody needed to be more polite here. See image below.
Please pay attention to third comment from top in which I have written excuses to your warning but no answers have posted to this logical statement and comment. Moderators only insist their decision that the question is too broad and subjective. I insist that the action of the moderators of not being patient enough to discuss their reason to put the question on hold and not hearing their excuses are rude and impolite action towards a person who is seeking academic discussions in this website.
@Parsa: Stack Exchange is a question-and-answer site, not a discussion site. If your goal is to provoke a discussion, then this should be done in a chat room or other online forum, not as a question here.
Asking questions on a Stack Exchange site isn't obvious. And it's not a right. It's a privilege; and there's a right way to do it, and many wrong ways to do it.
In order to maintain the site's usefulness and purpose, there are a bunch of moderation tools available; in order of increasing access: to low rep users, high rep users, moderators, and SE staff.
When questions aren't a good fit, then a question is put on hold, giving the original poster, and the community, chance to put it into shape.
Warning signs that the community might choose to put a question on hold are:
several questions in one: indicating that the question is too broad, meaning that it should be split into several concise separate questions, posted one at a time;
a lot of text in the question, little of which pertains to a specific question: indicating that the OP has used the privilege of asking a question to post a rant that would be better put as a blog post;
or soliciting opinions: indicating that there won't be a right answer, and that this would be better asked in chat or on a forum, not a Q&A site.
Your question has managed to trigger all three of those warning signs for me. Others agree that the question should be put on hold. If it's not edited into shape, it will get deleted.
And please don't read into other people's intentions or motivations. You're not telepathic. Accusing others of acting on emotional responses is unconstructive.
Where is the reference for those precise instructions? Pointing these specific instructions may help the users to better frame their questions. Moreover, when there is no response to the excuses of the user, the chance of assuming the actions as emotional rises up. However, one of the moderators (@ff524) precisely reads the question and the things she mentions are so constructive that I have to thank her so much. The answers of other moderators in this page is also appreciated.
@Parsa it takes a lot of time and effort for others to give extremely detailed feedback on your questions. Therefore, you should try to learn about the community standards independently by reading the [help], looking at other questions on the site, asking on meta if you're not sure about something, and not getting upset when your question is put on hold - it's all part of the learning experience.
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1098 | Messaging system for moderators
I just wanted to ask, why there does not exist any personal messaging system in this site, just to be able to contact users? At least, moderators should have this ability to contact users personally in case they want to note them something.
As an instance, somebody wanted to inform me that it is better to change my way I am doing tag edits. Because moderators can not send personal messages to the users, he/she had to comment under one of my questions. His attitude to help me to learn something about tag edits was great (I am so thankful to this attitude), but the way he informed me, brought my energy and courage to participate in the site, down.
Note: the referenced comments were removed, since they were not relevant to the question they were posted on.
I noticed and thank you so much not because of removing the comments, but because you helped me understand the site better than before.
This is by design: http://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/431/any-way-to-send-a-personal-message-to-another-user
Moderators do have the ability to send messages to users. It's usually done only in exceptional situations.
For typical situations, commenting is the correct way to contact a user. Alternatively, there is chat.
There is also some less explicit feedback. For example, if you often raise flags, you should go back and look how many were marked "helpful" and how many "declined." A high ratio of declined flags is a signal that you should ask for help (on meta) understanding the flagging system. Similarly, you can watch your suggested edits, and if they are declined, you should take that as feedback.
Even under a non-relevant question?!
@Parsa you can directly contact other users about their activity on this site by commenting near the relevant activity. For anything else, there's [chat]
@Parsa in case someone writes a comment in a place where it isn't relevant, it should be flagged for removal
As you mentioned, putting comment on relevant activity, not any question of the user. I also believe that Academia Chat is the best way to note users about their misunderstandings.
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1070 | Not enough distinction between visited links and unvisited in the questions list
On the homepage / questions list, the distinction between visited questions and unvisited is incredibly subtle.
At the moment, I can only just see the difference between them, because they are grey and slightly darker grey.
In contrast, The Workplace uses blue vs grey, which is much better.
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3337 | The line between graduate student and undergrad questions
I'm trying to find a better home for this question. I'm not sure Academia is a good fit. This question seems like it could be taken many ways. But I thought I'd ask before doing anything. I welcome opinions and ideas.
The link is no longer valid to the original question, perhaps if you could restate it within this thread. In addition, ask yourself if the original question stated what you have tried, and what did and didn't work about it. The more targeted, focused a question is, the better the responses will be.
@J.Roibal You can still see it here But I'll probably let the issue die and delete this question.
How about you might ask the question, "What is the difference in effort required when performing research at an undergraduate level compared to a graduate level?"
One of the challenges of your original post is that it asked many questions and SE is one question per post which provides a better opportunity for complete answers.
You are welcome to ask it if you think it will be well received.
Here is a question with a similar area to yours, with some fantastic answers by experienced programmers: http://programmers.stackexchange.com/questions/150091/how-to-become-a-super-user-programming
@J.Roibal My post? @ morbidCode wrote that post. I was just a friendly mod trying to find it a home before it died.
My apologies, I thought you had written the original post. I am new to SE and just learning the process.
@J.Roibal no problem. I like the helpful attitude. Lots of ropes to learn here. I appreciate you being willing to show them to someone. :)
I think this question would probably be closed on Academia,SE with the close reason:
"The answer to this question strongly depends on individual factors such as a certain person’s preferences, a given institution’s regulations, the exact contents of your work or your personal values.
Similar questions, like How much details one should learn when studying mathematics on his own? have been closed for that reason.
A comment on the question has already expressed that it is a highly individual matter:
This depends entirely on the individual, and can only be learned from experience. Sadly there's nothing useful we can tell you beyond that. – Ixrec
I was afraid of that. Seems there isn't a good place on the stackexchange network to talk about study skills. Thanks for you time.
@CandiedOrange Maybe Personal Productivity? Check with them.
Seems damn silly to down vote this and not comment. If you have another opinion, share it.
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3448 | Can't flag close on a bountied question
This question: Convince my supervisor for me to switch my research field to his major area halfway in my PhD
seems off-topic for me as it depends on the personal circumstances and relationship between the student and advisor. As ff says, "talk to him."
Of course, whether to close should be a community decision, but I can't even flag to close because there's a bounty. This seems like a bug in the SE model as one could "protect" one's own posting from getting flagged for closure by putting a bounty on it.
Thoughts?
There's an existing feature request on main SE meta, here. Go ahead and vote for it :)
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1888 | Undergrad course exemption with interest in grad school
I believe this question about wanting to have a undergrad humanities course requirement exemption to be off-topic as it is primarily about undergraduate life.
Is it reasonable to request an exemption from certain degree requirements?
Apparently others believe that because the OP believes that this will lead to a better grad application, that it is on-topic.
Isn't this just a variation of "boat programming?" If we follow this route, then an OP can make the argument that it is on-topic just by mentioning "grad school."
So a question about "Why do I have to stay in a dorm?" would be on topic if the OP added "... I won't be able to study hard enough to get into grad school."
Isn't that the very core of boat programming?
Thoughts?
I strongly agree with your conclusion, though hadn't been able to phrase it so well. Undergraduate breadth requirements have very little to do with graduate school. In addition, the strength and particulars of their enforcement is also very institution-dependent, which also makes it a poor question for this site.
In my country, there is no comparable distinction between undergraduate and graduate, and thus I rarely, if ever, select this close reason (and rather skip reviewing questions that are deeply rooted in this system).
Nontheless, I agree with you seeing this as boat programming. With the same argument, we could allow all sorts of question on school education, as it may be relevant for university admissions – at least in my country, where said distinction between undergraduate and graduate does not exist.
Moreover, despite me not caring about the undergraduate close reason, I voted to close this question with the following close reason (which did not make it into the close notice):
The answer to this question strongly depends on individual factors such as a certain person’s preferences, a given institution’s regulations, the exact contents of your work or your personal values. Thus only someone familiar can answer this question and it cannot be generalised to apply to others.
More specifically: This question depends on your institution’s regulations on graduations or how the exception handlers will decide. Thus you have to look into your regulations or ask whoever takes care of this at your institution.
Note that this does not only apply to the first question (Is it reasonable to ask?) but also the second (What should I say?), as the arguments also depend on the regulations, preferences of the decider and other individualities.
I consider the existing answers to confirm this judgement and reflect exactly the problem why this close reason exists, namely that answers can only guess or say “it depends”. Sure, there is content going beyond this in the answers:
You request will fail and instead you should …
What you want is unethical/bad for you, because …
The answer is probably no, but trying does not hurt.
If I were to decide, I would say no because …
In neither case do the additions really answer the question.
Except for the cynical remark that the course the asker wants to avoid would have taught him to answer this question themselves, only few answers address the second question at all and only very generally. This information may actually be worth keeping but rather to some much more generalised form of the question (e.g., “What are general strategies to argue for an exemption from some examination regulation?”), which may may indeed be a good fit for our site.
So, we are left with a lot of answers that do not really compete except for the yes/no part and mostly answer different questions that weren’t actually asked. This alone strongly suggests a bad, closeworthy question.
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1913 | How can we clean up the ABD questions
There are several similar ABD questions:
When can a person be called a PhD ABD?
Can someone call themselves Dr. so and so (ABD)?
How to address a doctoral candidate who is ABD (All but Dissertation)? Is "Dr" appropriate?
Seems like they should really be collapsed, suggestions?
They're not exactly the same as one another. Respectively:
When can someone use "ABD" as a title
Can someone who is ABD call themself Dr.
What should I call someone who is ABD.
They're not eligible for merging (not exact duplicates). They're similar, sure, but we have lots of similar questions on the site - I'm not sure why these are a problem.
I think people keep asking in the hope that someone will say it's okay to use ABD after their name --
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1684 | When should we name and link specific private entities in our answers?
I wrote an answer to this question concerning how to verify whether someone went to the college/university that their resume says they went to:
Fraudulent credentials
The correct answer (in part) is to refer the OP to "National Student Clearinghouse" which is a non-profit that handles most of these type of student degree verification services.
I'm in a bit of a conflict because I'm not very happy that even my own university and alma mater have essentially sold my data to a third-party which then resells them to students and employers. I find this a morally distasteful business model and I don't want to reward NSC with a direct link to them.
But back in the Real World®, people do need to know about their existence.
Suggestions?
If omitting the link makes you feel more comfortable, do that. It takes less than a second to copy-paste the organization's name to a search box and their website is, unsurprisingly, the first hit on Goo^H^H^Ha well-known search engine.
The main criteria regarding mentioning third-party services are not to write anything that could be construed as an endorsement or advertisement, and to disclose if you have any direct or indirect involvement with that particular entity. It's completely fine to mention them and then explain why you don't like them, just as you did in your question here.
College is a business, unfortunately. I think that part of the 'agreed upon' in attending is that the university owns parts of your educational data that the institution itself grants (titles, transcripts, etc.). Sad, but that's how business works.
Personally I don't find that linking to NSC is distasteful in terms of adding the content to an answer because:
They have data on students that universities have the right to give (or sell) them
They are a verified not-for-profit entity.
Even if one has to pay for the service, it's NFP so it's not as perverted an operation in my view.
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1560 | What should we do with the "Can I get into X program with 3.xx GPA?"
There's been a couple of questions along the lines of "Can I get into X program with x.xx GPA?"
Is it possible to get into a good masters program in computer science with a 3-3.5 GPA?
Can I get a scholarship from graduate school in physics if my GPA below 3?
Should these questions be allowed? My concern is that are too broad or too particular. Thoughts?
I would like to see one nice CW question asking how to get into grad school with answers that would cover low GPA, low GRE, low TOEFL, limited research experience, bad references, bad undergraduate school, etc. A single answer with subsections might be better than multiple answers, just because a lot of information would be the same. We could then close these types of questions as duplicates.
I have created the CW question and started an answer: How does the admissions process work for Ph.D. programs in the US, particularly for weak or borderline students?
If we can get something like this started, I'm fine with typing away the section on the GRE. Then we can mark all questions as a duplicate of the primary question instead of closing.
@Compass Please do! I really like this solution!
@jakebeal potentially we want one question for masters programs and one for PhDs.
@StrongBad Yes, I think that makes sense.
I think that's a great idea. The only concern is whether these aspects would differ a lot between countries / fields (if we end up having to write something specific for applying to physics in Europe with low GRE and no research experience it would be better to have multiple questions than one super-long one).
Pragmatically, I would keep this CW question about applying in the US (or US-inspired admission systems, as in some places in Asia). Admission in Central Europe seems different enough that I see little value covering it in the same question.
and we can bracket the gpa by values of .2 with a scale from 0-100 of probability for acceptance for each group of 10 schools based on times rankings, applied to all fields... i it jokingly extreme, but i think these questions keep coming because there are so many times someone will say 'yea but i want to apply for physics phd, and my masters is chemistry with gpa 3.0, so my situation is different'. or is this pessimistic?
@user1938107 I think there is a general answer about how admissions work that can handle the majority applicants, but PhD/MS admissions and US/UK/etc are very different. I think a general US PhD question would capture a lot of the problem questions.
@user1938107 Sure, people would ask this - and we would close because we wouldn't agree that this is completely different.
@Compass you should add something to the GRE section of the CW question I created.
Noticing this recent question, I added a section for mismatched background. I don't have an answer, myself...
@jakebeal I tried to cover that in the GPA section.
@StrongBad Ah, I see that now... I've changed the header to make it clearer that this covers issues of major as well, and am voting to close the new question as duplicate.
My immediate emotional response is well summarized by Ripley's line from Aliens.
Putting things in a somewhat less inflammatory way: I think these are terrible questions and epitomize the "specific advice for a very specific situation" closing reason. The reason why they are terrible is because:
They are almost never generalizable (how many people are there with a 3.7 GPA from a mid-ranked Elbonian institution who double-majored in electrical engineering and llama-wrangling but did two semesters of research in an unrelated area with a nice professor who probably still remembers their name)
The answers pretty much always boil down to "It will probably be pretty hard, but not necessarily impossible."
Because of this, I generally vote to close these questions whenever I see them, except in the unusual circumstance that neither problem #1 nor problem #2 applies.
And yet neither of the specific questions mentioned by RoboKaren has any close votes or downvotes, from you or from anyone else.
@ff524 This is because both of these questions actually do not fall into the pattern that jakebeal mentions. The first one asks about any CS program (i.e., not all that specific, imho), the second one about any physics scholarship with a bad GPA. None of those questions is the epitome of "specific advice for a very specific situation", unless we assume that there are almost no people with crappy undergrad grades who wish to do grad studies.
@xLeitix then... I'm not sure how this answers RoboKaren's question, which specifically cites those two examples.
@ff524 I agree that it kinda doesn't. Jake's statement is completely correct, but the questions that RoboKaren means are not at all so clear-cut.
Sorry, bad cases make bad precedent. :-(
My concern is that are too broad or too particular.
Hmm, how can they be both too broad and too particular :) ? Honestly, I think they are neither. The first question talks about getting into any CS program with mediocre grades, the second one about getting any physics scholarship with terrible grades. Both seem not super-specific to me. The only thing that is probably "wrong" with those questions is that it is very unlikely that there is a good, objective answer to them, more than "it's unlikely, but you can always try".
I personally don't find these questions overly interesting, but there is probably a large number of students out there for which they are relevant. So I would just let these questions be.
Just picking on your first sentence: questions can be (and often are) both too broad and too specific. E.g. we can't answer what will/should happen for the individual OP (too specific) and we also can't enumerate the entire range of possibilities that might occur for people like the OP (too broad). Sometimes there is no happy medium.
I think these questions should be closed due to the fact that there are now such varying types of graduate/masters programs in these fields (e.g., Computer Science, the MBA, Law, MSIS (MBA + CS), etc).
At some schools it is implicitly known that the masters program is much more like the bachelors program, and at other schools, this may be explicitly made known (along with some requirement that remediary courses be taken the first year exclusively). While at others still, the curriculum may be designed to be totally soul-crushing from the beginning. There is a wide-range of hand-holding from 0-100 at institutions, and it hasn't really been quantified anywhere.
Thus these kinds of questions aren't really apples to apples unfortunately.
What does the difficulty of the programs have to do with these questions?
I have taken the liberty of adding a generic question and answer for the questions we get regarding the GRE level required for entry to programs. There were a lot of these questions and they were very specific to the student, so I have tried to give a general answer that allows students to assess any GRE score against the data on their cohort. This could be a useful question to link to as a duplicate for questions of this kind. Hopefully that contributes something to this issue.
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2025 | Who is upvoting that?
Can someone please explain the philosophy of stackoverflow and why such questions get upvotes?
Is it appreciated that people shut down their brains and get totally paralyzed until someone tells them how to do thing? Like really context specific things where no general answer exists and rather personal.
Because that is the impression I am having recently especially on Academia. This question with impressive 33 upvotes is another example.
Can someone please explain the philosophy of stackoverflow and why such questions get upvotes?
Whatever the philosophy, questions and answers are upvoted and downvoted by whoever wish to do so, for whatever reason they fancy. I can upvote a question just because I like the way it is written; or simply because the poster is new to the website and I can give them a few reputation points so that they can comment; or because they made a joke that made me laugh; or because, however stupid it is, their problem had been my problem many years ago; or because I think that, anyhow, the poster might be a kind person because he or she wants to be courteous to their teacher; or ... yes, we can go on forever.
Is it appreciated that people shutdown their brains and get totally paralyzed until someone tells them how to do thing?
Random thoughts below:
When I was a student at high-school, we used to assemble tube circuits powered from 500 V supply voltages on unisolated bread boards, so that every now and then a student could get the thrill of an electric shock.
When I was a student at the university there weren't (almost) any university policies. It was just student against professor. If a professor wished to fail you because you, guy, were wearing an earring, there wasn't anything you could do; a professor could throw chalks to you because you were chit-chatting during a lesson; or they could take pictures of the class just to see at the exam if you skipped a few lessons; and the fact that a professor used to yell at students was, well, taken as normal.
It can't be denied that proceeding, or barely surviving, in such an environment required students to turn on their brain. However, modern safety rules (what about the "it's hot" band around the coffee cups? what about the "don't put the cat in the washing machine" warning?) and university policies forbid all the above niceties to protect people from electric shock, harassment, discrimination etc. Do you consider this a bad thing?
The price to pay -- of course there's always a price to pay -- is that people nowadays has become more cautious about doing things that can possibly break a rule. And so, yes, with the fear of doing something wrong, people sometimes ask questions whose answer seems pretty obvious to others.
That said, as my most voted comment highlights, sometimes I'm puzzled too.
"When I was a student at high-school, we used to assemble tube circuits powered from 500 V supply voltages on unisolated bread boards, so that every now and then a student could get the thrill of an electric shock." Not a bad idea (associative learning), though I'd definitely make sure there's a current limiting thingy in there somewhere if you're doing that on purpose. Giving someone a lil memorable "reminder" and getting them murdered are vastly different, and definitely whit[ish] against black, per my ethic views.
"However, modern safety rules (what about the "it's hot" band around the coffee cups? what about the "don't put the cat in the washing machine" warning?) and university policies forbid all the above niceties to protect people from electric shock, harassment, discrimination etc. Do you consider this a bad thing?" Rules being excessively pendatic about safety discouraging experimentation and curiosity? Yes, that's bad. Rules that require people to be more considerate of others and mind their ugly side? Hell no, that's progress.
I believe in the right to be an idiot but not the right to be an ass.
In contrast with the other answers, I think there's often actually a good reason that "bad" questions get voted up. I tend to vote for a question when I think that the answers are likely to be interesting or useful, whether or not the question appears to come from a bizarre or foolish place.
It's very easy for us, looking back from many years distance, to forget some of the confusion and anxiety that can be experienced by people who aren't as experienced---not just in academia but in dealing with people in general.
For example, I have up-voted both of the questions that you link. My reasons were:
For the question on missing class, students---even early graduate students---often have a remarkable degree of anxiety tied to perfectionism and rule-following. This question of how to balance conflicting needs is thus likely to be be helpful to others in the same situation, and drew a number of careful answers.
For the question on purchasing an essay and regretting it, I thought it was actually an interesting question how exactly one draws the the boundary, which could be useful not just for students but for professors thinking about some of the screwy situations that students present them with. The answers ended up taking a number of different perspectives and making very interesting reading.
In short, I try to remember that a vote on a question is not the same as voting on the questioner.
Actually, I don't think there's any contrast between your answer and the other two. A remark: some people, as a student, might not have experienced much of anxiety and confusion along the years: for these people certain questions can appear a bit strange.
The voting model of the stack exchange system is entirely subjective. A user believing a question should be up-, or downvoted is free to act based on their personal philosophy. This will result in posts where you might wonder how the net vote score ended up being what it is; but, by definition, there are no wrong scores. If you feel that the underlying question, answer, or comment violates one of the site's stated restrictions (e.g., bigotry), flag for moderator attention. Other than that, any score is perfectly in line with the site's rules and philosophy.
On the other hand, the site has a rule to be nice. Examples for discouraged behavior include to avoid "belittling language" and "name-calling," and users are asked to "assume good intentions." I would thus argue that your question, as currently stated, is counter to the site's spirit.
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1326 | Is this section also about how to formulate good explanations?
Can you look at this question? https://stackoverflow.com/questions/26655534/how-this-js-jquery-syntax-work
I tried to show every point which was not clear. Most of time I read a university book they were completely unclear. The teacher were giving everything as understood.
But this is my personal idea. I would like to ask if there are resources, tools, website or anything else for improving the quality of slides, books or eLearning in the direction I've showed in the question on StackOverflow.
Can I open such a question here?
Maybe I am missing something, but what is the question you are proposing to ask?
When people write books they give many stuff as understood. This, in my opinion, is the reason why Math (for example) is hard. I remember when I read symbols wondering what they were. The question I've linked clarifies everything. I wonder if this intuition that I've wrote now has been lead on by someone else. If someone has made a scale to measure symbols given as understood on a book of math for example.
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2121 | Is the question about speaking problem on-topic?
I tend to lack coherence and get stumble when talking in thoughtful topics. Unless I really take note, cat always got my tongue, even thought I know what to say. My writing is, nonetheless, not having that problem.
Is it on-topic here? Since most thoughtful topics I meet are in academic setting, I think that asking this question on Academia is on-topic. But I'm afraid that it may be considered to be a boat programming question.
Example: say I need to talk about game theory to persuade a speaker. I have read about it, and I know that to successfully persuade them, I need to use point a and b. When I thinking about what to talk in my head, both a and b are thought carefully enough to the point that I believe that they will work. However, when I don't take note and get straight to speak, cat got my tongue and eventually point a is spoken in a way that it's hard to understand, and I completely forgot point b.
This is the extreme case, I not always get to this level of this problem. But it persists.
I have asked this on the big Meta, and it seems that Academia is my only choice. The body of question is the same so you can skip to the answer.
There have been a couple questions about speaking on the site (for instance, here and here). I don't think, however, that any question regarding your proposed example is really applicable. The common element of the speaking questions that have been asked before is that they are either reference requests for resources to use (or point others towards) when learning the language, or are specifically about how to communicate in academic presentations.
Otherwise, it's a not-well-defined topic that doesn't really fit the site or the audience. Even in this meta post, you haven't really been able to conceptualize what the question you want to ask is. Basically, it boils down to something like "How do I communicate what I think better?", which is an incredibly broad and impossible-to-answer question. Even if you could get a reasonable question out of it, it becomes a pretty clear case of boat programming to me. Communication is essential to a lot more than academia, and unless the question involves communicating in specific academic situations I don't think it would be on-topic.
Ultimately, the best advice I can give you is to work on your English, practice thinking and speaking, and continue to familiarize yourself with the topics. Working on your writing will help as well, you have very good English for a non-native speaker, but there is a lot of room for improvement in terms of clarity and structure.
I wonder why you consider the second linked question would be a boat programming question? I would ask a question similar to that
Academic communications, including speaking, are most certainly on-topic at this site. The challenge is making an answerable question out of your concerns.
For example, what you have expressed above is not quite answerable. My key questions would be:
What is the context of the communication? Informal setting? Planned discussion? Prepared talk? These strongly affect the answers you might get.
What exactly is the help you want? Are you wanting to know how to prevent the problem, how to recover from it, how serious it is, something else entirely?
In short: ask away, refine as best you can, and be prepared to refine further in response to "unclear what you're asking"
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1822 | Are questions about academic club on toptic?
I don't know if there are different definitions for academic club, but the club I join is a group of young people, discuss about academic topis such as philosophy (what is freedom?), ecology (wet land in Mekong Rivers), linguistics, religious, etc. The members are diversity, from undergrad students to non-academians, but none of them are grad student (well, some will be, but when they become grad students, they won't have time to be active on the club). The mentors of the club are from PhD to old professors. There is used to have an institute sponsored it, but now it's only the name, not the money anymore.
Will questions about academic clubs be on topic? On topic questions in this site are about:
Life as a graduate student, postdoctoral researcher, university professor
Transitioning from undergraduate to graduate researcher
Inner workings of research departments
Requirements and expectations of academicians
University-level pedagogy
If it's not, I think this kind of question will be on topic on Community Building SE.
The question I'm about to ask is how to gently tell a person in a discuss group that they overtalks and try to take the leader position but fails to make a good, agreed by others argument.
It really depends on what the point of the question is. You might try suggesting a few proposed questions here, so that you get some feedback before posting them on the main site.
The question I'm about to ask is how to gently tell a person in a discuss group that they overtalks and try to take the leader position but fails to make a good, agreed by others argument.
That question would fit much better on Workplace.SE, since it's not really specific to academia.
Are questions about academic club on toptic? in Workplace if you are interest.
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3490 | Tag suggestion: student-ability
There are currently 54 questions concern about weak students, 194 questions for strong students. I propose we should have a tag for the ability of the students. The question How to deal with a very weak student? seems to be an excellent example of this tag.
My propose wiki excerpt:
This tag is used for questions concerning about the performance of the students in academia, and how to interact with them.
Some categories of the question: How can a weak student get better? How to help a disabled students? How to deal with useless feeling?
What do you think?
Since you've asked the community for feedback on meta, I suggest waiting for some responses before creating the tag.
As for the specific tag suggestion: I find the tag to be somewhat ambiguous. Can you explain more by suggesting what you'd propose as the tag wiki excerpt, and what general categories of question would benefit from this tag? (Clearly, many of the questions in the linked searches are not related to students' abilities.) This would make your proposal much clearer
Initially I put the tag in the question first before thinking about asking the community. But I agree that I shouldn't create the tag first. I have added the wiki excerpt. What do you mean on the general categories? Questions concerning about students' abilities? The links are just a quick research. Click on the example question and you will see a number of suggested question really ask about students' abilities.
Hmm, the tag wiki excerpt you've suggested seems to have a lot of overlap with [tag:students]. I'm not convinced that we need both [tag:students] and [tag:student-ability], but if we do, it seems like it would have to be much more specific in order to really add value.
By general categories, I meant: can you think of some "types" or questions that we get often, that are not classified well by existing tags and would be much better classified with this new tag? For example, when I suggested emotional-responses, I wrote: We get a lot of questions here of the form "How to deal with feeling X?", or "Is it common for people in my situation to feel X?", where X is [one of a list of emotions] - those are categories of questions.
Of course it has overlap with the [students] tag, because the [student-ability] should be a subset of it. It is also the same with [international-students] or [transfer-students] tags. In my experience in browsing SE, creating a sub-tag is not a problem. What ambiguity do you find with this current proposal? I'll add the categories in the question.
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2106 | Should I remove the background in the question if I see the answers don't use this information?
Should a dismissal from PhD in graduate application be listed as academic misconduct?
I find the background part in this question doesn't give useful information, or at least the answers don't use it. Should I delete the whole part to make the question short and to the point?
In you specific example, I agree with removing the background.
However, in general, I would be very careful to remove background information, because academia varies more than you think it does: What you consider irrelevant from your experience may be relevant in other fields, countries and similar. Moreover, we encourage new users to rather give us too much background than to little, as they often even know less what’s relevant. It might thus be discouraging if we remove the background early on.
As an alternative to deleting consider moving the background under some subsection such that the relevant parts of the question are streamlined and the background isn’t lost.
I see no issue with removing that section, personally. I agree that it doesn't add anything substantiative to the question.
| Stack Exchange | 2025-03-21T12:54:48.703949 | 2015-12-13T11:38:08 | {
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