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1192 | Clarify or delete the "advice" tag
By definition, almost all questions here ask about advice. Some questions are tagged "advice", some aren't. I suggest that the "advice" tag is not useful and should be deleted.
One alternative would be to explicitly define the "advice" tag as
This is a question about giving, requesting or receiving advice.
For instance, this question could be tagged "advice" under this definition.
However, I am afraid that many users will nevertheless tag any request for advice with "advice", i.e., that the tag will have a low signal-to-noise ratio. In addition, out of the 17 questions currently tagged "advice", it seems like only the single one linked above asks for advice about giving advice, so after cleaning up useless instances of the tag, we would be left with only a single valid instance.
EDIT: And I would also propose deleting the personal-advice tag, for exactly the same reason. (Should I split this off into a separate meta question?)
In preparation for deleting this tag, I have retagged all questions that were tagged only with "advice" or "personal-advice", so that removing these tags won't create untagged questions.
What about this question? The question needs advice tag or kind of its synonym tag. How to advise a student looking for an under-grad thesis topic?
This is a perfect example of a meta-tag, and I think it should definitely be blacklisted. If there are others that should also be torched please add to the list.
+1 indeed, the site is about giving advice, right? It is as ridiculous as [tag:academia] would be.
I'm all for deleting bad tags. However, there is a caveat that we should check if any of these tags should have been assigned to advising instead. Then the remaining can be "nuked" as needed.
There does not seem to be an [tag:advising] tag, but an [tag:advisor] one. Looking at the 17 questions tagged [tag:advice], none of these appear to be in need of retagging [tag:advisor].
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1783 | What to do with the mental-health tag
We kind-of discussed this in a related post.
We recently got two questions tagged mental-health:
How to overcome these learning difficulties and progress in academia?
“Anonymous” is so distressed that he is having trouble functioning [duplicate]
Then again, disability explicitly covers "cognitive, mental, sensory, emotional, or developmental" impairments. So mental-health seems to be a proper subset of disability.
Then yet again, most of the disability questions really could be retagged mental-health. Explicitly, I'd argue that out of 20 disability questions, all but the following could be tagged mental-health:
Does disability impact on prospects of employment in academia?
Dismissed by my committee
Disclosing hidden disability to employer
How does Stephen Hawking conduct his research?
(Yes, I'm putting speech impairments under the "mental" category here, since they usually involve language centers in the brain, unless there is some trauma to the vocal apparatus. Clinical psychologists, neurologists etc. are welcome to correct me.)
I see a couple of ways to proceed here.
Clearly separate physical and mental disabilities, by tagging the 4 questions above physical-disability, retagging the other 16 disability questions mental-health, black-listing the disability tag, and adding mental-disability as a synonym for mental-health (so people find it when they type "disability" into the tag box).
Merge the two concepts, by retagging the mental-health questions to disability and blacklisting mental-health.
Do nothing, and let nature take its course.
Given that I see three alternatives, the usual upvote=yes, downvote=no meta mechanism won't be useful here. So I'll create three answers corresponding to the three alternatives. Please vote your preference, and comment as appropriate.
I don't really like the idea of blacklisting "mental health" as a tag. I believe this does more to stigmatize such issues than to help them be discussed openly. We need to be aware of such problems, and help people suffering from them, not force them to hide it to continue their studies or professions.
Given the current vote count (4 for merging mental-health with health-issues, 2 for do nothing) I have merged mental-health with health-issues.
I think mental-health should be merged with health-issues.
I'm reposting here a highly-upvoted comment on a related meta question:
I am very much against a mental-health tag, just because I am concerned about contributing to the misconception that mental health issues are somehow not "real" medical issues.
See related discussion there.
We can define [tag:mental-health] as a synonym for [tag:health-issues] or of [tag:disability] (how do these two tags relate?). However, it really isn't. [tag:mental-health] is a proper subset of each of those others. Does this make a difference?
@Stephan My point was that I don't think we should separately categorize the subset, because I fear it gives a wrong impression.
@Stephan As for [tag:disability], personally I think it should be a synonym of [tag:health-issues]... but that's another discussion.
Mens sana in corpore sano, and also its various inverses. I think the issues are really inextricable, so far as site like this goes. Let us merge by aliasing mental-health to health-issues.
Do nothing, and let nature take its course.
Not all disabilities are physical and not all mental health issues are disabilities. The idea of merging them seems wrong and the proposed separation seems too fine grained to me. I see no problem with questions having both tags. If the tags are not consistently being used incorrectly, I see no problem.
Someone who is color blind has a disability, but may or may not have mental health problems. Similarly with speech-language, hearing, vision, mobility, etc. Leaving multiple tags for people to choose from allows people to self-identify as they see fit. The person with the health issue himself should have the freedom to choose the tags that he feels fit the best.
Clearly separate physical and mental disabilities, by tagging the 4 questions above physical-disability, retagging the other 16 disability questions mental-health, black-listing the disability tag, and adding mental-disability as a synonym for mental-health (so people find it when they type "disability" into the tag box).
Merge the two concepts, by retagging the mental-health questions to disability and blacklisting mental-health.
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1634 | New tag proposal: APA-style
The American Psychological Association (APA) publishes its Publication Manual, now in its sixth edition, documenting (among other things) the APA Style, a citation and referencing style. APA Style is pretty common. It is pretty much the only style used in psychology journals, but is also used in other fields. There are BibTeX packages on CRAN to implement it.
We have quite a few questions related to APA style.
I propose creating a new tag apa-style and retagging these questions (except for this one and this one) unless there are objections.
Thoughts?
To the downvoter: was the downvote because you disagreed with the idea or because you thought it was a bad question? I think a question can be good even if the answer is "no"
@jakebeal voting on meta is different and down votes often me "no" even if it is a good question.
@StrongBad Thanks: Somehow, I had never realized that the help menu was different in meta...
This has been open for five days, with no activity for the last three. I'll ask the mods to tag this [tag:status-declined]. Thanks everyone!
Personally, I don't really think we need a separate tag for each citation-style. (Let the votes on this answer indicate what everyone else thinks...)
APA style is a lot more than just a citation style. There are at most a few other style guides that are as comprehensive (e.g., Chicago and Modern Language Association). That said, I am not sure the tag is needed.
@StrongBad We also have [tag:writing-style] and [tag:graphics] to cover other style issues. (Although all but 2 of the questions in Stephan's query are about citation)
I think [tag:citation-style] is enough but cannot we make the proposed [tag:apa-style] a synonym to it? Just like what we have for [tag:gender] tag and its synonyms?
What about a style-manuals tag to cover things like APA, MLA, and the others, where the question is about things that go beyond citations?
APA style is so obnoxiously comprehensive (and generally obnoxious and different from other styles) that I think it's reasonable to have its own tag.
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3327 | Should we make country tags visually distinct?
Higher ed systems differ quite substantially between countries, and we have country tags like united-states or germany, which serve to indicate questions that are specific to certain countries.
Workplace.SE is in a similar position. It has recently been suggested there to make country tags visually distinct, essentially so answerers actually see that the question is specific and don't jump in with answers that may not apply to the specific country asked about. The current top-voted answer suggests adding a stylized globe to Workplace country tags.
Question: should we also (try to) make country tags visually distinct? If so, which design would be useful?
Edit: At Workplace, StrongBad notes that this would also apply to other SE sites, and anyway, it would require SE development work. So I have asked the general question about visually enhancing country tags at Meta, linking here. We could still use this thread to discuss whether we would want to actually use such a feature if it is implemented.
Yes, I think it's a good idea. It might also have the positive side-effect of drawing attention to the fact that in many cases specifying the country is essential... and that US should not be taken as default ;-)
Note that the infrastructure already exists: on StackOverflow, companies can pay to have a tiny icon included in the tag for their product. See http://stackoverflow.com/questions/tagged/google-app-engine for instance. So it likely wouldn't require a lot of development work. One possibility might be to include a tiny icon of the country's flag.
Do upvotes and downvotes to the original question mean "I want this feature, let's ask the SE staff" and "I don't want this feature", respectively? We should probably count heads on this one.
This is something that has to be taken up with Stack Exchange paid staff—this is not something that we as moderators or individual community members can change. So if there is a consensus to request that they do so, we can bring it up with them.
I m not sure this is a big issue for us. Further, you can only make so many tag stand out. I think more often people ignore the "field" tag (e.g., math or history) than the country tag. If we were only going to highlight one type of tag, field might be more important. I am not sure how I feel about highlighting multiple types of tags.
+1. Don't make it a painting, teach people through community modetaion. I don't believe that painting the tags in colours is substantially helpful.
If the question is specific to one country or field, that should be included in the question title, or at least in the body. This will be more noticeable than the appearance of a tag, and would make modification of the tags unnecessary.
In my opinion, I don't think this would be such a useful feature. For two reasons.
If the target location is not the US, UK or some other country that is well-known for its institutions, it might lead to too many specialised requests and not enough people to answer them. In other words, potential answer-writers might not consider a question because they can see it does not apply to the country that they have experience with.
I think the separation is unnecessary and that many answers to questions that DO mention the country and field, still refer to another country, such as "I know you ask about country X, but in country Y it is usually the case that..." which can be relevant, informative and even help the OP simply by widening the horizon.
I feel I have benefited from reading about the different fields and situations that have differing norms. Introducing country tags would try to tackle the problem of people asking unclear questions- I am not convinced that these users would then go and use country tags.
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332 | Community ads for 2013
Last year, we managed to get a nice campaign of community ads to run on other sites of the Stack Exchange network (Physics, Mathematics, English L&U, TeX and Mathematica). But every year, the voting starts anew, and we need to gather votes in these communities’ Meta sites for our ad to run:
Mathematics
English L&U
CSTheory
TeX (ad is now running)
Mathematica (ad is now running)
Physics (ad is now running)
If you're a member of these communities, please follow the links above and upvote the ad!
Also, the list of sites and the ad image are not set in stone: if you feel that we should advertise on another site, please edit the post above. If you want to suggest a new ad image, post it as an answer below!
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830 | Upcoming graduation
Here's a short update on my earlier comment on Meta regarding the future of the site, including our graduation…
The SE team decided, a few months ago, that Academia Stack Exchange is ready for graduation. This is based on numerical indicators (activity, traffic, number of frequent users, etc.), on the results of our earlier site evaluation (and by the way, please participate in the latest one, which is still open at the time I write this).
Despite this good news, there is somewhat of a queue at the “site design” stage. Progress there is somewhat slow, but there is progress: new sites have been released recently (The Workplace and Money), and some sites designs have been drafted (see Graphics Design).
I am told that the design team has begun seriously looking at Academia. While no commitment can be made, we're looking at a few weeks before seeing their proposal for our new identity.
Should we put some suggestions for design, or it is for us to wait?
Usually we wait for them to propose a design and then we can discuss it (this is what happened on cstheory for example)
@PiotrMigdal I think “graphic design by committee” doesn't work too well :) thus, we wait for a proposal, on which we can then comment before it is deployed
Physics initially had a community-proposed design that didn't go down very well. That said, there's nothing stopping people from proposing design ideas, in the understanding that the design team can very well (or is even likely to) not use them in any way.
Any further updates on this ?
I thought Academia graduating would be called "The Workplace", which already has a site! ba dum dum... crash!
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258 | When is an edit not an edit any more?
As a community, where do we want to draw the line between editing old off-topic closed questions and changing them completely? This recently edited question has received many comments (well, a few comments with many upvotes) that the edit was over the top. I think I do agree, because while the theme of the question is the same, the question has completely changed (and not only by being more constructive). In particular, the answers given (and upvoted) already some months ago are now completely irrelevant to the question.
So, what do you think should happen to this sort of questions? (meaning: questions closed, with existing non-trivial answers, who cannot be salvaged by minor edit or simple removal of subjectivity)
No edit, delete
No edit, delete, ask the improved question as a new question
Invasive edit, delete all answers (and all comments, which was actually done)
In my opinion, option #2 has the best benefits: it increases the value for our site by adding a good question, and does not create an unclear situation with mismatched question/answers/comments. Also, it properly attributes the good question to its rightful author (though it probably is a minor point).
Also, who gets the increase (or decrease) in reputation for the upvotes (or downvotes) of the edited question? Is it the original poster or the editor?
The following link is relevant: http://meta.academia.stackexchange.com/a/251/64
@JoelReyesNoche - The OP gets the rep, not the editor.
I am not moved by the fact that the original question should have been deleted (eventually). That is the proper fate for it. If we are concerned for Ran G's rep just wait sixty days before killing it; but that period has already elapsed, so we've even good that way.
On the other hand, I think the rule that edits should not make large changes to the meaning of other peoples posts or to any question that already has developed and upvoted answers should be a bright line.
Please, delete the offending questions and ask the new question separately.
For the question involved, the question was changed, the comments were deleted because they "were no longer relevant," and the people who gave answers to the original question were asked if they wanted to revise their answers. In short, the old question and comments were, in effect, deleted, and the old answers needed to be updated. You might as well make a new question.
For the question involved, I recommend option number 4: No edit, (no delete), ask the improved version as a new question.
Of note: deletion policy was discussed here previously… the general SE policy is that most closed questions should end up edited/reopened, or deleted (the notable exception being duplicates)
If this general SE policy is to be followed here then I would recommend option 2 in this case.
This answer, plus @Joel's comment above, makes sense to me. I imagine that would probably follow option 2 if something like this came up again, but given that each case has to be judged individually, that doesn't really mean much.
As the editor of the comment, perhaps I did go too far in my edits. However, the old question would have been subject to deletion. We can always try to "roll back" the changes, but then we're left with a question to be deleted. However, I'm not exactly looking for the reputation; I wanted to improve the question. Changing the author changes the "benefits" formula. So I don't know what the best answer here is.
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400 | Data visualisation questions
This question about representation of experimental data was migrated to CrossValidated, the SE site for “statisticians, data miners and data analysis”. Below, I make the case that this question is actually a pretty good fit for our site, too, and that it should be reöpened. I welcome comments on this position, and would like to know the feeling of the community at large.
First, let me state that there is no doubt that the question is on-topic on CrossValidated. However, I think it is not off-topic for Academia.SE. That case (a question on topic on two or more sites) happens from time to time (for example between Physics and Chemistry), and the SE policy for such a case is clear: the first step for migrating a question is “is it off-topic?”. If it's not, it stays, even if it might be a “better fit” for the other SE site.
Now, is that specific question on-topic at Academia? Our FAQ says on-topic categories of questions include:
Requirements and expectations of academicians
The question is exactly about the requirements and expectations of plotting data in an academic context. It's a common question for people to ask, an usually a topic about which people have not received formal training, even if great books exist (see: Tufte, E.R.). So, in my opinion, it is both on-topic and of great interest. It's not a specialized data-analysis question (which would probably be off-topic), but rather a common question.
I welcome other people's comments, in particular those of people who voted to close and migrate. I genuinely don't understand how this question was judged off-topic, so I'd be happy if you could explain it to me. In particular, if it is judged off-topic, how can it be modified to be on-topic? (I know it cannot be edited now that it's migrated, but it can be reäsked.)
As the one who prompted the migration, I believe that the question was purely statistics. The only element that made it "academia"-specific was the issue that it was a disagreement between a student and a professor. If you change the people making the argument from student and professor to co-workers in a lab, or an employee in a factory and his boss, the "academic" aspect of the question goes away.
A good question for Academia.SE (or any other board) should be one where changing some of the details does not change the relevancy to the board.
I don't agree. Data is not presented the same way in an academic context and for other purposes. Otherwise, we should close many many questions on the site, because they can be asked in other situations. Context is important, whether it's for writing style, or data visualization.
Example of great questions that could be asked the same, in a different context, yet are perfectly on-topic: http://academia.stackexchange.com/q/2541/2700, http://academia.stackexchange.com/q/1095/2700, http://academia.stackexchange.com/q/3608/2700, http://academia.stackexchange.com/q/3501/2700, etc.
While I didn't vote for it, I support the migration - just like a programming question a professor asks me belongs on StackOverflow, not here, despite being asked in an academic context.
I'm not sure I agree with your argument that this is an Academic topic. The question being asked here could have been asked in an aeronautical engineering forum, or a financial engineering forum, or a jelly bean sales forum. Simply replace the work "professor" with "boss" and it's completely generic. The fact that it occurred in an Academic setting does not automatically make it an Academic question. Personally, I support the migration.
Okay. My point is that the question is specific to presenting data in an academic venue (paper, conference, whatever). Which makes it specific to academia. We'll have to agree to disagree, but I think this makes many questions off topic that were not closed, such as writing questions. See the list of questions in my comment on aeismail's answer. For one specific example, see this one: it could clearly be asked by replacing "professor" with boss, and should thus be closed according to this standard. I'm fine if that's the community's consensus…
… but I am worried it makes use adopt a very very narrow scope. Also, the question fits the list of topics of the FAQ, which suggest that the FAQ should be rewritten, for example into “Requirements and expectations of academicians that do not apply outside of academia”
@F'x - I agree with you, we want to avoid a very narrow scope. To me it's just a question of degree; the questions you linked to above all relate to academia, whereas this question (to me) seems to relate not at all to academia, but rather entirely to statistics. This is really just a judgement call, and I guess we'll agree to disagree about this particular case. For what it's worth, I would not support closing any of the questions you linked to above, as they relate more to academia than this one does (IMHO).
@eykabal okay, then I'd welcome some suggestions on how to improve it… I think it's a great question, and I will reäsk it
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389 | Academia needs YOU: community evaluation
A new section has appeared in the list of review queues: community evaluation. It is temporary, and will stay for a few days. It is the new form of the older self-evaluation.
If you open it, you will be asked to evaluate 10 relatively recent questions from the site, with the following criteria:
Review the question and its answers and compare them to information available from other online sources. What type of impression would this question make on a first-time visitor to the site? Are the answers correct, clear, useful and informative? Would the question and answer be interesting to the kind of user this site is trying to attract, or are they a little embarrassing?
The review can help us (SE team, mods and community) gauge the attractiveness to new users. So, let's all chip in!
Done. Question now closed. Should we delete?
Other metas usually keep such time-limited questions around, only closed. I have no opinion on the matter.
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380 | Synonimizing the writing and scientific-writing tags
I find that the writing and scientific-writing tags are used interchangeably in existing questions… I suggest we make them synonyms. Please give your opinion in answers, so the mods can make it happen if the community feels it's okay.
Why should writing and scientific-writing be synonyms ? After all, there's a lot of academic writing that's not scientific. Admittedly, this site is very tech-heavy, but that's not by design, and we'd welcome academics from non-science disciplines as well.
I'm just stating what I think the current usage is.
Sure. but I guess I'm saying that we should fix this by separating them, rather than by making them synonyms.
yes, but only if the distinction is viable for the long term (i.e. we don't regularly need to retag a lot of questions)
+1 People being sloppy taggers doesn't mean the two are synonyms. If anything its a call for cleanup and retagging with the appropriate tags.
This is messy and I think there is a bigger question. At the most basic level, should the tag be scientific-writing or writing-scientific? I think they mean fundamentally different things and I am not sure we need to break down writing or science into sub categories. We also have scientific-productivity, but no productivity tag. I think I would vote for getting rid of the sub-categories and let people decide if it is science or writing or both.
"Scientific writing" probably should be "technical writing." But there might be those who think the difference is significant enough to keep them separate. I'd be fine with whatever the general consensus is.
Remember, all we need to do is see how the community interprets it and act accordingly. We're not really defining anything here, we're just trying to ensure consistency.
I agree with the other answers. And I propose that:
as scientific-writing is a subset of writing;
and given that because the context is academia, all the writing we'd talk about is scholarly writing, even when for a lay audience;
then the main tag be writing, and that scientific-writing be a synonym of it.
| Stack Exchange | 2025-03-21T12:54:48.786860 | 2013-01-29T13:47:53 | {
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238 | Community promotion ad to run on other SE’s
Stack Exchange sites that have graduated run so-called “Community Promotion Ads”: these run in the right sidebar of each page, and are designated according to votes on the Meta of each site. For example, see on Physics.SE how it works.
The good thing about these ads is that the new visitors they bring are, for the most part, already users on other Stack Exchange sites, and they now how the system works. Over at Chemistry, we have placed an ad on Physics.SE and it does bring us some traffic.
I’d like to propose that we come up with an ad to run on our sibling SE sites. I see three points to deal with:
finding a nice motto or a catchy sentence
creating the ad itself (having a nice graphics improves one’s click-through rate, but it's not absolutely necessary)
coming up with a list of sites we want to target: I’m thinking Mathematics, Physics, Theoretical Computer Science, TeX - LaTeX, Mathematica, English L&U, Electrical Engineering (sorted roughly in decreasing order of suitability IMO)
What do you think?
Added to site bulletin for a week.
Edit: second version incorporating Daniel’s suggestion
Comments very welcome!
This looks pretty good, but needs Academia SE as you say. Maybe "... but academia.se has answers"
Okay, I'll add an answer to keep track of the other sites’ meta where ads were posted for voting. Please go there and upvote!
Physics (now running; check stats here)
Mathematics (now running; check stats here)
English L&U (now running; check stats here)
TeX (now running; check stats here)
Mathematica (now running; check stats here)
There are a lot of academics over at tex.sx, I wonder if we could get someone to help design us a coat of arms. It might be useful also when we graduate. I would be happy to use some of my tex.sx rep to offer a 500 rep bounty.
I have asked: https://tex.stackexchange.com/questions/79147/draw-a-coat-of-arms-in-latex
It's a good idea to plan. But the problem is technically we haven't graduated yet. We're still in beta mode. We need to get the number of questions up a little higher. (About 15%, if my math is right.)
The ads are displayed on graduated sites, but they can be ads for anything: other SE sites (graduated or not), even non-SE websites (see the Physics examples).
Okay. I misunderstood your intent—you want to create an ad that can be advertised on Physics.SE (and perhaps Math.SE, etc.). I had thought you wanted the ads here. Still not a bad idea to plan here, though.
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695 | POLL: Should we participate in the “Winter Bash” Holiday hats promotion?
In 2013, Stack Exchange will continue its tradition of the "Winter Bash". Winter Bash is an annual event that can run on any Stack Exchange site that chooses to participate. Users earn “hats” for their gravatars by completing certain tasks (analogous to badges). Certain actions trigger the user receiving a hat, which their gravatar can “wear”. We track everyone’s progress earning hats in a leaderboard that looks something like this:
Stack Exchange sees Winter Bash as a a fun and lighthearted way to celebrate the amazing people who make the sites awesome, as the year draws to a close. Two things to note:
Any user can opt out (clicking an option in your profile means you won't see any hat at all).
Apart from the wearing of hats by avatars, the site is otherwise unaffected (there is no “holiday” theme of the site's design, for example)
This being said, we (as a community) also have to choice to opt out entirely and have the Winter Bash completely disabled on Academia Stack Exchange (not hats for anyone). In 2012, we chose to participate.
To decide whether we will participate in the Winter Bash 2013 Edition, I've created a “poll” below this post, with two comments. Upvote one of the comments according to your preference. If you want to discuss further, leave an answer or comments to other answers.
The poll will close on Thursday November 28.
Yes, Academia.SE should participate in Winter Bash 2013.
No, Academia.SE should not participate in Winter Bash 2013.
For the record: we shall have hats.
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205 | What should happen to closed questions?
What is this community’s take on deleting closed questions? What are the criteria for deletion?
In the past few days, I have voted on deleting some of the closed questions that seemed to have absolutely no value to the site (way off-topic, way too localized, that kind of stuff). I do it on other sites, as part of the “janitorial” activities of high-rep users.
The questions gathered no other delete vote, so I flagged a few others (e.g., here and there). The mods declined to delete, saying “there's no need to flag a question as low-quality if it's already been closed”.
So, I wonder: does this site have a deliberate policy of not deleting these very low quality closed questions? Argument has been made in other parts of the SE network, including by the SE team itself, that deletion is the final destination of many closed questions. For example, see here:
Why would you delete a question? Isn’t closing it enough?
Some questions are of such poor quality that they cannot be salvaged. They’re literally nonsense. Not every byte of data that is created in the world is infinite and sacred.
Some questions are so incredibly off topic that they add no value to a programming community.
The mental cost of processing these closed questions is not zero, particularly for users who are actively engaged and scanning questions to find things they can help answer.
If users see a lot of closed questions, they’ll note that we don’t enforce the guidelines, so why should they? Without any final resolution, asking questions that get closed becomes something we are implicitly encouraging — a broken windows problem. If this goes on for long enough, we’re no longer a community of programmers who ask and answer programming questions, we’re a community of random people discussing.. whatever. That’s toxic.
If enough of these closed questions are allowed to hang around, they become clutter that reduces the overall signal to noise ratio — which further reduces confidence in the system.
Or see there:
Closed questions should be kept on the site when:
They are a duplicate of another on topic question. As there are many ways of asking the same question it's good that we have the different examples on the site.
....
Well that's it really.
I could see no meta post on the topic, hence I create one. When does the community feel it is appropriate to delete closed questions?
Edit: I finally managed to find the exact quote I was looking for. This is from Grace Note, a community manager from the SE team:
With the exception of duplicates (which we keep around for searchability), closing is intended to be a temporary state for a question. There are only two states in the future of a closed question - getting deleted or getting reopened. The primary purpose of closing is to serve as a sentence to eventual deletion.
and
unless a question has some chance to be considered for reopening, it should be deleted
So, the SE policy is not to ask “which closed questions should be deleted?” but “which closed questions should be kept?” (as done, e.g., on the computer science meta).
For the record, and for others to comment on it, I'll add here my opinion:
I think closed questions should be deleted if:
they have not been answered
they are not duplicates (“closed as duplicate” can be found in searches and lead back to the main question, so they are useful)
The reason for this is basically the same as summarized in my question: off-topic or low-quality closed questions reduce the signal-to-noise ratio (they turn up in searches, for example) and don't give a good image of the site.
I would be happy to have them deleted via high-rep users (and not moderators), if moderators think it's not the best use of their time. But we need a policy for that, and people then have to check regularly for recent delete votes.
See aeismail's answer above; I disagree with your suggested deletion policy. Just because there's no answer doesn't mean it shouldn't be there; new people come all the time, and old questions do occasionally receive new answers. At the very least, leaving old questions intact prevents a new user (who is savvy enough to search) from asking the same question again.
@eykanal F'x is talking about closed questions, nobody can add answers to those.
I disagree, I think we should delete as little as possible.
I'll accept this because it features a nice quote from a Stack Exchange community manager, so accepting it (and moving it higher) will make it more visible to new users…
There are three main types of deletions that I personally have made:
Answers that should have been comments; the answer may look like it was deleted, but it was just converted to a comment
Answers that were completely off topic, and do not add anything to the conversation.
Answers that are abusive/trolling/spammy/ad hominem/etc.
I believe that this is the way the other mods deal with deletions as well.
That being said, moderators are people too, and you'll probably find differences between how aeismail, Charles, and I deal with flags. It should be noted that your posting here is exactly how you should handle this sort of thing; if you flag something and you think we didn't respond appropriately, make a thread such as this one specifically related to the post at hand and we'll respond. (As mods, we get a notification every time someone post a new thread in meta... we'll see it.)
EDIT: Having discussed this with mods from other sites, I'm going to reshape my opinion. It seems that a "closed" marker on a question is actually an indicator stating, "Please either edit this question so it's site-appropriate or delete it". In that vein, we should look at each closed question as a request to fix the question up so it's salvageable. If we can't do that, it should be deleted, as suggested by Grace Note (and brought to my attention by F'x in his answer below).
I agree with your edit too… and I'm sorry it took me so long to convincingly articulate my point :)
I think having the record of the question being asked and "shut down" is more useful than deleting them outright. Something that is offensive or spam should, of course, be deleted. But something that is merely off-topic or inappropriate for the board should probably stay for archival purposes, particularly if an answer was received.
I'm mostly talking about very low quality questions which have not received an answer. Keeping them diminishes the signal/noise ratio… (they show up in search results, for example)
That's true. But I think the comment trail is also a needed part of the record of this group. It's better to have a record that a question was asked and thought off-topic, rather than just delete it outright. If the community feels differently, that's their decision, too. But I don't like the idea of arbitrarily deleting questions if there is useful information about why we don't allow questions of a given nature.
one could argue that the place for “useful information about why we don't allow questions of a given nature” is on meta, not on the main site (for the same reason: keep the site clean and attractive!)
Anyway, I didn't want to drag anyone into a length discussion… seems you mods have a pretty clear agreement on that, and noöne else actually popped in so far… I won't flag for deletion any more! Thanks again for the responses here.
Disagree. Based on experience on other sites, you really want to clean that stuff up. Either put the preasure on to get them edited and re-opened or make them go away. Down the road, they will attract fleas. People will see them around and use your site to ask off topic questions, get their quick answers and then move on even through their question is not what you want being asked. If a question is shut down it should either be in the shop for repairs or in line for the rubbish heap.
I think it's fair to say that if a question has no tangible relation to academia, it is fair game for elimination. However, questions that are somewhat on-topic represent a "grey area" for now. If we see that we are getting hit with a bunch of questions in those areas, we can adopt a stricter policy. However, if the community decides a question should be zapped from existence, we're not likely to undo that.
Candidates for deletion can be found here. Each and every question on that list, should either be deleted or edited & reopened. If you have 2000 rep or over, please do go to that list, and spend a little bit of time going through some of the questions, and for each one, either vote for its deletion, or edit it into shape so that it can be reopened.
As F'x wrote, the Stack Exchange policy is this (my emphasis) :
With the exception of duplicates (which we keep around for searchability), closing is intended to be a temporary state for a question. There are only two states in the future of a closed question - getting deleted or getting reopened. The primary purpose of closing is to serve as a sentence to eventual deletion.
and
unless a question has some chance to be considered for reopening, it should be deleted
Thank you for the updated search string. Despite being documented I couldn't figure out how to filter out duplicate and migrated questions.
It's only now become possible to filter out duplicates (like, within the last few hours)
@EnergyNumbers that makes me feel better.
I'd like to add an additional reason to be careful in deleting questions:
As long as the software does not inform users that their post has been deleted, we should be extremely careful in deleting questions.
To elaborate a bit more: for any question where we can assume good faith, the question must not be deleted. Closing informs a user that a question is offtopic or not suitable. Deleting leaves a user confused and annoyed.
On a personal note, I've had a question deleted on English SE and I have thoroughly confused and quite annoyed. Where had my question gone?
Why had my question disappeared? Finally I had to waste peoples time by asking on Meta if someone know what happened to my question. Meanwhile, I got very annoyed and almost decided to leave English SE because of this bad treatment.
Only 10k-users can see deleted question. But deleted questions from 10k-users are probably very rare. Therefore, as long as the software does not inform users about deleted posts, we should only close questions that are obviously not in good faith.
Deletion happens after closing. If the question was closed, and the user is not interested in editing to fit the site’s standards, I don't see how deleting it would be a problem for them. (There's a waiting period between closing and deleting.)
I didn't notice any waiting period when my question got deleted, I never saw it closed. How long or how short is this waiting period?
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679 | Should we have software-specific tags?
Peter and I are apparently of different opinion on the opportunity of tagging questions with bibtex. He edited a question to add the tag, thus creating it. I thought it wasn't a good tag, because discussion limited to features of one specific piece of software are considered off topic. So, basically, having the tag would lead more people to ask such unwanted questions. So, instead of starting an edit war, let's open a discussion here.
I've pretty much explained my own position case above: I believe bibtex as a tag is not a good thing, no more than ms-word (which doesn't exist) or latex (which has 3 questions). It is true that there may be few legitimate on-topic questions that include bibtex, but (i) it's a minority, and the vast majority of questions we get are off topic; (ii) if the question is on topic, it's mainly because bibtex (or any other specific software) is not central to it.
But I'm wondering how the community feels about it. Let's hear it!
It seems bibtex is a subset of reference-managers. I don't see why we need to spilt the topic into multiple tiny subsets.
I agree; any questions for which a "bibtex" tag would be appropriate should likely be moved to the Tex.SE site. That seems to technology-specific here.
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645 | Vote on tag synonyms!
We have some tag synonym suggestions that have not been voted on, despite being quite old. I'd like to suggest people visit the tag synonym page and vote on existing suggestions:
Click on the links of the left column (freehand circle!) to go to the voting page.
This should help people submit more tag synonyms in turn, which will improve our tagging system and the overall experience on the site (especially searching by tags)!
Can you explain the voting process a little more. I can only vote for the two publications synonyms. Presumably I cannot vote for jobs because I proposed it, but I don't see the vote count. I would be surprised if I didn't have a total answer score of 5 in plagiarism, writing, and cv. Am I missing something?
For looking for tag synonyms, you might find helpful: http://stared.github.io/tagoverflow/ (just beware that is work in progress; or well... write me if you need something, PM or with a GitHub issue).
To use this question as a discussion on the proposed synonyms, the writing --> scientific-writing one doesn't seem like a good idea to me, as not all academic writing is scientific writing; from my understanding of the term "sciences", there are many academic fields outside of the sciences. Not sure if that's how the tag is used, but from simply a semantic standpoint I'm not a huge fan of this.
I understand your point of view, but on this one I think we should take a pragmatic approach. All the writing questions we have are scientific writing questions, as far as I can see. It makes no sense to have two tags with the same exact scope.
@F'x Makes sense. Do you object to moving the other direction, though? Having [tag:scientific-writing] --> [tag:writing]?
No, I don't. Let´s go with the more generic of the two.
@F'x or eykanal The synonym was created a while back, but the scientific-writing questions never got re-tagged. Can you hit them with your re-tag diamond mod hammer?
@StrongBad Looks like F'x took care of it.
@eykanal are you sure? For example, this question only has the [tag:scientific-writing].
@StrongBad - Not anymore it doesn't! (You were right, I just performed the merge so we should be good now.)
@eykanal thanks. It might be better to delete this answer now just to keep the question up to date.
To follow up on eykanal's post with another suggested synonym. There is a suggestion to equate bibliometrics and h-index. This is a bit like equating chemistry with oxygen. Bibliometrics is a research field and the h-index is just one parameter used in bibliometrics. We then would need to equate also citation index and impact factor with bibliometrics. Hence, I don't think this synonym is very constructive.
Yet, h-index is so small that it is hardly a useful tag... Looking at its questions, they would be better tagged with bibliometrics
I don't think we have a citation index tag yet. As for making "impact factor" a synonym also, I think it is reasonable given that there really is no single definition of impact factor and the different measures of impact factor are just bibliometrics.
I can see your points, but for me bibliometrics is a wide field beyond a few indices. I guess it might be possible to split the term in the future if need be.
It appears to me that references and reference-request have a split personality. In my opinion the questions should either be recommendation-letter or citations. Should we systematically re-tag the questions and then make references and reference-request be synonyms for citations or recommendation-letter, and if so, which one?
Dual-purpose tags are not helpful, as you've pointed out. I like the idea of retagging. I don't have a good feel for which one references should be a synonym for. My feeling is that it should go for "citations" rather than "recommendation letters," since I suspect that is the more common academic usage.
[tag:references] are citations, see my proposal.
[tag:reference-request] is wildly misused on this site. This tag is on many SE sites and mean asking to give a paper backing particular claim (see e.g. http://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/28/academic-salaries-at-european-universities). In other cases we should retag [tag:recommendation-letter].
I made a proposal for ms to be a synonym of masters back when there were a few questions tagged ms. They have all been retagged, but the synonym has not been created. Do we want the synonym?
It's done, could you delete it?
@PiotrMigdal the questions have been re-tagged for a while but the synonym has not been created.
I made a proposal for phd-thesis to be a synonym of thesis back when there were a few questions tagged phd-thesis. They have all been retagged, but the synonym has not been created. Do we want the synonym?
Is it done? I don't see any questions under [tag:phd-thesis]...
@PiotrMigdal All the questions have been re-tagged, but the synonym has not been created. The community needs to vote for it, or the mods need to hit it with a hammer. The purpose of this question is to allow below without enough rep in the respective tags to help guide the mods.
references -> citations
(Or the other way. I don't have a strong feeling which name is better. Just citations is more popular.)
The references tag runs into the problem of recommendation letter, so I think making it the synonym is the way to go with the citations tag as the master. That said we would need to go through all the questions and retag the ones related to reference letters.
I made a proposal for phd-committee to be a synonym of advisor back when there were a few questions tagged phd-committee. They have all been retagged, but the synonym has not been created. Do we want the synonym?
I don't see why two tags should be related.
@PiotrMigdal because at the time all the questions tagged phd-committee were talking about phd advisors. Potentially there is a difference, but I am not sure what it is. Maybe you could propose a tag wiki entry that would make it clear why they are different.
I know "phd committee" as "PhD thesis defense committee" (advisor is there, but it is a very different animal than just advisor). I hope that retagged questions were NOT specifically related to it.
I made a proposal for mba to be a synonym of masters back when there were a few questions tagged mba. They have all been retagged, but the synonym has not been created. Do we want the synonym?
From practical point of view, MBA is a a specific masters. I would prefer to keep them separate.
@PiotrMigdal yet you feel ms, which is a specific masters, should be a synonym of masters. What about MA?
Did I? (I now "ms" only for "Ms.", BTW.)
@PiotrMigdal MS stands for Masters of Science and MA stands for Masters of Art, just like MBA stands for Masters of Business Administration.
(I guessed.) Just I always see it always in the form MSc (albeit with various placements of . and ). Both MSc and MA are masters, the only difference is subject (and we have tags for subjects, if needed). Whereas, from my observation, MBA has different specifics (e.g. expensive, for business oriented people rather than a typical step in academic career, often taken not directly after Bachelor's (and less related to Bachelor's background), etc). Too bad it was retagged and I cannot even see whether the issues had a lot in common with [tag:masters] or not.
| Stack Exchange | 2025-03-21T12:54:48.788444 | 2013-09-16T11:18:30 | {
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434 | Is this question OK to be asked?
A user answered/commented in https://academia.stackexchange.com/a/8819/2643 that (paraphrasing) one's reputation might suffer if they publish in not-so-highly-ranked conferences.
Based on this I want to ask following question. Let me know if the wording is fine before it gets any close votes.
What are the disadvantages in publishing in national conferences?
Did you ask it now?
I don't think I would rate this as "off-topic," but board members may always think differently. However, I would frame the question in a more "neutral" way and ask the question as "Can I only publish in top-ranked proceedings?"
Or "Should I only...." (rather than "can")
"Can I only?" this is an (easy) yes or no, and it would be no. Anyone can publish wherever they are accepted. It would not be a useful question. "Should I only?" is (completely) opinionated and would be (or should be) closed as such. "What are the disadvantages" should be an answerable question and I would not VtC.
| Stack Exchange | 2025-03-21T12:54:48.788955 | 2013-03-23T15:27:53 | {
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447 | If a personal situations question is generalizable, is it on-topic?
I was reading this post from the main site and found myself confused why there are four votes to close. As my comment there says, I think the underlying question (though it could have been asked in a better way) is widely applicable. While the question is about a personal situation it seems to me a situation that many students may find themselves in.
I saw this meta question and it is similar but I don't feel that other question really answers my question.
My question remains, if a question is generalizable, then even if it is about a personal situation, shouldn't it be on-topic? Should we edit the question to make it more generalized?
The question as it stands is "What should I do to make my life better?". I can see how it is generalizable since the situation that is causing the unhappiness is fairly common, then the question is: What should one do to make one's life better?
This type of question seems to be chatty and open ended so is not a good fit for the site. See the FAQ for guidance.
I guess I should add that I didn't vote to close yet. I think there is a question buried in there and before voting to close I would want to write a comment that may lead to a helpful edit, and I haven't had time.
Since the question was up-voted 16 times, it seems like there are several people on the site who think it's a good question. JeffE's (quite direct) response was up-voted 35 times. For me, I see as a borderline case but within limits.
@earthling I am not sure that up votes always reflect the quality of the question, but rather sometimes reflect the importance/relevance of the topic. For me I don't see it currently as borderline at all. There might be an important and relevant question in there, but currently it is too buried.
Apparently, there have been many people to comment, enough people to vote to close, not enough to vote to reopen, and none have edited it into better shape. That's sad.
If you want to see that question stay, improve it!
Well, this position seems to lead directly to what Daniel E. Shub is warning about: close/re-open wars. Be more constructive please. We shouldn't play here a game that we first close questions and only afterwards start to discuss on meta why they should be re-opened. We should do it rather the other way round! I find the position to always close/delete on the ground of breaking FAQ a little bit too pedantic.
@walkmanyi questions closed are "on hold", waiting to be reopened if improved. It's simple, and it's how the system works, on this and all other SE sites. Otherwise, leaving the question open and hope that it might get better is bound to lead to disappointing results.
I see your point. But in practice it seems to me that closed questions seldom get re-opened. Or am I wrong? Honestly, while building up my confidence in editing this site in the last months, I often found myself thinking: Well, these guys cite FAQ etc., they know what they are doing. Let's leave things as they are. I wouldn't be surprised if that were the attitude of most "more junior" users here around.
I think the first thing we need to decide is if the question as it currently stands is fit for staying open. If not then we need to decide if it is salvageable with an edit that doesn't change the meaning. Hopefully we can guide the OP with comments/meta/chat to the required edits. To me the question is not suitable as it is currently written and I think should be closed. I would like to see someone take the time to help the OP make the question suitable, or ask a new question. I am quite removed from my PhD days so don't think I have e prospective to edit/ask the question.
I think this disucssion is as good as it is difficult. In my view, a personalized question is fine if there is something general in it. The problem is that the OPs usually want a personal answer and generalized answers tend to be voted down or at least not voted up at all. So, I think the big question is, how do we get across to OPs that a personal question is fne but that the site expects some generality in both questions and answers, in short: that this is not a personal problem solving site?
I think we could do wth some standard greetings to new OPs so that in this case the message about generality comes across. Other sites such as TeX.sx uses such a system
I see the point of the other answers. However, in the past few months and weeks I found myself to advocate a more inclusive stance on this site. I know that my position probably clashes with FAQ, but my view of this site is that it should provide useful advice, rather than well-phrased questions. Under useful advice I mean content which can be found by mere use of a search engine and providing valuable insights. Often questions are ill-phrased, but answers are valuable. IMHO, we are too quick to close/delete such questions.
Regarding the question in consideration, I voted for re-open because I find the answers to the question useful. Is the question subjective? Yes. Is it generalisable? Probably yes, but at the moment it is too localised. Will people who put a question similar to the one asked into a search engine find answers useful? Absolutely! Hence my re-open vote. Not because of the question, but because of JeffE's answer which is an extremely valuable piece of advice.
Let me illustrate what I mean. During my first postdoc I felt overwhelmed by whatever came on me. I complained to my former thesis adviser and asked him for advice. His response was laconic: Something is wrong with your time management. Then I started to look for advice around the Network, eventually finding this piece of text. In the core the question is the following:
if we want to be writers, how are we supposed to write if we’re working 17 hours a day?
Would such a question fly here on this site? Probably not. Does it contain a sound advice? Absolutely!
To conclude the story, I printed out on a A3 paper the acronym F.F.O. and glued that above my desk. Worked very well for me and I am deeply convinced answers to the question in question would work for somebody else too.
I am a little surprised that someone cast the final closing vote without making a comment on this meta question. Similiarly, there are 3 reopen votes. We need to build a consensus about what is on/off topic and discussing questions like this is key. As I said in my other answer, it is not that I disagree with the vote to close, but rather the lack of discussion. The 19 up votes and 3 favourites says something about the question/topic that we need to be aware of. Is there an edit that can save the question. Can we ask a new good question that will appeal to those who liked this question?
We want to avoid a close/reopen war.
| Stack Exchange | 2025-03-21T12:54:48.789077 | 2013-04-02T01:15:33 | {
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511 | Bad rendering of bounty custom message dialog
I just posted a bounty on one of my questions and I noticed that the rendering is off. The vertical lines on the far left (where it says "Enter a custom message" the E does not have the vertical line, just the three horizontal lines). This is true of all the text on the far left side.
I'm guessing that since not that many bounties get awarded this has not been been caught.
In case someone wants to reproduce this, I'm using FireFox Portable 20.0.1 on Win7 x64.
Could you post a screenshot? I don't think I see what you're seeing.
Also, posting this here is fine... I can let one of the main devs know if necessary.
@eykanal I've posted a screenshot above.
I can't reproduce this on win or osx, FF20. here's my screenshot. Can anyone else reproduce this bug?
I've reproduced this on Firefox 20.0.1 on Win 8, @Jin. The trick is, you have to type a message into the box - when you hit the end of the first line, just before the message wraps, it'll scroll the entire contents of the dialog to the left slightly. It won't show up until you type a message in (although the right border of the entryfield appears cut off until you click in it), and it won't show up if you paste a long message in; you have to manually type more than 80 characters into the box.
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666 | Undergrad research is on topic?
In this question, JeffE says that academic research questions are firmly on topic. However, this question is about undergrad research and it seems the question could just as easily relate to graduate level research but it was closed as being off topic.
It seems either the rules are unclear or they are being followed inconsistently. Or, am I simply not seeing something that other people can see?
To clarify: I see the scope of this site as academia as a human activity, regardless of who is doing the acting. The knee-jerk rejection of undergraduates as "real" academics, even when they are doing exactly the things that PhD students, postdocs, and faculty do, is frankly mind-boggling to me.
I think that I would not be nearly so categorical as Jeff—or perhaps I'm viewing what he perceives as "academic research" to be more expansive than my definition. Questions about how to prep for the Intel science fair would be off-topic, but asking how to design a research topic would certainly be fair game.
I think the correct rule to apply in such matters is if it's a question a PhD student (or higher) could reasonably ask. If so, then it's appropriate. So I very much disagree with the close votes, and would support reopening the question.
@DanielE.Shub Presumably, questions that would only be helpful for tenured faculty (or asked by tenured faculty) are also welcome here.
@JeffE of course. I was trying to mimic what aeismail wrote changing only "question" to "answer" and I clearly left out the key "or higher" part. I replaced my comment.
I don't think it is about the question, rather, I think the rule should be "if the answers could be helpful to a graduate student (or higher)."
If the question is about research or anything research-related—e.g., publishing, presenting, literature, professional networking, etc.—it's on topic. If the question is not about research—coursework, specific software questions, generic career advice, homework, etc.—it's off topic.
Undergraduate research, industry research, amateur research; these are all research-related, and therefore on topic.
But when do we move from research to non-research? Presenting and discussing research is part of the process.
@aeismail - I completely agree. I clarified the answer.
But then that means that a topic about putting together a junior-high science fair poster becomes "academia." That seems to be taking things a bit too far.
@aeismail junior-high science fair posters generally don't include any/much "research"
Are questions about graduate school admissions/departmental politics/professional etiquette/how to format a vitae, etc., not on topic? --I wouldn't call these research-related any more than coursework or software questions
@SAH - Good points, we've been treating all those as on-topic, but this answer doesn't explicitly call it out. My take is that they're on-topic, as they're related to the research environment, but that's just my opinion, and I'll be the first to admit it's pretty fuzzy. Feel free to start a new meta question asking about that distinction!
I think questions about research are on topic. I dislike the idea that any "magic word" (be it the dreaded 'homework' on other sites, or 'undergrad' here) automatically makes a question less valuable, off topic or not worthy of being answered.
Research, even research that will get published in good peer-reviewed journals, presented at conferences, etc. is not the exclusive domain of post-bachelors students and faculty. To give a brief personal example, if this site existed when I was an undergrad, I could have asked questions about how to deal with co-authors who weren't pulling their weight, how long it's reasonable to wait for a journal article to come back from review, what to expect from your first conference presentation, how to handle some drama around publishing, and how to handle some press coverage of your work.
The idea that I wasn't yet in graduate school shouldn't apply to any of that.
I believe that research questions should be on topic. I also believe that questions about "research" projects that are part of the requirements for an undergraduate degree are off topic. I feel this way because in my opinion these types of projects rarely make a sufficient contribution on interesting projects to warrant authorship on the resulting outputs (in the cases where there are any). In this way I don't think of these questions as research questions, but instead as undergraduate course work questions. These types of "undergraduate" questions can be on topic if they are asked in regards to transitioning from undergraduate to graduate researcher. In this way questions about working as an undergraduate in a research group (e.g., the US REU program) in preparation for graduate school would be on topic.
As for the argument that both an undergraduate and a Phd student might ask the same "question", in the case of proc/cons of choosing your own topic, the answers are very different.
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800 | Should we delete and re-ask questions from non-users?
I was reading this question which was migrated from Math.SE. Although this question was closed as a rant it made me wonder about migrated questions.
This question was asked by someone without an A.SE account (I think that's the case) so, for example, the username shows up but there is no link. I'm not sure if that user will get comments or answers. I also wonder if that user can (or would) ever accept an answer.
All of this begs the question, when non-A.SE-users are the asker of a question, should we delete and re-ask the question so that it belongs to someone who can actually answer clarifying questions and who can accept answers?
My gut answer is: no, you shouldn't.
A user who wants to follow up with a migrated question can join our site. If not, it's wrong to take somebody's question and pass it off as your own.
However, you could certainly choose to "adopt" a question, and be responsible for its curating over time.
Is there a way to accept answers on these questions?
This question was asked by someone without an A.SE account (I think that's the case) so, for example, the username shows up but there is no link. I'm not sure if that user will get comments or answers. I also wonder if that user can (or would) ever accept an answer.
Your intuition is correct; the individual does not exist on our site, so they would not be alerted to new responses and cannot accept answers.
When non-A.SE-users are the asker of a question, should we delete and re-ask the question so that it belongs to someone who can actually answer clarifying questions and who can accept answers?
Remember, this is a community-owned site. We can discuss the question in the question comments, and anyone can then edit the question to clarify confusing content. There's no need to delete and re-ask just so that we can accept the answer.
The only way I could see this working and, as aeismail has stated, not having it end up feeling like we've repackaged questions asked by others for our own benefit, is to have a dedicated account, somewhat ala the "Community" account for owning those answers, which the mod staff has access to.
I think in that case, it's still somewhat problematic, as the "Accepted" answer then becomes the moderation staff's best guess at the correct answer, rather than the answer the user truly would have accepted. This has two problems in my opinion:
It substitutes no information for potentially wrong information, which always makes me nervous.
It creates the potential for a kind of "cultural homogeneity" as the large number of ownerless questions have their answers then dictated by a relatively small group of users. If these "Super Answerers" all come from a particular perspective, the same field, etc. I think you create a fall sense of there being community norms where none actually exist.
I agree. I'm wondering which is better, Community accepted answers or nothing accepted. I guess nothing accepted is not that big of an issue since there are vote counts.
| Stack Exchange | 2025-03-21T12:54:48.790331 | 2014-02-18T14:42:57 | {
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789 | Studying by MOOC on-topic or off?
In this question, the OP believes that studying by MOOC should be on-topic since it deals with the idea of gaining knowledge from a teacher in a more-or-less formal way. However, the question was closed as off-topic by several, including myself, who believe academia to be focused on universities and the like.
While I can see the OP's argument, we do generally say that undergraduate studies is off-topic. Not that all MOOC are for undergraduates but rather there is a clear statement that not all learning is on-topic. This question is to help find the line between on- and off-topic.
So, where does this question fall? On- or off-topic?
Questions about MOOC's are not prima facie off-topic. This question, however, does not ask a question relevant for our forum. "Can I learn a subject using a MOOC" is too broad for an SE site.
This is a forum about academia, not education. MOOCs are directly related to education, but not necessarily academia. A question would not be on-topic simply by virtue of it's pertaining to MOOCs. The inverse is not necessarily true; an academia-related question may include some content about MOOCs.
If I can say something:
MOOC courses are followed by people not only in their undergraduate degrees, but also at master's level. In those cases if one gets a certificate of accomplishment one can get extra credits for the course
So I really still not see why MOOC is considered as something out of the academic world
I have edited my question to make it clearer. I was not trying to imply that MOOC=undergrad studies, rather that the site has clearly made the decision that some learning issues are off-topic.
| Stack Exchange | 2025-03-21T12:54:48.790603 | 2014-02-14T23:09:45 | {
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197 | How do we distinguish between reference tag and bibliography tag?
There are a lot of questions tagged with the tag references. But some actually fall under bibliography, as some disciplines/journals use the title References for bibliography.
And some questions are actually related to referees, as one who provides a reference.
So how should the reference tag wiki should be created? The questions need to be re-tagged, according as which meaning is adopted?
As the tag wiki for bibliography says
Questions related to the structure, building and typesetting of a
bibliography comes under this tag. Bibliography is an organized
listing of books or a systematic, detailed description of books as
physical objects.
references tag excerpt may be edited to mean references about a candidate by a reputed person and the questions tagged with references that actually fall under bibliography may be changed to bibliography tag.
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201 | How to encourage tag creators to edit tag wiki as well?
Some users create tags while adding question; some are highly useful and some are simply meaningless. Do SE have any mechanism to encourage users to add tag wiki as well, on creating tags?
Esp. see this question In conference review process, what do “author response” and “author notification” mean? What actually the tags (wording) (dates) (call) mean?
So, if the tag creator him(her)self propose a tag wiki, it is good for the community.
This is a pretty common problem on the main SO site as well; people tag questions with seemingly ridiculous tags in the hopes of... well, I'm really not sure, but I guess they think that adding weird tags increases the chance they'll get an answer. There isn't really much we can do for these people, since they clearly didn't search to see other related stuff and then read the instructions next to the tag box that state to enter related tags. Not much we can do for those users.
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192 | How can I move a user's comment to the appropriate place?
Here a new user should have added a comment, but mistakenly started a new answer. Charles (correctly) moved the user's response to be a comment rather than an answer. I know Charles is a moderator, which brings me to my question. Is this sort of maintenance restricted to mods? Or is this something that I can fix on my own? If so, how?
| Stack Exchange | 2025-03-21T12:54:48.790957 | 2012-09-21T06:32:48 | {
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711 | Revealing details about other people
In my answer to "How to write a white paper for a non-academic". I mentioned that I know a true story, an example of such a situation with a "happy end". Now, it was requested that I relieve more information about this, which I originally didn't want to.
What do I know: I know who are the authors, I know one of them in person (from a conference) and he made a conference talk from where I know the information. I know quite well the topic of the papers.
My question: Is it non-ethical to publish this information here?
My view of pros: it's all positive, therefore it's not really speaking behind their back.
My view of cons: I don't want to be a paparazzi that publishes such information on a random webpage/blog/... without the people's consent.
I don't think anyone requested details… but people are curious, especially went it sounds like a good story! So they ask for details.
Don't feel pressured to reveal anything, if it's not public knowledge.
I would venture to add that, specifically, if we are considering anecdotes, if said anecdote is public information, then I don't think that it is a breach of privacy to reveal their names and other details (affiliations, gender etc.)
If their story is published, you would have to cite them as the authors… in that case, revealing their names and credentials would be fair ground. If the information you have is privileged meaning you have access to the info because you are friends, you happen to know them personally or they asked you to proof read some papers. It would not be ok to use such info especially on a public site.
If you are truly concerned, go on and ask for their blessing/permission.
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147 | Transfer of question from The Workplace to Academia?
Well the other day I was asking this question on The Workplace. However my gut feeling told me the question didn't really belong there, and they introduced me to this SE site instead.
Here's my question: https://workplace.stackexchange.com/questions/2152/whats-the-difference-between-a-bachelor-of-commerce-and-a-bachelor-of-science
Is this on topic here? Would I be able to get a transfer of the question from there to here? I'm looking at someone who has a general understanding of what each Bachelor degree does and which field of work hires them. Say for "Bachelor of Arts" it may include people who may end up being Creative Directors, etc.
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357 | Too fast closing of questions from humanities
We've got another question with a background in humanities which was closed almost immediately. Another such is discussed here. The reason in both cases was that it's too subjective, rather argumentative and no objective answer could be provided. It seems to me this might be a pattern we need to be careful about. It seems to me that both questions and discussions around them implicitly assume that the question cannot be objectively answered. That however rules out any scientific discourse based on softer criteria. I argue that such questions should not be closed so quickly, there indeed might be good answers to them rooted in research in humanities, history, sociology, etc.
Considering the discussion here, my feeling is that due to the current composition of academia.SE audience which is skewed towards people from exact scientific disciplines, we might be too dismissive about questions from humanities. This way, we won't succeed to attract people from those areas. We should rather find a way to embrace such softer questions.
I am lost. Would you care to explain what is the question on main site having anything to do with humanity?
@scaahu: I reacted to this part of the question "For example, what are the shortcomings of British or Canadian or Australian higher education system?". I will edit the question.
@scaahu: and also regardless of the question's content, its title was (and still is) a reasonable question.
I saw the new version of the question on main site. I am still lost. I don't intend to leave any comment there. Please explain here.
As somebody with a strong liberal arts background, I can sympathize that most of the questions here do come from people with a science background—but that makes sense, given the host of the board!
However, the question you cite at the top of the page is way too broad for the Q&A format Stack Exchange promotes. "Why is X the way it is now?" questions are usually poor fits for formats like SE sites.
As a moderator, however, I will keep an eye out for questions that are being given too short a leash. I prefer to keep things community-moderated (since I am a volunteer, not an elected mod), but will step in if things are getting out of hand.
Re: the question format: is the new version still too broad? If so, can we come up with a way to treat/reformat this kind of questions so that they would be acceptable? Me being from "harder" sciences background, I honestly do not know how to reformulate these questions (which I personally like and consider useful) so that they become more acceptable?
@walkmanyi The first sub-question is okay to me - scholarly resources. The second one is too broad - there can be too many reasons to fit into our Q&A format - What are the main differences.
@scaahu: I see. Do you have then any insights into my question about how to reformulate such questions in the comment to aeismail above?
@walkmanyi The question http://academia.stackexchange.com/q/7455/546 is like saying assuming X is true, do you know any references?
@scaahu: right. Could the graph posted by Leon Palafox in answer to this question be an indication to plausibility of that claim?
@walkmanyi Yes. Given those info, now we can ask why it is happening that way as a follow up. Still, it cannot be too broad to fit, imho.
The question is better. The second part could be treated in much the same way as the first: Are their comparative studies of the educational systems in the US and other English-speaking countries?
I am a little confused about why the linked question leads to this question, but in general I think we are closing some of these broad questions too quickly. It seems the decision is that the answer will be subjective and long. I think for many of these types of questions someone with the expertise could write a really good reasonable length answer. We don't have very many unanswered question, so leaving some of these open wouldn't be a big problem and we could see if eventually we get people with the required expertise.
Re: the link. Perhaps this can be attributed to my inexperience with the mechanics of this Q&A site, I am simply not sure where to discuss/dispute closing/reopening of questions. I didn't want to spoil the question's discussion so I referred to a (albeit on a more general level) continuation here.
@walkmanyi I think you did the right thing bring this to meta (although you could have brought it to chat also). I am just not sure that I see that question as being a "humanities" question. Rereading the link question I guess I can see the humanities aspect.
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370 | Should we keep questions asking about a (popular) myth?
This question, originally posed as this one turns out to be based on an incorrect assumption, which, I argue, is not easy to recognize, even might be considered a part of layman public opinion.
Should we close/delete, or keep questions which are tackling such urban legends?
In favour of keeping such questions that answers fixing them might be useful to debunk the corresponding myths. Of course, against keeping them speaks the fact that the question is based on incorrect facts and thus non-sense in its core. Keeping such would only spoil the Q&A site.
If the question is indeed asking about an urban legend, there's an entire SE dedicated to that sort of thing. I would suggest that any question touching on what may or may not even be true be reformulated to first address whether the assumptions are true, and after the reformulation, the question should be migrated to Skeptics. If the assumption turns out to be true, the question could then be reposted with a link to the Skeptics post as a basis for the assumption.
Note that this is pretty abstract, and the more likely scenario is that each question would have to be judged on an independent basis.
I would avoid having too long a list of subjects that we consider verboten. Even urban legends can have their role on this board, if it's asked correctly. I'd rather let the community judge what is or is not appropriate for this board by voting accordingly.
@aeismail - FWIW, I completely agree.
So at least we have something like a process in place for stuff like this. So much for a futile, but certainly entertaining and in a way also educative effort to save two quirky questions :-).
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408 | Should we delete questions which are trivial, but received somewhat valuable answers?
Continuing with my push towards more liberal stance on deleting questions (we are developing here some deletionists vs. inclusionists issues, I guess), let me ask the following:
Suppose we've got a trivial, localised, or otherwise not-that-good question, but thanks to a slight shift in its interpretation and seeing through the question somebody provided quite valuable, even though only tangentially related answer. Should we delete such a question?
Before diving into the review of (currently 43! proposals to close), I would like to get an idea of the moderators'and the community's opinions whether my, openly inclusionist, stance has any merit and approval.
I am referring to questions, such as these:
Distance Learning vs Free Online Education, or
Funding for Belgian student to do a PhD in UK?
In the first one, the answer by Charles is something worth to keep, and in the second one it's the rmounce's reply.
Following the usual meaning of downvotes on Meta sites, I am downvoting not because the question is bad (it is good to ask it), but because in my opinion the answer is no, we should keep such questions, they add value to the site.
I agree. Questions with useful answers should be kept!
Distance Learning vs Free Online Education
This seems to be a very good question which happens to be worded very poorly. If anyone cares to edit this, I think it's well worth salvaging. To me, the close votes only reflect that the question body does not reflect the title. The question in the title seems to be a good question.
Funding for Belgian student to do a PhD in UK?
Again, to me this question just looks like it needs a little editing. The current question is actually fine—"what alternative funding sources exist?"—but it could use some editing to make it read smoother.
Broadly speaking, just because someone voted to close doesn't mean any closing is necessary. As a beta site, anyone can vote to close, and lots of questions with close votes are perfectly fine. This is particularly true of the older ones you're looking at, as we were still defining the site scope when those were asked.
+1 for all of it. A vote to close is a vote to get rid of the question (in most cases, it will be deleted). If there is a good question hidden behind the current state, don't close-vote, edit it!
We have good strong guidelines, the FAQ, and the wider Stack Exchange culture.
The only criteria that matter for old questions, are the same criteria we apply to new questions: if they are off-topic, not constructive, or not real questions, they should be closed.
If we leave open questions that are not in line with those criteria, then we're leaving broken windows around, and the site will decay and fall apart. Bad questions should be closed, then either deleted, or ideally edited to a fit state and reopened.
Both the questions you've cited are not appropriate as they stand. So let's close them, and then see whether they get deleted, or edited & reopened.
We should also be a lot less precious about crowd-pleaser questions that are not constructive. Yes, lots of people are tickled by them. But if they're not constructive, or not real questions, or off-topic, they should be closed.
For example, What are the advantages or disadvantages of using LaTeX for writing scientific publications
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443 | Are questions about tools on-topic?
My understanding of the answers and votes on the question whether software-related questions are on-topic is that indeed, questions on software as tools for work in academia are on-topic. Now this question was closed recently. To my understanding, the question is about tools too. Perhaps it is on something many would regard as too lowly and dirty issue, but I think it's relevant to work people in academia perform. So I would like to finally see how to deal with questions regarding tools, be it software, hardware, or otherwise practical things making life of a teacher, or a researcher easier.
P.S.
As I expressed already elsewhere, I'd rather take an inclusive position regarding deleting question on this site. This should be a place to provide answers of whatever kind relevant to academia, rather than a list of FAQ for academics. Hence my question above.
That question is well-phrased as an academic concern, and I agree with you that it's on topic here.
To the broader point, I agree with you; if something is well phrased an academic concern, I would definitely rather keep it here than delete it.
I also agree with this sentiment. Technology plays an essential role in all areas of life, but the needs of academics can in some cases be quite specific. I don't particularly like the attitude of several 'experienced' acad members who tend to punitively close academic specific questions but relating to software, websites, etc on the general presumtion of 'not relevant to academia', despite receiving several constructive responses and healthy discussion. Just because one doesn't personally find it interesting doesn't mean that other people with academia don't find it useful. I do like this site, but in generally I feel that these types of questions are not welcome, despite having no other natural home (for example the first question I asked here got several answers and a good discussion, but was then migrated where it still has virtually zero response).
I would like to get more involved, as this area is personally particularly interesting to me, but I don't see the point in contributing if my efforts are permanently deleted from the ether due to other people's biases.
I'm confused about the inconsistent application of questions about tools and whether they're on topic or not.
For example:
https://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/10597/how-can-i-use-the-ms-onenote-application-for-my-lierature-search was closed and received downvotes.
How to read and take notes on research papers is open and has a number of upvotes.
The close votes for one is that it is off-topic (rather than, for example, being "not constructive"; arguably the second question shows that the some solutions have been attempted, whereas the first one does not illustrate this preparation) but at the core these questions have similar styles.
The OneNote question is a poor fit in my opinion because there is no single correct answer, rather it is looking for a poll about how people use it. The "how to take notes" question is looking for a fact based answer (is there a tool and if so what is it). This could potentially become a big list or polling question, but it hasn't degenerated into that yet.
I don't agree with your assessment, as a "How do take notes on papers" can range from "Use Word" to "Use OneNote" to "Use Evernote" to "Print them out and write on them" as I feel that none of those are single correct answers either. But I think I'm more about leaving feedback. We're more open than most SE sites about open-ended questions, but I feel that if we do close a topic we should be clear about why it was closed - if it's not off-topic, then we should instead indicate that the question showed a lack of research or detail.
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3351 | Shall we close Brexit-related questions as not answerable?
There are a number of questions related to Brexit on this site. I have lots of questions related to Brexit, but I don't ask them because nobody can answer them. I propose we close those questions, because:
Although the electorate voted to leave the European Union, it is still not formally certain that Brexit will happen.
Nobody knows yet what will happen now that the referendum resulted Brexit.
Therefore, any answer to such questions is speculation at best and giving false hopes/promises at worst.
Some affected questions:
Could Brexit negatively affect PhD students in the UK who are EU nationals?
How would the UK leaving the EU affect academia and PhD admission?
The problem is, currently, those questions are impossible to answer. At the same time, they are the theater of interesting discussions, without politics (which is really cool !).
Closing it because the answer is only theorical might be a possibility, but at the same time, we got a lot of other informations from those topic (international PhD infos, etc...).
@GautierC I agree that speculation can be fun and interesting, but it's not what Stack Exchange is for.
It is impossible to give a 100% answer, however there a lot of people with experience of dealing with the UK from outside of the EU. There are also valid points about what is prefunded and what is funded on going bases. Given “project fear”, I think some of this fear can usefully be taken away.
PS, I think the likelihood of a Brexit is close to 50% (+- 25%) and no one that claims to be able to predict the outcome knows what they are talking about. (But that the likelihood has increased in the last few weeks.)
@Ian But it's unknown whether UK's relation to the EU will be like Norway and Iceland, like Switzerland, like Canada/USA, or a new relation altogether. This is unknown in general, and it's unknown for academia specifically. If this becomes clear in 1, 6, or 12 months, we can address those questions based on experiences by academics already outside the EU. (I agree that the overly precise number of 38% is not very meaningful.)
@gerrit, but if you can say that a student from the USA and a student form the 3rd world would both be allowed into the UK to do "X", it is reasonable to assume a student from the EU post Brexit would be at least as well off.
@Ian True; there is a reasonable assumption on a worst case scenario.
The Brexit questions remind me of the question about Muslim students' PhD applications being affected by the rise of ISIS (here). I'd argue that if you're going to consider questions with geopolitical "what-ifs" to be unanswerable, you'd have to do the same with that question as well. More specifically, (in my opinion), by the standards you proposed, it's also unanswerable.
Well, at least for the first point, we now know that it did happen.
@MassimoOrtolano We know that a vote for Brexit did happen. Until the UK triggers Article 50, Brexit is not certain to happen. Arguably, the longer the UK waits, the more likely politicians will find an excuse to ignore the result or hold another referendum.
The questions may not be answerable now, but they will be answerable in the future. Leave them open, maybe with an answer or comment that we don't know yet, and then they can be answered when the time comes that the answer is available.
Article 50 has been triggered and the process of figuring out the answers has formally begun.
There is a high frequency of questions that ask "How can I best navigate some future event?" most of which are perfectly acceptable to answer despite people needing to account for an inordinate number of unpredictable variables.
"How do I best apply for school."
"How do I best respond to so and so."
All of those types of questions would ideally require a knowledge of the people involved at least but people still answer them based on, at best, a bit of data generalized to an almost entirely unknown situation.
Estimating the exact impact of a global, national, or local economic trends is no easier than estimating the exact impact of a global, national, or local interpersonal trend. Brexit at least has a news cycle that can update the question. But this forum isn't designed to keep people current, it is designed to entomb information and then is misapplied to things that are changeable.
If you are trying to form some sort of consistency then no keep it open, or block both. If you are going to on a whim block things that appear too frequently, then sure, but it shouldn't be on the pretense that they are unanswerable.
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1849 | Why does this low-score question not show up at the bottom of questions sorted by votes?
This question has a (deserved) score of -12. Yet if I search for all questions sorted by votes and scroll to the very last page, it does not show up; the lowest non-closed question is this question with +5-15=-10. Why don't I see the -12 question there?
I just downvoted the question with -10 score so that it has a -11 score and it has now been removed from the list of all questions sorted by votes.
Right now the question with 0-12=-12 score is listed on the 7th page of the newest questions list.
It has happened before http://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/95408/sorting-questions-by-votes-is-broken but SE thinks it is fixed. I noticed it a few months ago but never followed up on it.
I just checked this out and I do see the question at the bottom of the list. Can you repro? If not, I'm going to assume it was just caching.
@Pops I cannot reproduce it now.
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3398 | Why did many simultaneously earn the generalist badge?
It appears that 20 hours ago, 75 people earned the generalist badge. For all who currently have the generalist badge, it was awarded at this time.
What event or sequence of events caused the simultaneous awarding of the generalist badge to 75 users?
There is a requirement that a site must fulfil for Generalist badges to be awarded, namely that the top-40 tags have 201 questions or more (source). Academia passed this threshold yesterday¹, and hence everyone eligible for this badge² received it at the same time.
¹ with this question (there are two tags with 201 questions, and this is the most recent one in those tags)
² which were quite a lot by the way; only a handful of sites on the network have more generalists.
Out of interest, how did you find out about the handful of sites with more generalists? Some ingenious db query (if so, any chance of a link to it?), or extensive trawling?
@EnergyNumbers: Semi-extensive trawling in circumstances that did not allow me to focus on any intelligent tasks – it’s not that much to do if you know what you are doing.
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311 | Are questions being deleted too quickly?
I have recently acquired moderator privileges. Academia is the first SE site where I do so, so I was curious to see what they are like.
One thing that struck me is how quickly some questions get deleted. For example, this question (only visible with moderator privileges) was asked Nov 27 at 22:50 and deleted Nov 28 at 13:36, e.g. less than 15 hours later. This question was even deleted within an hour. The instructions in Access to moderator tools state that You must wait for a question to be closed for 2 days before you can vote for deletion.
From previous experience elsewhere on the SE network, a user asking a question gets no notification if the question is deleted, and is unable to view the question or the comments. They will simply get error 404. With such a quick deletion, it's quite possible that the OP never got the chance to read the feedback and learn how to ask better questions.
Would it be wise to wait a little longer before deleting questions? Personally, I think even 2 days is a bit quick. Closing is clear enough to signal "this is off-topic". Does it really hurt to leave the question for at least a week to give the OP opportunity to read and consider the feedback?
In those two particular cases, they were so bad as to beyond rescue-by-edit. So I'm glad to see the back of them, sooner rather than later.
For those of us who aren't diamond-mods, but have access to Delete Votes, we can't cast a delete vote for a proposal until the two days have passed. So the two-day minimum is enforced for us, by the software.
And you can only cast five delete votes per day.
In general, closed questions should either be edited and reopened; or, if an edit can't save them, they should (ISTM) be deleted. The exception is duplicate questions, where the closed duplicate is allowed to hang around as bait for search engines.
Anyway, here's a bunch of closed questions awaiting your attention for delete votes, now you've got them.
If you have enough reputation, and the question was not upvoted, you can vote to delete it without the two-days delay…
This topic has received a good deal of attention here. I suggest reading the linked post for context. In short, it seems that the (active contingent of) the community has taken the stance that deletion should happen sooner rather than later, to prevent off-topic closed questions from piling up over the long term. (As a point of reference, the main SO site has over 50,000 questions with close votes just sitting around.)
Personally, I hear both sides. It definitely doesn't hurt to leave it around. That being said, it doesn't help anything, either.
If you (the OP) (or anyone else, really) have a particular opinion on how these should be handled, feel free to post as an answer here and let the community vote on it.
My point is not really on whether or not to delete the question, but on how quickly, particularly in the light that the OP gets no feedback if a question gets deleted. There might be something between leaving closed questions around and deleting them within an day.
Closed questions are broken windows: they give a bad first impression of the site to new users, and can (if in sufficiently large numbers) clutter the main page.
The alternative is to downvote these questions as well as close them, because a question of score –3 or lower will disappear from the questions list. I think that alternative is harsher for the user (people tend to react badly to downvotes).
I don't agree that it's harsher. I've had a question deleted elsewhere on SE before, and got confused and annoyed because it had simply vanished without a trace. I would agree with you if the user were informed about the deletion, but as this currently doesn't happen, I think it's still better more user-friendly to have a few downvotes (and wait a week with deletion) than for questions to vanish without a trace. Again, I'm not proposing not to delete, but just to wait a little longer so the OP has a chance to realise what's going on.
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3688 | "How can I communicate with X about Y?"
Academia gets quite a few questions from people in academia who want to communicate something to someone, but are just not sure how to say it. Often this is a student trying to tell something to a professor.
What sentence is suitable for thanking a professor?
How do I politely ask a professor to contact another professor he knows to accept me as PhD student?
How to tell a professor at a foreign university politely and impressively that I can’t cover the costs of living for my PhD?
How do I turn down an internship offer by a professor because I have a better offer in a corporate research lab?
How do I explain to a prof who is not happy with my actions which were simply a mistake due to miscommunication?
What advice can we offer for asking, answering, or moderating such questions?
A few potential issues:
In many cases the asker is simply nervous - perhaps they are intimidated by the idea of talking to a professor, or have bad news or a sensitive request and are worried about the reaction, or are anxious about their language skills, etc. They may be looking for reassurance rather than help with wording.
Sometimes newcomers to academia seem to think there are magic protocols to follow, and seem to be unaware that academics generally communicate just the same as everyone else. (To which we have JeffE's classic response: "Pretend as though he were human".)
Cultural factors may come into play. Etiquette, polite wording, etc, vary much more between cultures than inside/outside academia. An answer that's applicable in the US may not work at all in Japan, for instance; but maybe that distinction doesn't really have anything to do with academia.
Language issues may come into play. Perhaps the asker is not writing in their native language and is unsure whether they are clearly expressing themselves, or whether the tone of their wording is appropriate. Again, this might not really have anything to do with academia.
I don't understand what the question is here. Do you want suggestions, feedback, opinions about a proposal, or what?
@aparente001: "What advice can we offer for asking, answering, or moderating such questions?" If someone is considering asking / answering such a question, what should they include to make the question / answer as useful as possible? (Or should they not ask it at all?) Under what circumstances should such questions be closed? Feel free to make suggestions regarding any of these, and votes will hopefully indicate a community consensus.
For this type of question, I think usually the OP just needs to get unstuck, and some kind of response is extraordinarily helpful to them. Maybe if you described your motivation for the question, or wrote an answer containing your own view, I'd get a better idea what sorts of answers you're looking for?
This sounds to me like a good opportunity to create a community wiki question with a name like: "What should I do if I am feeling anxious about communicating with my professor?"
This would be a good one for marking all of the general "What are the magic words?" questions as duplicates.
Another large family of communication questions, however, are really not about the communication but about diagnosing and addressing problems in professional relationships. Those generally merit individual consideration and answers, and it would be important to not consider them as duplicates. After all, "Professors are human too" also covers quite a wide range of complicated problems.
Edit: I've now created a draft Q&A for this; please feel free to improve:
How should I phrase an important question that I need to ask a professor?
Most of these questions should be closed as off topic.
"How to write an email" kind of questions are not actually about academia, they are basically boat programming questions asking "how to communicate with other people?". These questions are additionally often very specific to a certain situation and unlikely to be helpful to other people. Valid questions would rather be more general and ask for example if and how communication is different in academia.
Academia.SE is also not an email writing service, we should not offer help with wording emails etc at all.
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765 | The modafinil question
I am unsure about the appropriateness of the question https://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/16215/modafinil-for-academics.
For background, Wikipedia informs us that modafinil is better known in the US by its brand name, Provigil, and is a "vigilance promoting" drug currently approved for the treatment of various sleep disorders. The question seems to ask about using it in what we might call a "performance enhancing" role, rather than for a specific medical condition. In the US, modafinil is available by prescription only and is a controlled substance, so using it without the supervision of a physician would probably be illegal (IANAL).
There is a long history of academics using psychoactive drugs to improve their work, and arguably questions about drug use in academia are on-topic. However, the current question has a "how-to" flavor which makes me less comfortable. I would rather not see this site move in that direction.
If any SE moderators/admins wish to weigh in on potential legal issues, that would be welcome as well.
Thoughts?
I am with you. I was about to push the close button. Unsure what reason to close.
I am also concerned about that question. However, I think it is still valid. The cost of using performance enhancing drugs in academia is not the same as in the medical field. For example, an academic who is primarily a teacher would normally have significant breaks during the year which could be used to recover from the effects...that is, to detox.
I do think this question is on the line but not because it applies equally to all professions (I do not think that). I think this question is on the line because it could easily lead to some promoting damaging drug use. At the same time, we can all give our thoughts, referencing relevant research showing the negative long-term effects.
In the end, I would vote to leave it open....but as I wrote, it is right on the edge for me about what should be allowed here.
This is an example of a "boat programming" question. You could replace "for academics" with anything and it wouldn't meaningfully change either the question or the answers. Therefore it's off-topic.
How do you know you could replace "for academics" with anything? What's the basis of that judgement? ISTM that there is one very relevant way that academia differs from most other jobs: holders of other jobs have to do their work at specific dates and times, whereas academic researchers almost never do.
What about a migration to http://cogsci.stackexchange.com/?
My sample size is one. I personally know an academic who uses Ritalin(an Attention deficit drug) to boost his productivity in order to meet schedule set by the department chair to fulfill the "Publish or perish" requirement.
One point is that academics are supposed to produce creative, thoughtful work. It is not the same as modafinil for work that is usually trivial for the worker (most jobs)
More or less the same question could easily be asked of: teachers, lawyers, emergency response personnel, astronauts, psychologists and psychiatrists, authors, . . .
This question is directly linked to effective work habits for academics. Are effective work habits specific to academia allowed?
How is the question different if I replace "academics" with "residents" and "medical school students?" I don't see the specificity here.
I don't think that it is a boat-programming question. Focus required for mathematics may be very different from that in other disciplines (I know a lot of coding while sleep-deprived but none of mathematicians). Anyway, if it is for objective/scientific data, then it is rather CogSci.SE, if it is for recommendations - too opinion-based (regardless of legal status).
Perhaps a better question would be, "Do long hours spent intensively on (math) research, beyond the normal physiological capacity of the human brain, have a marginal benefit to research quality, above that of substituting periods of non-sleep relaxation, in the long run?"
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537 | Can we do something about this self-promoting, spamming user?
This user obviously just promotes whatever company they work for:
https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/7262/kimberly-fujioka
Looking through their posts (including the deleted one), this user doesn't seem to be self-promoting beyond including a sig in her answers. Considering that she posted all her answers within two hours of each other and the edits to remove her sig were (for the most part) made towards the end of her posting, I'd give her another shot before taking excessive action. To quote some famous dead person,
Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity.
In this case, we'd substitute "unfamiliar with the social norms in our community" for "stupidity", but the concept still applies.
If this behavior continues please flag the relevant posts and we'll take further action.
In fact from the description of her company in her profile, the answers she has provided don't even seem obviously linked.
@DanielE.Shub - I agree, but the community has done the "modding" quite well, downvoting her posts and editing out her sig. At this point, I don't think any further action is warranted. If the behavior continues we can consider next steps.
@LeonMeier - Considering that this post was from 2013 and that this user has been inactive since just around that date, I'd say it's pretty moot at this point.
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589 | Updating our "What topics can I ask about here?" help center page to be explicit about what **not** to ask
When recently voting to close an off-topic undergraduate question, I saw this screen:
with the phrase:
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?
Note, however, that this description is absent from the linked help center page. Nor is it at What types of questions should I avoid asking?. We do note that questions that are very specific to one person's situation are not likely to get very far, but we don't outright discourage questions specific to undergraduates.
Some SE sites explicitly discourage certain off-topic questions. Mathematics has a detailed list: https://math.stackexchange.com/help/on-topic
Can we add a section like this to our help center?
I'm now collecting proposals for the list of questions not to ask here
I believe we should revisit this issue, in light of the fact that we have come out of beta and are getting more traffic.
Specifically, I sympathize with new users who post questions about things like undergraduate admissions without realizing it's considered off-topic. I wouldn't understand that from reading the help center text, either.
I also think it would be worthwhile to specify that
questions for a specific research project (e.g. Examples of Psychology in Finance) are off-topic, and
questions about Should I attend University X or University Y are off-topic
Although these are clearly off-topic if one reads the help center text carefully, I think we get enough of these that I'd like to exclude them explicitly.
I think this ties directly into the question of how we go about getting more questions per day on the site. We're never going to get out of Beta status unless we get 2-3 times more questions per day (correct me if I'm wrong), and while I am all for having strict guidelines on topic-appropriate questions, we should possibly thinking of some sort of outreach to find more people who want to ask questions that are on topic.
But what is the rush to get out of beta? From what I understand as long as we continue to "slowly grow" we can stay in beta for as long as we need to. Apart from some fancy wallpaper and better "advertising" I am not sure there is a difference between beta and not beta.
@DanielE.Shub Keep in mind, every so often the powers that be decide to close betas that aren't doing well. The guidance specifically says "As long as your site makes steady progress and continues to make the Internet a better place to get expert answers to your questions, it will move on" (emphasis theirs). I do think we can make the case for the latter (we make the Internet better), but too few questions doesn't help with "steady progress."
@ChrisGregg but you can see that we are making steady progress.
@CharlesMorisset while those are technical differences I am happy with our diamond mods and I think the increase in rep would actually be bad for us.
@DanielE.Shub I'm not going to argue about steady progress, except to say that a case could be made from your data that as a whole we aren't making steady progress (I'd be happy to present that argument, but I'd be playing Devil's advocate more than anything). Incidentally, it isn't surprising to me that the number of questions has dropped lately--I would venture that this is because school is out in the U.S.
@ChrisGregg I suggest we move this to chat ...
Note that the section you linked to on the Mathematics section is from their "on-topic" page, which we also use to explicitly list what is on-topic for this site. You will note that this list does not include anything related to undergraduate studies.
Historically, the SE folks have been willing to let us define what is on-topic, and discourage changes to the "what's off-topic" list, as anything that's no on-topic is, by definition, off-topic. I can bring it up with the admins again, but I doubt their stance has changed.
In response to the clarification below, I still maintain my above position. We list what should be asked, with the implicit (if not explicit) statement that anything not on-topic is off-topic. My view is that adding more text to the FAQ will not solve problems; people who post off-topic questions will not be deterred because "it's not in the FAQ".
Basically, I feel that listing off-topic stuff may make us feel good, but it decreases FAQ readability (more text) and won't affect the number of off-topic questions.
I understand this position, but besides Mathematics, MathOverflow, Superuser, English Language and Usage, and stackoverflow (to name a few) all list "specifically off-topic topics" on their on-topic help center pages.
@BenNorris Ah, I didn't realize what you referring to... I didn't go that far down the page. Thanks for clarifying. I'll update my answer to address that.
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149 | Are questions on student success/retention or recruitment on-topic, particularly if they are about research in those areas?
As a followup to DQdlM's question about pedagogy, are questions about student recruitment, success, or retention on topic even if they are not related to curriculum development or instructional design?
For example: My institution does a little general recruitment. Most recruitment is handled in the academic departments. I am not a college recruiter. I assume that research has been done on targeting and recruiting students who are likely to be successful, but since my research background is in chemistry, I do not even know where to begin looking for this kind of information. Would a question on locating resources on recruiting undergraduate students be on-topic?
I would agree that this is on-topic. Questions related to achieving positive outcomes, such as improved learning as well as retention, would definitely be relevant. The only thing is that focus should be on teaching at the college level or above.
I would definitely imagine this is on-topic. It's related to academia and specific to academics. I would suggest that, because recruitment/retention in academia requires specialized techniques not used in other fields—unique approaches to finding students, unqiue ways of selling the lab, unique methods for differentiating yourself—that such questions would be fine here.
I'd love to hear what others think.
Thanks for the comment. I'm going to go ask my question now.
Yes, questions about student recruitment and retention are definitely on-topic.
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168 | What is the etiquette of providing more than one answer to the same question?
I am thinking specifically of this question, where my answer would be wholly different based on the type of virtual teaching environment. I would like to provide separate answers for each environment so that they can be evaluated (and voted on) separately. Some answers may be more useful than others.
I know that I have the ability to provide more than one answer to a question. If the two answers are substantively different, is that preferable to a single long, rambling answer of the type "In situation A, do this, ............ and in situation B..... this other thing"?
From the main SO.meta, it seems that the preferred method is to put both answers in one answer, using headers to distinguish them.
I'm with eykanal on this one. Don't use multiple answers to a single question unless there's no other option. You can use the headers to distinguish different parts of your answer, so you should do so, rather than creating multiple answers.
I tend to prefer them being put in the same answer using headers or bullet points or something to distinguish them for a few reasons:
Two 50-point answers does not a gold badge make ;)
If you provide two excellent answers, it removes any conflict about which one to accept as "the" answer
It keeps your two-part answer together, so that variation in voting doesn't split them off. This is less of a big deal if they can truly be separated with no harm done, but I find this to be fairly rare.
It makes referring to @CleverUser's answer somewhat confusing.
The vote is done to the answer as a whole. You would probably get higher votes for a more complete answer, or even several answers.
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3380 | Please consider supporting arXiv trackbacks on the mother Meta
One long-standing feature requests for the Stack Exchange engine is the implementation of trackbacks for mentions of the arXiv on Stack Exchange sites. In general, if you have a blog and you blog about an arXiv eprint, you can send the arXiv a specially crafted http message, and then your blog gets listed on a page of the form
http://arXiv.org/tb/paper-id
that lists a bunch of internet locations that discuss the eprint. Some more examples of how this works:
Example: Here is a list of trackbacks to the arXiv preprint arXiv:0905.2658 from various blogs. My feature-request is that if a future SE post mentions an arXiv number, say, arXiv:0905.2658, then a trackback is automatically sent to the arXiv.org who then adds the SE post to the trackback list.
Example: This SE answer mentions the arXiv preprint arXiv:0707.2895. With trackbacks to the arXiv, it would be possible to see on the corresponding trackback list that this preprint is mentioned on SE.
More Examples: (SE question, arXiv preprint, trackback list);
(SE question, arXiv preprint, trackback list).
For recent trackbacks from across the internet to the whole of arXiv, see http://arxiv.org/tb/recent.
The trackback mechanism was implemented and put online on MathOverflow in 2013, and it has been ticking along ever since. A feature request was posted at about that time on Meta Stack Excange to enable this across all the science Stack Exchange sites, at
Trackbacks from SE to the arXiv.org?
It has received a lot of love over the years (currently at score 62) but apparently this has not been enough. So: do you think this mechanism should be enabled on network sites? If so, either post an answer here saying Aye, or go show that feature-request some (more) love.
I would recommend posting this on the SE-level Meta, rather than here, where it will be much less visible.
@aeismail That's... sort of the point of this question. As the question body and title indicate, this has been posted on [meta.se]. This is a request for support from this community to that feature request.
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330 | Do you want this question from meta.maths?
Over on meta.maths.SE this question was asked:
Teaching someone who doesn't put much effort in
While certainly off-topic for meta.maths.SE, I think it's a reasonable and interesting question and might be suitable for academia.SE. However, it's not apparent from the Academia FAQ that it'd be on-topic.
Question: Should this question be migrated to academia.SE?
[UPDATE] This question has now been moved to: Teaching classmates who don't put much effort in
It needs some cleaning up, but there's a valid question buried in there. I think we could take the question, but it would have to be worked on a bit before we'd open it for response.
What kind of stuff would need to be changed?
The main issue is that the teaching aspect, rather than "group study" factor, would need to be emphasized. (The former is in keeping with the aim of the board; the latter is not.)
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553 | Are questions about Institutional Review Board (IRB) procedures on topic?
In many fields (traditionally, Medicine but also increasingly the social sciences), applying for IRB approval is an integral part of being an academic. Are such questions on topic, and if so under what parameters (e.g. focusing on standard procedures vs. slippery ethical questions)?
The IRB has been the subject of an answer to a question, but not yet a question.
Posted now: http://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/10810/route-for-irb-approval-when-studys-only-tie-to-second-institution-is-you
Questions related to performing one's job as an academic professional is normally on-topic. However, the question would still need to satisfy the general requirement of being useful to a broader audience than the poster. Therefore, overly detailed questions may not be approved, but a broader question (related, for instance, to ethics or general questions about applications, and so on) might very well be on-topic.
It might be easier for you to post a sample question so we can see if it would be appropriate or not.
I think my question will qualify then. I'm new to here (but not to SE) so wanted a better sense before I posted. Thanks.
And just as I said, "I'm new to here," I was granted to Yearling badge :-). But my q's were migrated mostly.
As a former researcher who dealt extensively with the IRB, these types of questions would definitely be on-topic here, as they relate directly to:
Inner workings of research departments
Requirements and expectations of academicians
as listed in the Section Formerly Known As FAQ.
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882 | Discussion about publication bias in academia on another site
There was an interesting discussion at the stats Cross Validated site about (mis)use of statistics in academic papers. I think the audience of Academia will benefit from it, but I am not sure what the best way is to link to that discussion.
What you've done here is probably the best way. The Stack Exchange sites are set up to answer questions, not really to share cool stuff across sites.
OK, fair enough.
Meta is a good place to bring attention to interesting things. You could also link the discussion in chat. If you have an answerable question about the discussion that is relevant to academics you could ask that question on the main site.
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1176 | Do we need a tag for minorities
Academia (as an area of human activity) clearly faces issues with minorities. This is the US term to denote population groups that comprise less than a half of the population. These could be racial minorities, such as African Americans; gender minorities, such as females in academia; religious minorities, such as Muslims in the US; sexual miniorities, such as gay and lesbian. Consequently, questions on how to handle minority issues appear on Academia.SE from time to time. These questions are highly sensitive, and always generate long debates in comments and double digit counts of answers. Even experienced teachers and administrators may get into a lot of trouble for mishandling these issues.
Religious minority question: an instructor who is concerned about Muslim students; I made a comment, somewhere between 20 and 30 down, about a clash between a religious and a sexual minority issues that led to student suing the university (uh-oh)
Gender minority question: general nature. Note a deeply negative score of the last answer on the list. gender tag on this question leads to another five or so questions tagged that way. The answer that I gave talks about Harvard University President Larry Summers who had to step down because of his poorly understood remarks about women in academia (uh-oh)
I would like to propose to create the tag minority, but I am not sure how common this term is in other parts of the world, and as to whether it would convey the right meaning. (As I said, this is a highly sensitive issue!) Some people would be offended to be called minorities, as they don't consider themsevels to be in any way "minor" to other, more commonly seen, people.
Let's discuss.
I've found that one doesn't really need to propose a tag like this; questions end up being asked that, by virtue of their content, demand a new tag be created. That may be just my take, though.
I gave +1 for the question and also +1 for the (as of now) only answer. I think the term "diversity" works better here.
I think it'd be somewhat controversial to label women a "minority"... (even if currently a minority in academia)
The general word that describes all of the situations you're describing for religious, ethnic, and lifestyle minorities is diversity. This sometimes includes gender under the same umbrella, but this is not universally true.
OK, that's a better choice of a word. However, there are no questions tagged that way... yet :).
+1. Minority could still be a tag synonym, though.
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417 | Flag declined, "Please use the closing vote mechanism" but I don't have enough reputation
I flagged a question as off-topic but it was declined, with the comment:
declined - Please use the closing vote mechanism
Close votes require 500 reputation, correct? Why would this be declined if I can't do that? What is the purpose of being able to vote as off-topic if I am not supposed to...?
The question was: I and my advisor have a crush on the same woman, what should I do?
I think the reason for declining the flag is inappropriate. My guess is it was just an oversight that you did not have the rep to actually use the closing mechanism. In general, flags about issues like off-topic questions are appreciated.
As for the specific question, I am not sure when you flagged it, but it has now been deleted. It took a slightly odd route to deletion in that it wasn't closed first.
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1038 | Academia's question listing is taller
The entries in the question listing on Academia.SE are much bigger vertically than other SE sites. There appears to be a lot more spacing above and below each question entry.
Is there a reason Academia is different than most (all?) SE sites in regard to the question listing? I find it more difficult to scan and it requires more scrolling. The vast amount of emptiness makes me feel as if it is an oversight or a bug.
Can this be changed???
EDIT: This was also asked for in a reply on the original design post.
Hee. This ties in nicely to my casual observation that many academics consider white space to be wasted space, and that this relates to the horrible design values of most academic posters... ;-)
many academics consider white space to be wasted space — As opposed to programmers?
I think this is a relatively simple fix—it's the extra padding around the question. However, I also think that the fix shouldn't be to go something quite so dense as Stack Overflow. (Currently, I can fit about 7 questions from Academia.SE on my screen compared to about 10 SO questions in the same space. However, SO seems too crowded in comparison.
I think perhaps we can reduce the padding a bit, but we should still keep some just so that it remains easy to read.
I also would prefer to see more questions at a glance (less scrolling => I am more happy).
When I look at the two screenshots side by side, I prefer the academia spacing. All in all, it is remarkable how much more pleasing to my eye the academia format is than the SO format: some really nice work was done in the design of our site.
It looks to me that the height of each question could be slightly reduced, perhaps to the point of being able to fit one more question on the screen. But I wouldn't want to mess with it too much: all in all, I think that what has been pointed out here is truly a feature rather than a bug.
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109 | Economics.SE is closing, some questions could be migrated
Economics.SE is closing on 4 May and I, along with the other mods, am in the process of salvaging the best questions we have to be migrated to other parts of the SE universe where they may make a good fit.
We have had a request to transfer a question across and I will be doing so.
https://economics.stackexchange.com/q/99/48
I realise I should ask in advance, but we have very little time and I feel it worthwhile having the discussion of relevance/appropriateness once we have the luxury of having actually saved them.
If you would like to review other questions on the site, please, we can use the help.
Thanks.
This question is fine for our board.
This would fit
How to get the data to reproduce a published result
See also this general migration thread on meta.econ.SE.
So, did Economics reopen again after this? If so, this should might fit the criteria for being closed as obsolete.
What happened to it?! Was it not economically viable? :P
Here are some other candidates for migration:
Are European Eductional Institutions Experiencing the Same Amount of Price Increases as American Schools?
Are there any open-source textbooks on economics freely available on the web?
I've posted these and the one listed above on their meta.
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1153 | Is the graduate application of a "smart but lazy" person a "duplicate" of someone who has redeemed themself?
Right now, we have a seemingly "catch all" question of this sort. It reads in part, "My transcripts suck. There's no way to dress it up." A number of other questions have been linked to this as a duplicate.
But at least one of other questions showed "skewed," rather than uniformly bad grades that CAN be "dressed up," IMHO. The thrust was, "I have six years of grades. They averaged 2.0 in the first three years of undergraduate work. I "found myself" in my senior year, and my grades average 3.6 for that year, plus two years of a Masters degree. Most PhD programs require a 3.3 average to graduate, and base their admittance criteria on this fact. Given that I have good research and recommendations, how can I convince them that I'm really a 3.6 student (over the last three years) and not a 2.8 student (cumulative over six years)?
Then there was a question (left open) with the basically opposite "problem" profile to "smart but lazy," (the premise of the first question cited above). It came from hardworking "grind" who gets good grades, but whose test scores, research efforts and faculty members may call his "talents" into question.
Why was the question with the 2.0-3.6 GPA "progression" closed as a duplicate of the first one, when it was really more like the open question from the grind?
Can you please link to the other questions, too?
@ff524: I added a link to the "grind." The formerly "smart but lazy" person is a 40-something full professor who shall remain nameless (but whom everyone knows). I couldn't find the link to the freshman D in real analysis.
Tx. I changed the duplicate on this question that you linked to a more appropriate one.
The "grind" post was not closed as a duplicate. I'm a little confused about the purpose of this meta post; are you trying to say that the posts you link to have been closed as duplicates even though the "duplicate" is much more generic? Or are you trying to make some other point?
I couldn't find the "bad grade in real analysis" post you mention, but I found this similar one which also was not closed as a duplicate.
@ff524: No, it was not closed. I added it as an example of the variety of issues, that may be faced. The real question was, can we create separate categories for polar opposites?
I'm not sure what you mean by "categories"?
@ff524: That was not the one I had in mind, but close enough. Maybe the thrust of my meta question was, "why was that one question closed, when IMHO, it was "similar" to the others?"
Which is the one question that was closed, that you're mainly concerned about? Perhaps you could clarify this meta post a bit. Right now, it's not clear to me what kind of "answer" you're looking for.
@ff524: I reworked the question by asking 'why was the one question closed when there are other open questions with similar thrusts?" Thanks for your help.
I can't make heads or tails of this. What is the fundamental question or issue to be resolved?
Your main concern seems to be this question, asked by thinking.
Originally, the question asked:
Would I have any chance to get admitted to top universities? I feel that the BSc GPA is a problem.
This was closed as a duplicate of How do you get a bad transcript past PhD admissions, which has a lot of good, general advice on how the other things thinking mentioned (such as publications and good recommendations) can help get someone with a poor academic record into a PhD program. It even has this answer, which specifically addresses how a good MSc can overcome a poor BSc record.
Some 10 months later, you seem to have edited this question so it now emphasizes the difference between the BSc and MSc grades:
Will schools likely give more weight to my MSc or BSc grades?
Now it is a duplicate of Doing bad in undergraduate but good in a masters program, which asks exactly that.
The question which you call the "grind" question is like neither of those. It asks how difficult a PhD program is compared to a MS. The apparent intent of the asker is to evaluate whether a PhD would be a good choice for him/herself. It's not even about admissions - it's about deciding whether to pursue a PhD, and it doesn't even seem related to the aforementioned questions about getting into a PhD program. There may possibly be some similarities between the askers' backgrounds or personalities, but they're not asking the same question.
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1057 | Judgments and etiquette
I'd like to draw your attention to this question:
Is it bad for one's future career prospects if the PhD thesis topic is broad?
My concern is that we're rather quick at jumping to serious conclusions:
Firstly, the etiquette
Be nice.
Civility is required at all times; rudeness will not be tolerated
but even more important, I see harsh judgments (e.g. this answer but also in the comments of @krammer which I cannot link) for which I do not see proper grounds based on the available information. This is not only rude, but it is IMHO also bad scientific practice.
The 2 judgments are:
bad supervision: While I think it perfectly reasonable to ask about clarification whether the OP has discussed the question with their supervisor, and also to state in calm words if there is a smell of bad supervisor, IMHO
it should be respected if the OP explicitly states "My question does not ask for your opinion about my supervisor."
And I actually think that this statement is a symptom/follow-up reaction of the comments beeing rude.
There is at least one rather obvious and perfectly harmless situation that could have lead to the OP's question:
The supervisor may have told the OP (or didn't need to tell because the OP knows) to update the working title of the thesis to a final title, and the OP has trouble formulating this title. Which is a perfectly reasonable task towards the end of the thesis, and a perfectly normal difficulty.
Thus, I don't see objective grounds for the exclusive judgement that it is the supervision that is bad. IMHO there is a huge difference between stating that the supervision is the problem and that problems with the supervision is one possible underlying reason.
the thesis does not deserve the grade: This is an extremely serious judgment.
In a cursory search, I could not uncover the OPs real name and the papers. Noone else so far stated that they actually know the papers, not even after asking (besides the fact that the thesis may be long-form, and thus may have considerably more content than can be judged by us right now).
Yet we have statements that "set of loosely connected papers [...] would be called outcome of a good literature survey at my university." (Which may or may not be true, but in fact we don't even know whether the papers are just loosely connected) and "It will depend on the institution, but at the institution I work, you would not be two months from completion. You'd be two years from completion."
Again, there are perfectly harmless possible explanations, e.g. as @adam.r pointed out in the comment to @MHH's answer: "Sometimes, a student is so absorbed in his work that it all seems obvious, and the student does not recognize how advanced his work really is."
I think the underlying concern that we need to behave ourselves better is related to @badroit's concern with the "bad supervisor meme" at
Don't walk. Don't run either
Indeed. Nevertheless, what sensible response can be made to a question that appears mysterious and ineffable (if not unlikely sensible) under the "rules" the questioner attempts to impose? To ask whether there isn't a larger context ... that would make things clearer... surely isn't incivil, although it can be interpreted (especially by "troubled" questioners whose very troubled-ness has helped precipitate the "mysterious" difficulties) as hostile. Of course, it gets muddled when some answers are incivil, thus seemingly justifying a broadly hostile response by the questioner...
@LordStryker, whence my questions about larger context in many situations. When it is insisted that a question must be answered under rules imposed by the questioner, and the possible significance of larger context is explicitly denied, typically this certifies that the larger context would, indeed, resolve the "mystery". Refusal to cooperate in clarification...?
@LordStryker, as you like.
@CharlesMorisset Actually I addressed that question minutes after it was asked. I believe I've since eliminated that comment and folded it into the post.
@CharlesMorisset I'm more than certain that meaningful feedback from the community can be created without me asking my supervisor anything or reporting what my supervisor said.
Comments are there to improve the question - Were you not just criticizing the concept of "opinion-based"?
Since the question includes one of my comments(and I realize that my thoughts could have been put in a better way), the question explicitly states that each paper I've published is its own research focus without any connection to the next - Which made me comprehend that they are set of loosely connected papers which usually happens during literature survey where you ponder over a lot of topics to look for suitable research topics, work upon them, publish papers if possible and then settle with one of them for deeper thinking. PhD is supposed to make a dent in the field isn't it.
@krammer Could you elaborate what 'make a dent' actually means? Do you consider a peer reviewed publication as a minor contribution to the scientific community?
@Martin Quality of peer reviewed publications also matter.(Lots of questions and advice already on ASE regarding this). Though I cannot comment on OPs paper quality(and shouldn't). I only mean, in my part of the world, 5 different and orthogonal research papers without any common goal (on which the OP asked to comment), would probably not be viewed very highly(I am from CS background). Though this doesn't at all mean that the PhD thesis of the OP is bad or unreasonable for his field of study.
Yes, this question IMHO escalated quickly, and is certainly not the best showcase of the academia.SE community. Clearly, mistakes have been made, both by the OP and some of our community members - from the OP's knee-jerk follow-up comments and edits to EnergyNumber's very derogatory answer (which I downvoted). I originally also wanted to provide an answer this question, but the current state of the discussion leaves me with no desire to get involved.
However, I don't think that this is an inherent problem of our Stack Exchange. I am pretty much daily around here (apparently I am bored at work), and this is one of the few, maybe even the first time, I see this happening to this extend. I would not say that we are in general overly fast to jump to conclusions. The "bad advisor" tag certainly gets thrown around a bit too loosely here, though. Imho, we should indeed watch ourselves a bit in that regard.
In hindsight, there is a fundamental problem with the question, in that the top-level question and the body subject ask two fundamentally different questions. I responded to the top-level question, rather than the questions posed in the body.
The most equitable solution right now, I think, would be to split the question in two.
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327 | Bug in our web display?
I notice a possible bug in our display.
In this question How do I convert my PhD dissertation so that it can be published as a book?
Javeer Baker's comment appears on top of Suresh's comment.
In general, if A writes a comments, then B writes a comment 5 hours later, A's comment would appear on top of B's.
In the case of the subject question, something is wrong because Javeer wrote the comment 5 hours after Suresh did his.
Something is wrong.
Perhaps there was an earlier comment that Javeer Baker was replying to, but that subsequently got removed.
@gerrit is right - check the edit history of the question to see what was actually changed - it doesn't relate to Suresh's later comment.
Okay, I was confused. Maybe it's fine. The last thing I want to see is a bug. Thanks. To the mod, if it's not a problem, please close this question. Thanks, my bad.
It appears that I was confused by Javeer Baker'comment replying to someone else's comment which was removed later(thus become invisible to me).
Thanks to gerrit and EnergyNumbers who pointed it out.
I apologize for this false alarm.
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718 | What's up with "Academic dismissal from PhD program. What next?"
The question Academic dismissal from PhD program. What next? is currently marked as locked. (While it is locked, the rest of us are prevented from voting or editing.) The message says:
This post has been locked while disputes about its content are being resolved. For more info visit meta.
So, I'm asking here. What's the expected trajectory of this question? Is it permanently locked, or will access be restored?
I see a disputatious comment thread, and a comment that the question will be locked for 24 hours. Locking it freezes everything in place for the duration, but it also prevents the rest of the community from acting on the question -- for instance, we can't vote on answers or comments.
Do we need a solution for how to handle this once the 24 hours are up? It seems like the situation is pretty clear, and the original author is simply violating site rules and ignoring feedback from the community and from moderators alike. I wonder if there's a way to prevent the problematic edits while still allowing the rest of the community to work on cleaning up the question (rather than locking everyone out, offenders and non-offenders alike).
Security experts warn that stuff you put on the Internet is on the Internet
As you noticed in the text of the lock notice, the lock will be lifted automatically after 24 hours. This is standard protocol; just because there's a dispute now doesn't mean there will be one later, so the lock isn't permanently applied. After 24 hours everyone can post again and all will be good.
Regarding your "how to handle this" question, there are just a few options:
Do nothing and just continually revert bad edits - this takes a lot of work, and history has shown that this is unlikely to solve the problem.
Temporarily lock the question - slightly heavy-handed, as you noted, but it enforces a cooling-off period. The locks on all Stack Exchange sites are set up such that you can lock a single answer without affecting other answers on a question, but if you lock the question itself then nothing can happen to that question, including having new answers added.
Permanently lock the question - too heavy handed for a first approach, but if the problem resurfaces after the temporary lock this may be the only good course of action
Temporarily ban the users making the bad edits - solves the problem of bad edits, but much too heavy-handed for this situation; this is one person causing an issue one time, we would almost never ban for that.
Other than these, we really don't have many other tools. The lock is slighly heavy-handed, I agree, but it's our best option and saves everyone involved a lot of time.
Thanks! Sounds reasonable. Hope this works! P.S. My reaction: I agree with you that banning the user for making bad edits seems heavy-handed as a first response. On the other hand, if the problem continues after the lock expires, I think you would be justified in banning the user for a brief cooling-off period, if the user continues to repeatedly ignore repeated feedback from the moderators and the community, in a way that makes it infeasible for the community to handle the situation. Hopefully it won't come to that!
As the locker, I can comment that I was seeing way too many flags about this question. The OP also wanted to contact the site adminstration to remove the personally identifying material put in the question previously. There were also so many edits that the question became a "community wiki"—which really is weird for a question of this type. Given all of this, I felt it was better to let everybody cool off for a day before things got too out of hand.
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2096 | How should we handle questions that include identifying information about third parties?
I was looking at this question about a 17-year-old Ph.D. student in astrophysics, and I was struck by the potential for identifying this student (if it's a real scenario, which I don't for a second believe, but that's another topic). The number of current 17-year-old astrophysics Ph.D. students is minuscule, which makes this description extraordinarily specific. It may not uniquely identify the student, but it probably comes close. What makes it problematic is that the question was supposedly posted by the student's advisor, not the student, so there's no reason to think the student would be OK with being publicly identified.
If the classmates of such a student notice this question, they will surely wonder whether it's the same student, which could be awkward. Furthermore, one particular 17-year-old astrophysics Ph.D. student has recently been in the news for allegations of plagiarism, which makes this question sound like a sly reference to that case.
Do we have a formal policy on this issue? How should it be handled?
I'd propose deleting questions that include this level of identifying detail for third parties, to avoid embarrassing the people involved. (We could make an exception for cases in which the identifying detail is crucial for the question and no awkward or embarrassing material is revealed beyond what has already been widely circulated.)
There are at least two risks here:
Accidentally identifying third parties, for example if an advisor posts a question about a foolish or eccentric thing that an identifiable student has done.
Deliberately posting misinformation designed to embarrass someone by making it appear that information is leaking about an identifiable third party.
Either way, I find it problematic. (By contrast, people are of course welcome to post whatever information they feel is appropriate about themselves.)
Is the idea that what is problematic here is that the identifying details concern someone else?
@PeteL.Clark I'd think so. If I say something embarrassing about myself, I know what it is coming and what I am OK with sharing; but a third party doesn't have that privilege.
In order to save the question, the details of the field and age can be redacted, and replaced by "unusually young PhD student in the natural sciences".
Question: even if the question is edited, what's to stop someone from seeing the original question (and the identifying information)? Or can that be stripped from the question by a moderator, and I'm just not aware of that power?
@tonysdg: Moderators can request a deletion of old versions of a post from Stack Exchange. It’s some work, but it’s possible.
For the particular question you cited, it looks bogus anyway. Do you have any other examples?
Identifying information isn't viewed as a problem here in its own right, and we don't take steps to ensure anonymity of the questioner. If a given user wishes to remain anonymous, the burden of anonymity is left to them.
That said, we've had a very small number of questions here where the actual text of the question had to potential to cause significant damage to the questioner. As I recall, In those situations, we left comments on the question asking whether they wish to have the question anonymized, and if they didn't reply within a few days we anonymized the question for them. I can recall two situations like that and both were handled individually.
Regarding answers potentially identifying someone else, that can take a number of forms. We've had some odd questions calling out professors for being jerks, TAs for being clueless, lab members for being childish, etc. Some of those contained uncomfortable amounts of information regarding the university, course, lab group, etc. In most cases, the identifying information ends up being edited out by other users, as in almost all cases that information would lead to the question being closed as "too localized." I recommend that approach for the general case.
In this instance, we have the rare case where the question itself is identifying due to its unique nature. My stance here is that the question be allowed to stand, for two reasons:
The question is in no way damaging to the individual. It's plainly stated as hearsay, which means that it's essentially a fictitious question asked out of simple curiosity. The potential for harm is very minimal.
The question is interesting in its own right, and lends interesting insight into Academia even without knowing who the individual is.
That's my take, at least.
I'm talking about identifying information for third parties. I.e., it's reasonable for someone to identify themselves and describe their problem, even if it's a potentially embarrassing problem, but it's not reasonable for someone to identify their student and describe the student's problem (especially if it makes the student look eccentric or foolish). I'll edit to clarify.
Ah, I'm sorry, I see that now. Geez, I'm off my game today. Let me update my answer.
No problem. I realized looking back that my question didn't make this clear at all (so the only way to see what I meant was to examine the original question). I've edited it to reflect this issue. Thanks!
Its plainly stated as hearsay – Just being curious: What indictaions do you have for this?
@Wrzlprmft - I probably used the wrong term. What I meant was that the advisor conveying his impressions of what the student said to him, which may or may not be true. I personally view that as nothing more than pure fiction, but hearsay may be too strong a phrase for that.
@Wrzlprmft to any reader it is hearsay anyway; no one knows if the poster is actually who he claims to be.
@Davidmh: Sure, but that’s something other than stated as hearsay. The latter implies to me something like a post starting with: “I heard that the following happened:”
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3411 | What is our stance on questions that can be used for legal and illegal purposes?
What is our stance on questions that can be used for legal and illegal purposes? Are they on-topic or off-topic?
The other Stack Exchange websites that I am aware of where this issue has been discussed have the following policy: ~ "we are not lawyer, if in doubt, leave it Stack Exchange employees to decide':
https://softwarerecs.meta.stackexchange.com/a/741/903
https://security.meta.stackexchange.com/q/1397/7475
https://security.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/black-hat
Do we want to add some additional self-censhorship on Academia Stack Exchange?
Example 0: Ways to get free and legal access to research papers as a researcher : "legal" depends on the jurisdiction, and as a result some legal methods could be illegal in some places.
Example 1: How often do publishers sue researchers for copyright infringement for putting their articles on a personal website? -> knowing the answer could motivate researchers to violate copyright laws.
Example 2: Where can I obtain the content of closed MOOCs? -> knowing the answer could motivate students to obtain educational materials, which in some cases could be illegal.
Just for context, this question was mostly predicated by this recent question.
Personally, I think that the results of those discussions are just a way to wash one's hands of it. Not being a lawyer doesn't justify the ignorance of a law, at least in one's country, if a law affects one's profession.
@MassimoOrtolano the law that applies may differ from the one in your jurisdiction.
@FranckDernoncourt What I think is that questions of the type: "Is it legal to do X in country Y?" are ok, but questions on how to do X, when X is borderline should be closed.
@MassimoOrtolano Why do you say borderline? Isn't an action either legal or illegal? Also, why being more restrictive than the law?
Borderline because it's legal in one country and illegal in another one. The "how to" changes a lot. It's like asking: "Where can I find weed?". The answer changes a lot from Colorado, where it's legal, to my hometown, where it's illegal
@MassimoOrtolano I see, thanks for the clarification. Then I disagree that we should ban questions that are valid in some countries. Why being more restrictive than the law?
Because in countries where it's illegal, we're aiding illegal action by telling them how to do it. If the action itself is merely the topic around the question and legality the subject of the question, discussing this generally is fine. When how to perform the action is itself the subject, that's the problem, as Massimo already said.
@Nij: So we should close a question each time it is asks for something that may be illegal in one country?
I asked about legality over at TGO.se and to an extent it was asked about at expats.se
@StrongBad Thanks. I guess at that point we should distinguish purely illegal (e.g., illegally enter a country) vs. can be used for legal and illegal purposes.
I am not a lawyer and I don't particularly care about the law. I like to live in my little bubble and believe that if I act ethically and responsibly that I will stay out of trouble.
I believe that in order to be found guilty in the US of aiding and abetting a crime, that you have to being knowingly facilitating a crime. I am hesitant to provide answers that will likely be used to break the law, even if there is a technically legal way of using the information. Therefore, I think questions about primarily illegal activities should be closed. This is obviously a gray area and may sometimes lead to disagreements. As I said, I am not a lawyer and all this could be wrong from a legal vantage.
As for the example questions:
Ways to get free and legal access to research papers as a researcher is asking for legal access. My limited understanding of US law is that distributing copyrighted material without permission is illegal, but downloading material is not illegal. I would therefore say that this question is fine from a legal vantage, but I don't like it because it seems like a big list (although your answer is nice).
How often do publishers sue researchers for copyright infringement for putting their articles on a personal website? is asking for stats. I don't particularly like this question. It is hard for me to see how the answers would be useful. If I was forced to list reasons that an answer might be useful, I think I would probably come up with illegal activities, and therefore maybe it should be closed.
Where can I obtain the content of closed MOOCs? is again a bad question in my mind (I am not trying to pick on you) because it seems like a big list question to me. As the question is not about sharing, but downloading, I think it falls into the same category as the first example question.
In the three examples given in the question, which ones do you consider as primarily illegal (if any)?
@FranckDernoncourt see edit
Thanks. Why not leaving the question open for people to exchange information that can be used legally in the jurisdiction where they reside? Also, for the last question, should it be closed because it's a list, or because of those legal issues?
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775 | Is Coaching Class(Tutoring) on-topic?
I am asking if the "coaching class" part of the question https://academia.stackexchange.com/q/16596/546 is on-topic on our site?
In case you have no idea what this coaching (tutoring) class is about, please allow me to explain.
In my location(Taiwan) and many countries in Asia, graduate school admissions are based on entrance exams which consist of written exam and oral exam. In order to pass the exams, many students go to the coaching schools to learn how to succeed in those exams. The coaching schools are more like tutoring schools, or should I say, actually unofficial universities. The coaching schools teach or re-teach the students how to solve the problems they get in the exam. For example, almost all the science/engineering graduate schools will have the test for Calculus or engineering math. The coaching school teach the students how to solve the problems the student may see on the tests, e.g. how to prove the Fundamental Theorem of Calculus. In case you wonder who teaches those coaching classes? The answer is: many of them are unemployed PhDs.
As far as I know, the coaching schools are popular at least in my location. I know they also exist in other Asian locations(I just don't know how popular they are there).
We do use GPA and recommendation letters. However, the recommendation letters are somewhat inflated. GPA is for reference only. Every school may have different standards when grading. The entrance exam is what most people here consider fair.
Thus, the coaching schools are common and popular. There are also coaching schools for taking TOEFL and GRE. I, for one, went to a coaching school and passed TOEFL and GRE 40 years ago.
I personally think coaching classes(schools) is on-topic here. At least, it's not undergraduate only topic. I don't know if it is primarily opinion-based. Please let me know your answer.
This is pretty common in the US also with prep classes for many of the graduate school admissions tests (e.g., LSAT, MCAT, and the GRE general exams) so definitely on topic.
It wasn't clear the way the question was (and still is) phrased. But your explanation makes it easy to see the question is on topic.
@scaaahu Can you post some sample potential questions pertaining to coaching classes
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317 | Answering without real experience
I am new to the academia and read a lot of how to be a good student/researcher and teacher.
This said, I really have no real experience in some questions on Academia.SE but I do have a sense on how things supposed to work. For example, I answered this question without being ever a PC. My question: is it valid in Academia.SE to do so?
your answer there is actually correct !
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323 | how to get the closing voters attention
Here I got a close vote. I have no issue with it but how can I know the intention behind closing voters. How to get their attention. Are voters required to explicitly justify their actions?
Apparently, I see nothing off-topic or not constructive with its current shape. It discusses possible academic activities to encourage collaborations.
Close votes are anonymous by design. You can't specifically message the person who submitted the close vote and they aren't required to specify why. It's intended to be a "anonymous majority" deal.
Consequently, you'll occasionally have questions with lone close votes, such as yours. Someone, for whatever reason, voted to close. The community clearly has—through their not voting to close—voted otherwise. This is fairly common, and you shouldn't let it bother you.
eykanal has answered regarding the mechanisms of SE. I'll add a point about the vote to close: it is not mine, but I hesitated to cast one, so I'll explain my reasons.
So-called “big list” questions are discouraged, as being not constructive:
“this question will likely solicit debate, arguments, polling, or extended discussion”
The idea is that asking “what activities can we do to improve research group atmosphere?” is not so different from “what is the best programming editor?”, “what are good resources on research ethics?”, and so on. Basically, if one can come up with 20 totally different but all equally valid answers, it means there is something wrong with the question. As the FAQ says:
What kind of questions should I not ask here?
You should only ask practical, answerable questions based on actual problems that you face. Chatty, open-ended questions diminish the usefulness of our site and push other questions off the front page.
Your questions should be reasonably scoped. If you can imagine an entire book that answers your question, you’re asking too much.
The question you linked is somewhat borderline. To me, you gave it enough specifics (“what can a PhD student do”, e.g.) to make it viable, but by some aspects it is very broad (look at the variety of answers you got).
Finally: it appears to me, as a moderator on two other SE sites and someöne who joined the Academia.SE fun recently, that the Academia community allows itself more leeway on this rule than other SE sites do. Good for us, as long as it doesn't lower the quality and usability of the site. We should keep that goal in mind when we cross this type of question and wonder whether to close them or not.
Thanks for giving the whole picture F'x.
Part of the reason for the greater latitude is the inherently "softer" nature of the questions, which call for opinions as often as procedures. That means personal judgment needs to be used, and that makes answers more subjective. If we could only answer objective questions, we wouldn't have much of a site!
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103 | New Beta Theme Launched
Your site looks a bit different today. Yes, we are getting rid of the 'Sketchy' look and replacing it with a more-polished and finished design for sites in beta.
You can read more about the redesign of our Beta theme on our blog entry.
Please note: This will not affect your "graduation" status in any way. When your site is due for graduation, it will get its final(real) site design and branding.
If you're still seeing the old favicon, please do a hard browser refresh. (Although sometimes it may take Chrome a while to load the new image).
If you see any CSS or styling issues, please report it in this post I created on Meta Stack Overflow. It will be easier for me to track all the bug reports there.
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3357 | Why is that question too broad?
I don't understand what the following question got closed as too broad. It simply asks for some studies on a specific question. Since no close voter left a comment regarding the "too broad" issue, I am asking here.
Research studies covering the reasons why faculty applicants accept or reject academic jobs?
Is there any research/study/survey that tried to quantify the reasons why faculty applicants accepted or rejected academic jobs that have been proposed to them? (e.g., location, salary, the current faculty, college ranking)
I am mostly interested in the United States and the field of computer science, but curious about other countries and fields as well.
In case you were wondering about the vote breakdown: you may know already that the "put on hold" box shows the majority close reason even if it's not unanimous. For this post, however, all five close votes cite the "too broad" reason.
@ff524 Thanks, yes that's annoying, this is one of the reasons why I avoid throwing close votes.
A key reason that I voted to close is that the question did not show evidence of research, per Bill Barth's comment. This is an incredibly broad topic, and as the help page says:
Your questions should be reasonably scoped. If you can imagine an entire book that answers your question, you’re asking too much.
Did you try plugging in some related terms on Google Scholar, like Bill suggested? It certainly seemed to me that there were some useful possibilities in the literature that came back from a simple keyword search. If you didn't find that literature useful, what was unsatisfying to you about the results that came back? That might help narrow things down enough to be meaningfully reopened.
It seems the title 'what are the reasons why faculty applicants accept or reject academic jobs' is too broad to be answerable in the SE format, however, the question asked by Franck 'is there research study that determines why applicants accept or reject academic position that have been proposed to them' is quite answerable. I have edited the title to be more specific, and I suggest the question to be re-opened.
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97 | Are questions about journals and citation management on-topic?
I saw this question on the computational science stack exchange. I thought the question (about finding DOIs from a list of formatted citations) would be a good fit for the site, but one of the other commentators said it was off-topic according to the FAQ. My interpretation of the FAQ is that it would be on-topic.
Should this question be on topic?
I don't think it is, but I'd love to see it answered somewhere. Perhaps open-source projects such as paperpile or zotero have tackled this?
Questions on citation management are generally on topic, as that is an important part of an academics' job. As the FAQ cites, questions related to a specific journal are normally off-topic, but questions about general procedures and issues related to them would be on-topic.
I guess the best thing to do would be to provide an example of the kind of question you'd like to post. (The question on the scicomp board would not be appropriate here, but other questions in that area might be.)
Is this question on-topic?
That question is borderline. It's not really a good fit for a Q&A-type board, inasmuch as it asks for a list and can lead to lots of arguments back and forth. That said, the question does have value as an archival source, so I'd be reluctant to use mod powers to delete it. I would leave it to the community to take such actions, if they felt it appropriate.
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2200 | Adding emphasis with blockquotes
In this answer I used the blockquote markdown syntax to emphasize the few sentences that contain the gist of the answer. Federico Poloni commented that this is bad practice and his comment got some upvotes. On the other hand, I've seen others using the same practice, see, e.g. this answer, this question or this question So I like to ask:
Is is bad practice to use the blockquote syntax to highlight a tl;dr?
(Oops, I did it again…)
A bit related:
Would the use of blockquotes confuse some machines that read the site? (And would this be good or bad?)
(He did it again!)
Good question. (You know my point of view.) However, I'd say it makes more sense on Meta.SE, since it's really appropriate to all SE sites, not specifically to Academia.SE. Searching for something like your question there didn't yield any hits. Do you want to ask a mod to migrate your question there?
@StephanKolassa I am nut sure - I suspect that different sites have different views on this. Probably it's better to see first, what people here think about this. I think one can not expect any consensus across the network.
@StephanKolassa Regarding the markup-properties: Markdown is not configurable (as far as I know). So it is impossible to create further markup than already offered. For me, this is reason enough to use the existing syntax for any purpose I like.
I'm tempted to draw the attention of the friendly people over at Meta.TeX.SE to this question and watch the flames erupt ;-)
@StephanKolassa Go ahead. I not really sure if there will be much interest, but now I am curious.
Did you ever notice how blockquotes look in mobile-mode? While it might seem like a reasonable form of emphasis in full-mode I feel in mobile-mode it is quite obviously not.
TL;DR
Yes, it is bad practice. Use either boldface or headlines to highlight TL;DRs. Use blockquotes only for text that could have otherwise been set in quotation marks.
Regarding the examples
The blockquotes in your answer are irritating. From my first glance at the answer, I expected something like: A brief introduction; a quote from the question; some elaboration; a suggestion on how to phrase something. Thus when I actually read the answer, I lost some time to being flummoxed.
Even, if we ignore the fact that the formatting of blockquotes is intended and designed for quotes, your answer is badly formatted. About half the text is emphasised and it would be much easier to read, if you integrated the blockquotes in the respective sentences, e.g., like this:
My interpretation of the situation is that this is not an academic issue since you are approaching somebody who leads some business with some business-related issue.
The fact that that somebody is also a professor and that somebody who you know has a class with this professor seems unrelated. So my advice would be to handle this as if it were a business meeting and not an academic meeting.
In this answer by Aeismail, the blockquotes are not needed, but as the text is actually a quote of some sort and could be legitimally enclosed in quotation marks, it does not cause any kind of dissonance while reading.
In this question by Electrique, the blockquotes have no reason to exist at all. The list is already visually detached from the rest of the text anyway.
In this question by ff524, the blockquotes are not needed either. The question is already emphasised through the boldface. In my opinion, the best way to format this question would be using headlines, such as Background; Actual Question; Related questions. This way the main question is highlighted as intended and there is no extensive use of boldface.
In general
We are trained to read quotes as quotes and their design is tailored towards this purpose. Therefore abusing them decreases readability and should be done as rarely as possible.
Alternatives are:
If you want to emphasise a sentence or a shorter amount of text: boldface.
If you want to emphasise a longer amount of text: Use a headline that communicates the importance of this part.
If you want to communicate that a portion of the text happens is different (but not more important), e.g., meta information or a digression, use italics.
Before somebody comes along and complains that you may want to use italics for other purpose: Upright is the italics of italics. LaTeX’s \emph works exactly like this.
Not emphasising at all. Often it is just not necessary.
That's well argued!
After posting my answer and reading yours, I went through many of my answers to check if I hadn't misused block quotes...
@MassimoOrtolano: It’s not the end of the world, you know. I may have misused blockquotes myself, when I was young and needed the reputation.
Is is bad practice to use the blockquote syntax to highlight a tl;dr?
Yes, because now we have a double block quote, but only the outer one is a real quote: sometimes, yes, you might need to reproduce the original formatting too.
Since questions can be edited in time, and there other ways of highlighting a part of the text (e.g. italics or bold), I think it's useful to have a clear marker of what's a real quote and what's not.
Note: I have to admit, though, that I'm kind of obsessive for this sort of things (as my PhD students kindly like to remind me).
The colon in the question confuses me, but isn't the block quote actually a quote? For example, I said "this is a quote"
In the absence of block quotes, I am pretty sure your two uses in this question and the examples you link to should be offset with quotation marks (although my grammar is atrocious). The example where people complained, however, should not be offset with quotation marks. As bad as my grammar is, my understanding of typographical style is worse, but I think anything in quotation marks can be typeset as a block quote.
I do not think we should limit the use of block quotes to quotes taken directly from the text of the question (or even answers or other sources), but we should reserve them for quotes. I think bold and/or italic can be used to provide emphasis.
I think what you write is true for the first linked answer, but not for the two linked questions. In these two questions the OPs use the blockquote to make the actual question stick out of the motivation and background. In the second linked question (the one by @ff524) the blockquoted question can be understood without the context.
@Dirk I asked over at E&L.SE: http://english.stackexchange.com/questions/303963/using-block-quotes-and-emphasis
In my opinion, the biggest issue here is that misusing blockquotes as a form of emphasis happens because:
they look too emphatic. The yellow background is too flashy. The black-on-grey used here on Meta seems a better alternative, or also the schemes commonly used on e-mail (intented text with a thin colored vertical bar on their right).
there is no alternative syntax in Markdown for the same purpose.
To fix #1. I have submitted a feature request for changing the color scheme for blockquotes.
I would appreciate a fix for #2, too, but it would require adding Markdown syntax, which of course cannot be a decision specific to academia.se, and shouldn't be taken lightly (I am definitely against a further Balkanization of Markdown). A possibility, anyway, could be using exclamation marks:
This is normal text
! This is a paragraph with emphasis
This is normal text again.
I'll answer my own question with my view:
In view of the very few possibilities that markdown offers to format answer and basically no customizability of the markup, one can barely speak of a markup language (there even is not syntax for emphasis, only commands for typesetting such as italics, bold, and bold italic). Moreover, logical markup is not used to parse answers by algorithms (other than rendering). Hence, my view is that markdown shall be used to format the posts to appear as needed.
Finally, other SE sites seem to use blockquotes for other purposes than quotes: A comment to StrongBad's question over at english.stackexchange states that
…the main use of block quotes here is to format and separate examples of word usage.
Over as tex.stackexchange I also noticed the pattern that people used blockquotes to emphasize paragraphs.
Examples of word usage are something one would usually set in quotation marks, if no other mode of emphasis is available, so it is a pretty orthodox way of using blockquotes.
Over as tex.stackexchange I also noticed the pattern that people used blockquotes to emphasize paragraphs. – That does not make it a good practice. Also, note that by the nature of its topic, TeX SE requires the use of blockquotes quite rarely, and its blockquote design is less tailored towards quoting.
FYI, there is syntax for emphasis in Markdown. The original specification states: "Emphasis Markdown treats asterisks (*) and underscores (_) as indicators of emphasis. Text wrapped with one * or _ will be wrapped with an HTML tag; double *’s or _’s will be wrapped with an HTML tag.". So asterisks and underscores are the semantic markup for emphasis, and they get translated into HTML's semantic markup for emphasis.
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3672 | Locked question with many downvotes but good answers
The question "How to deal with instructor forcing me to do an uninteresting optional exercise?" has been locked recently. The question is kind a of mirrored question to How to deal with uninterested students during an optional exercise session? and I think that both questions are a good and especially, both have great answers. However, the first question was has received several downvotes and also quite a few upvotes (currently being at -6 total). I imagine that the downvotes are partly due to the somehow offensive phrasing "some internet people".
My guess is that the question has been locked because of the heavy downvotes; here you find some reasons why posts should be locked (heavy downvotes are not exactly on the list…). As a locked question, there can't be up- and downvotes on the question and also no edits or comments can be made. I have the feeling, that the question should have been better received and would like to edit it (tone down a little), comment that I find the question reasonable and also upvote it. I could have flagged for moderator attention, but thought, I could learn more if I asked on meta.
Specifically:
Is asking on meta equally good as flagging?
Why was this question locked? (I have some guess, probably would have done the same, but I am curious.)
How to proceed with the question?
It says in the lock notice:
This post has been locked due to the high amount of off-topic comments generated. For extended discussions, please use chat.
That question in particular was locked due to (now-deleted) comments that degenerated into schoolyard name-calling. (The downvotes may have been a reaction to those same comments.)
The lock will automatically expire in five days, and you can edit it then.
Ok, I was late to that post, so that I did not see these comments anymore (lucky me, I guess). Thanks for the explanation and the info.
"that degenerated into schoolyard name-calling": Sigh. Due to the different time-zone, I always miss the fun :-)
@MassimoOrtolano Indeed. In particular, having seen the initial comments, I think your claim there that "This is a question which mirrors the other one, written from the point of view a student who is hypothetically in that position" is almost certainly not the case.
It is locked for 5 days to let things cool down. Specifically the number of off topic comments. After the timeout it will automatically unlock. At that point you will be able to edit it.
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3305 | Notification for edits on questions I downvoted?
I ask this question here, since the downvotes on this answer triggered my question. However, although it is a general issue with the stackexchange site, the issue has already been discussed in different communities and I am interested in the views from academia.SE.
Sometimes it goes like this:
the first version of a question or an answer is not written properly, contains some misunderstanding or is unclear at some point,
then this leads to downvotes,
hopefully criticism is explained in the comments,
then edits to the question or answer which clear the issues.
However, if there are downvoters who did not comment, they will probably never come back to the question or answer (also these who commented won't) and it will remain with a negative score. Often, additionally, the Matthew effect kicks in and the post may collect more downvotes although the issues have basically been cleared.
Is there a way to get notified if questions or answers I downvoted get edited?
As I see from the discussions in
Notification on edit of downvoted content on meta.stackoverflow from 2014
Why are there no notifications for edits after I cast a downvote on it? on meta.superuser from 2014
and
Allow an edit to notify downvoters: “I think I've fixed the issue now - please check” on meta.stackexchange from 2009
this question has been discussed early on. In 2009 it was a declined feature and in 2014 the idea got popular again but, as I see, no definitive conclusion. Also, this "feature request" is the second highest votes declined feature on meta.stackexchange, so I guess, the idea could have a chance to be revisited.
One of the earlier questions on the issue focused on downvotes for questions of new users and discouragement they get from questions that remain with downvotes although they have been improved. In the answer I linked above it is an answer of a high-rep user (even a moderator) that got the downvotes so discouragement may not be a great concern. My concern is more that a negative score on an improved answer just does not reflect the opinions on the question and its value properly and the mechanism of up- and downvotes does not work as it should.
What's the opinion of this community?
I think that there should be notifications along these lines, but as you note this is not really a question for meta.academa.SE, but a meta.SE question.
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2014 | Crossposting and closure
The question "What are some good ways to keep students coming to lectures?" has been posted here at Academia.SE and simultaneously over at Matheducators.SE. When I noticed this I commented on both questions and gave the link to the respective other site. I guessed that mods or high-rep users would take care of this issue. Now what happened is that on Matheducators.SE there is a comment by aeismael asking to keep the question open on Academia.SE and here on Academia.SE my comment with the link to the Matheducators.SE question is deleted.
While I have no particular feeling where the question should be open I think that only one of these questions should be open as long as they are asking precisely the same thing. Keeping both questions open results in exactly the things that crossposts do: Duplicate work on different sites and also an inferior collection of relevant answers on both sides.
My question is: Is the current status OK for the mods here and on Matheducators.SE? How should questions like this, i.e. question that fit on two sites and may receive good answers from both communities, be handled?
If either community decides to close it, the closed one can be migrated and merged with the open one. Right now the one on Academia has only one close vote, though.
(I un-deleted your comment. I think it's relevant information for potential close-voters, and if neither copy is closed in the end, it's also relevant information for future visitors to the question.)
I closed the question on MESE (I am a moderator there) and migrated it here. In addition I flagged it for moderator attention here so that they can be merged.
By contrast, no-one raised any moderator-attention flag on MESE (while for a migration a moderator is needed regardless). The situation would have been handled quite a bit earlier had there been a flag (or other information via dedicate channels) instead of several comments.
I see, it was the first time for me to bring such an issue to attention. I do not use flags much, so I am not really aware, of what flags are available at different sites.
No problem. After all you voted to close it. As MESE is small it can just take some time until enough users see it.
The consensus on StackExchange seems to be that you shouldn't cross-post questions, even if they are on-topic for both sites.
In this particular case, the question is certainly more general than for math alone. (Note that most answers are not specific to math.) Thus, I'd strongly support closing it on Math Educators and leaving it open on Academia. (Unfortunately, I can't vote over there.)
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1364 | Should I ask one question per country?
I see that my question https://academia.stackexchange.com/q/31701/452 received 3 close votes for being too broad. It seems that close voters complain that I am asking for all countries instead of just one.
Should I ask one question per country, or otherwise how can I improve the question?
The question got on hold so I deleted and created a country-specific question (https://academia.stackexchange.com/q/31806/452). Below is the original question:
Title: In which countries is consent required by law to take a picture
or to record audio / video of a conference talk?
Body: Provided that the conference does not explicitly prohibit
unauthorized audio and visual recordings of the presentations, and
ignoring ethical/political/any other non-legal issues.
I am aware of the question
Is consent required to record audio of a conference talk in the US?, but as the question
indicates it focuses on the USA only.
I'd also be fine with a list of countries where consent is not
required to take a picture or to record audio / video of a conference
talk.
I think that it would help if you refined the question based on why you want to know the answer to the question. Do you really care whether Bolivia, Fiji, and Uzbekistan require legal consent for recording conference talks (nothing special about those countries, just picking a few at random)? If you are just asking a very broad question out of idle curiosity, it seems like a lot of effort for little reward.
I think an appropriate way for this to get dealt with would be on a case-by-case basis, but in a lazy-evaluation manner. In other words, when somebody cares about a particular country, they can ask about it. We've got a good answer for the US now; tomorrow somebody might ask about an EU country that they have particular reason to care about, and the answer might turn out to cover many countries given their similarities and the large number of community members from who hail from the EU. It might be a while before somebody asks about North Korea or Zimbabwe, and that's OK.
In this way, the questions are likely to find an appropriate granularity and rate of asking on their own, rather than as either a single "big list" question or a big list of questions all at once, neither of which is likely to be addressed satisfactorily by the community in the near term due to lack of sufficient expertise in the less-well-represented countries.
Thanks, sure, we can do it each time it's needed. Two issues: 1. Conferences keep changing countries. 2. I feel it would be a bit messy to have the information fragmented in different questions, and one table/world map seems to me more efficient.
@FranckDernoncourt If we start having a lot of different answers, then perhaps it will be time to build such a map. Until this, it smacks of premature optimization to me.
Well since US-specific questions are typically not questioned, I guess your answer make the most sense, even though it's messy it's coherent with past decisions.
First country: France
@FranckDernoncourt I haven't been here too long, but I haven't seen any country-specific question get challenged for relevance (though some take a while time to be answered, like this one on Scandinavian Ph.D. programs). Institution-specific is a different matter...
I see a four issues with this question:
It seems like a big list question where there would be one, likely trivial, answer for each country
It does not seem particularly relevant or unique to academia
Ignoring the ethical/political/any other non-legal issues makes the question even less relevant to academia
It seems a little hypothetical to me and I would hate to see one of these questions for each country/region/state
I guess my point is that as individual questions, I am not sure they are great question(s) for us. As a big list, I think it is an awful question for us.
Thanks, for 1. why not having one unique community wiki answer, like Which airlines ban the use of Knee Defenders during flight?? For 2. IMHO it is relevant, but not specific. For 3. Ethics is often a bit more subjective than laws: a legal-focused question avoids to forward into opinion-based answer (I got a few closed votes for that reason lately). For 4. What do you mean by hypothetical?
The basic issue is that questions asking for list-based answers are considered poor fits for the Stack Exchange format. Asking a separate question for every country would mean you'd post 200 questions would compound the problem.
So was is the solution?
I don't know if there's a good way to make this question compatible with the Stack Exchange format. Some questions just don't fit, no matter how much you try to "massage" them.
Why not having one unique community wiki answer, like Which airlines ban the use of Knee Defenders during flight??
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1387 | Providing evidence of my efforts when asking reference-request questions for which I have found no useful information so far
When I ask a reference-request question, before asking I generally Google + Google Scholar a bunch of words I put in the question. It sounds a bit tedious to list all queries I have made, and it might be counterproductive as results for a given queries depend on the location, time, etc., I only look at the few first pages of results, and I may miss some interesting results.
However, some commentators asked me provide evidence of my efforts so far.
How can I provide evidence of my efforts when asking reference questions for which I have found no useful information so far?
I think that the push-back you are getting may have to do with the fact that you ask a lot of questions of this type. Of the 41 questions currently marked as reference-request on the site as a whole, 19 were asked by you over the last few months, and you've only accepted an answer on one of them. These are also nearly half of the questions that you have asked.
So far as I can see, this site is generally an excellent source for informed opinion, and people will often provide references voluntarily if they have them readily available. Moreover, many of your questions (e.g., on visit weekend weather, or on ESL vs. conference acceptance) draw good answers that are not references.
Insisting on references only when good informed opinion is available can make one wonder about the motivation. Are you asking the site to "do your homework" on literature searches? This can feel especially dubious given that you work in large-scale ML / data-mining, and a lot of your questions are for information where, if a study exists, it would likely be generated by one of your colleagues in the field.
So: is there a reason that you really need to tag so many of your questions asreference-request? Are these questions out of curiosity, or are you trying to use the answers to formulate research questions or related work sections of your own?
Thanks for your answer. I often insist on references to avoid having my questions closed as "primarily opinion-based" and because I prefer data-supported claims than educated guesses. I used to say clearly I am interested in both with a preference for references if any are available (e.g. http://academia.stackexchange.com/posts/27493/revisions). However a couple of close votes forced me to ask for references only, which isn't that bad as I'm afraid that many personal opinions answers deter future reference answers. Questions are out of curiosity, some stem from my interest in open science.
Regarding the number of answers I have accepted, to my defense very few of my questions got answers with references: if they do, I'm glad to accept them as an answer (apparently I had forgotten to do so for two answers). Also, I upvote all answers.
@FranckDernoncourt I think, then, that you may have over-corrected in your attempt to prevent questions being closed. It's also possible that the specific things you tend to wonder about are likely to simply not have an answer at present (e.g., percentage of papers previously rejected). You might also ask for the answer to the same data-driven questions without making it a reference request, as long as you make it clear it's not a "poll" question.
I agree with your answer. However, I think it is important to note that, almost by definition, asking a lot of questions is not a bad habit on a Q&A site. So the fact that @FranckDernoncourt was asking a lot of questions should not lead to a push-back, even though it might be happening.
@xLeitix Absolutely agreed. It is also the case that tweaking the way that one presents questions can encourage more productive dialogue.
I am not sure that it is useful to provide evidence about how you have searched for a topic. Even if a Google/Pubmed/Arxiv search turns up references, it doesn't really provide any expert insight. I think the value of making a reference request on AC.SE is that experts, or at least others with experience, can help guide you and refine the search. I would hope that reference request type questions are receiving better answers than just the first relevant hit in some search engine.
It's true that questions on SE sites are supposed to show at least a minimum of effort.
However, I think in the case of a reference-request question, the way to show that kind of effort is to
write a well-defined, specific question
give context for the question (i.e. explain the motivation or inspiration for the question)
explain why you think that a reference on the subject of your question might exist
This last point is, I think, where the pushback might be coming from - a couple of your questions are about things that I'd be very surprised if anyone had actually studied.
I don't think it's necessary or helpful to list Google Scholar search terms.
Regarding your comment on opinion-based questions, please don't abuse reference-request like that. It's perfectly valid to ask "why," "how," "how often," etc questions here without insisting on references. Use reference-request and insist on supporting citations for questions where you really need the supporting citations.
Thanks for your answer. The main reason why I specified reference-request in opinion-based questions is epitomized by the answer to the question: I want to do research but I'm too old for a PHD. There are 9 answers, from what I can see (I didn't follow all links) none of them provide any survey to back up their claims (except for my answer). I don't want the same thing to happen for my questions. I am lucky to be in an environment where I can get many personal opinions from academics, I am really much more looking for y research/study/survey.
Given the way to show that kind of effort, the context for the question has so far been always "I'm curious". And I think that a reference on the subject of my question might exist because I candidly think my questions point to interesting aspects of the academic worlds. But I've read other people suspecting me to use Academia StackExchange to crowd source my literature review for my personal research, so I take your point and will try to clarify that. It's hard to ask questions… I thought that any course 101 on research was making clear that formulating the question is the key.
@FranckDernoncourt There are other kinds of answers besides for "research/study/survey" and "personal opinion," e.g., "answers supported by experience," "answers supported by a logical explanation of some mechanism," "answers supported by an off-the-cuff study I just did on a small sample." If you are willing to accept some of those (as it seems you sometimes are), don't insist on only answers supported by research studies. You can clarify in your post what kind of answers you are looking for, and explicitly say you're not interested in unsupported opinions.
Good point, sounds like a good way to open it. One small issue I have with this though is that answers formulated on a public forum can be somehow distorted (of course studies aren't unbiased either). I'll think about it but thanks for the great suggestion!
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2048 | Are questions about a reference system for academic documents off-topic?
Are questions about a reference system for academic documents off-topic?
Example, in reference to this question:
PubMed IDs (a.k.a. PMIDs) seem to have been assigned sequentially:
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/1
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/2
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/3
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/4
...
However, some some PubMed IDs missing. I.e.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/2260 returns Error occurred: The following PMID is not available: 2260. Why are some PubMed IDs
missing?
@jakebeal Thanks for the edit, but what's the point of linking to the question? Too many people on Stack Exchange vote like sheep so it biases the answers. Or perhaps to people to case reopen votes?
When there is a meta discussion triggered by a question, typically it is useful to link the question in order to provide context for the discussion.
@jakebeal What context does it add? Are you referring to the comments on the question?
First, it makes it clear that the meta question is not just discussing an isolated hypothetical, but an actual question on the site, which can affect how people think about it. There is also a lot of useful information at the question, not just the comments but also edit history, closure status, who voted to close, views, etc.
In general, I think that questions regarding collections of scientific literature, such as PubMed, are on topic. Specific technical questions about details of their implementation, however, might not be. For example, I think most anyone would agree that a question like "Which operating system is used for the servers for arXiv?" would be off topic.
Your question about PubMed IDs strongly reminded me of this other closed question about the DOI structure of a particular journal. In both cases, it seems that any answer will basically boil down to "Because that's the way the database implementation happened to get set up" with no particular information or insight possible.
Do you have reason to believe that there may actually be something more than that behind PubMed's arbitrary system for assigning identifiers? If so, I at least would be happy to vote for reopening. At present, however, I see no reason to expect it to be particularly answerable or for the answer to be anything more than "Eh, databases, you know?"
Missing IDs may be due to technical issues or reference deletion. If the latter, I wonder what may cause a reference to be removed from PubMed. So I think the answer may be more than just cf auto-increment. (I find the other linked question interesting as well, and relevant to academia.)
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2141 | Has the stance on questions pertaining to legal issues changed?
On-topic-ness of questions on legal issues related to academia? seems to say questions pertaining to legal issues are on-topic.
However, the question below got closed on the grounds that it is a legal question.
Has the stance on questions pertaining to legal issues changed?
https://academia.stackexchange.com/q/31806/452
Is consent required by law to take a picture or to record audio / video of a conference talk in France?
Provided that the conference does not explicitly prohibit unauthorized audio and visual recordings of the presentations, and ignoring ethical/political/any other non-legal issues.
I am aware of the question Is consent required to record audio of a conference talk in the US?, but as the question indicates it focuses on the USA only.
Should we specify that questions where "expert" answers are from experts outside of academia are off-topic? is also relevant to some legal-issues questions.
Also note that Is consent required to record audio of a conference talk in the US? is not only about the legal aspect (and indeed, the answers don't get into the legal issues), but also asks more generally how it would be perceived.
@ff524 Thanks. I am still confused regarding the scope of this SE. Does it mean academics have no expert knowledge for legal matters? I would expect conference organizers to know more than a generalist lawyer for some questions such as the one given in the question's example. Also, I think such question should clearly say whether it is from a legal or ethical perspective (since that's two different questions).
I don't know what kind of expertise conference organizers have in that respect. Note that in the meta post on "questions requiring external expertise," there isn't really a clear consensus, just "let's see on a case by case basis."
@FranckDernoncourt: while taking photos at a conference legally probably isn't very special, there are some points where conferences are treated in a (suprisingly) special way, e.g. in EU VAT law. I stumbled upon this once and it turned out the situation was so specialized that the lady at the tax office service hotline told me she has to look it up as she never encountered a similar question before. But the conference provider knew. And I'd guess researchers to be more likely to have encountered that than normal tax consultants => IMHO on-topic at academia.sx.
Most legal-issues questions on Academia.SE are not about the law per se, but rather about the de facto interaction of academic standards and practices with issues regarding the law. That sort of thing is completely within scope of this site.
Your linked question, on the other hand, explicitly says that it is:
"ignoring ethical/political/any other non-legal issues"
in other words, focusing explicitly on the law. This is very different, and requires a precise technical answer, making it on topic at Law.SE but not here.
Presumably, you gave it this focus so that it would not be closed as a duplicate of "Is consent required to record audio of a conference talk in the US?", since the top and accepted answer to that question says that the legal issues are less important than the academic standards and practices around the issue. So either:
You have some reason to believe that the standards of the academic community would be different when international conferences are held in France than when they are held in the United States, and should modify the question to explain that, or
The question belongs on Law.SE and not Academia.SE, or
Something I have no understanding of is going on in your question and I would advise you to explain it better.
Thanks. I'm confused regarding the difference between questions "about the law per se" and questions "about the de facto interaction of academic standards and practices with issues regarding the law".
@FranckDernoncourt There is, of course, a grey area at the boundaries. Consider, however, the answers to the US-focused question, or to this highly-voted question on the legality of religious displays. They consider not only the legal issues but also the ethical, social, and professional issues. In different cases, different aspects dominate in providing good advice regarding academia. Your question explicitly rules out of scope everything but purely legal considerations.
Thanks, I think I understand now. However, I find it strange that a subset of an on-topic is off-topic.
@FranckDernoncourt I would think of it this way: the more general question has both on-topic aspects (issues of academia) and off-topic aspects (the law), but in the balance is more on-topic than off-topic. Your restriction largely eliminates the on-topic aspects, thus making the off-topic aspects dominant.
Why not editing such questions to exclude the legal aspect then, if we now decide that questions pertaining to legal issues are off-topic?
Also there are a number of questions that clearly ask for the legal side only, e.g. Is it illegal to share publications not in the public domain with collaborators? or License of code accompanying a published article, which are not closed.
The stance on questions pertaining to legal issues has not changed.
The most upvoted answer in On-topic-ness of questions on legal issues related to academia? clearly says:
I believe questions asking for general legal background about a particular academic issue should be considered on topic here.
The question https://academia.stackexchange.com/q/31806/452 is therefore on-topic.
There exist a number of questions that clearly ask for the legal side only, and are not closed, e.g.:
Is "Assistant Professor Position (Tenure Track) for a female Researcher" illegal in Austria?
Is it legal to use sci-hub.cc in Germany?
Is it illegal to share publications not in the public domain with collaborators?
License of code accompanying a published article.
Is it okay to upload the PDF of my non-open access papers in academia.edu or research gate? (the question clearly focuses on the legal aspect only)
Do Universities have a right to stop students from talking about questions on tests?
Who owns the intellectual property for work you do on weekends? (the question clearly focuses on the legal aspect only)
Do Nature journals wrongly claim copyright in their published pdfs? (the question clearly focuses on the legal aspect only, and was asked several months after the question mentioned in the meta question got closed)
Correctly licensing someone else's photo for publication in open-access journal (the question clearly focuses on the legal aspect only, and was asked several months after the question mentioned in the meta question got closed)
Is it legal to upload preprint on ResearchGate? (the question clearly focuses on the legal aspect only, and was asked several months after the question mentioned in the meta question got closed)
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2142 | How can I improve this question?
I wonder how I can improve this question. Unfortunately, I cannot ask it as a comment as the post is locked.
By how, I mean in terms of content (what is unclear?), as well as technically (how can I edit the question since it is locked?)
Do some publishers offer to host a mirror of webpages used as a reference?
Title: Do some publishers offer to host a mirror of webpages used as a reference?
Body: Using a link as a reference is often problematic as the link might disappear at a future time. However, the content might be of high relevance to the reader, so it might be worthwhile to add it as a reference. Do some publishers offer to host a mirror of webpages used as a reference?
as well as technically (how can I edit the question since it is locked?)
If a question is locked and you want to edit it, you can flag for a moderator to unlock it. (Rejected migrations are locked automatically.) I just unlocked this one.
Also, for the record, the close votes on this question were:
2x "Unclear what you're asking"
2x "Too broad"
1x "Shopping question"
Thanks! Can a user see the vote breakdown?
@FranckDernoncourt No, see MSE feature request. (Moderators, but not users AFAIK, can see the vote breakdown in the post timeline.)
Thanks, MSE feature request upvoted.
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2219 | Are questions on features offered by a website related to academic research on-topic?
Are questions on features offered by a website related to academic research on-topic?
Some are closed, some are open, so I wonder what the scope of this Stack Exchange website is on that kind of questions.
Examples:
Is there a more user-friendly way to download multiple articles from arXiv?
Bulk download Sci-Hub papers
Bulk download of arXiv (or other publication data set) with metadata AND citations
downvotes mean yes or no?
On meta, downvotes typically mean "disagree with proposition made by question." You have not articulated your position in this post, but your linked Sci-Hub post and comments here seem to indicate that you believe these questions should be on topic.
@jakebeal If no opinion is expressed in the question, which is the case here as I wanted to keep it unbiased, then downvotes are supposed to reflect that the question is of no interest.
What I have observed in this community's collective judgement is that the axis that you propose to consider ("Is this question about features offered by a website?") does not appear to be a useful discriminator for question quality.
The problem is that both "feature" and "website" cover way too broad a spectrum:
"Website" can mean anything from google-scholar and arxiv (clearly considered interesting and useful) to the details of a specific graduate program's online application form (clearly a "too specific" closure).
"Feature" can mean anything from the DOI question above to the transient and proprietary details of how a particular search engine is currently ranking its results (clearly a "too specific" closure) to obvious boat programming like "As a visually impaired scientist, how should I access arXiv?"
Instead, I would propose the following three-prong test with regards to questions related to the use of academia-related websites, apps, and similar systems:
Is the website academia-specific? (e.g., Google Scholar is, Yahoo Answers is not)
Is the website well-established and widely used in a significant number of disciplines? (e.g., arXiv is, CrazyEddiesPreprintShack.com is not)
Is the question about functionality that is both long-term stable and academia-specific? (e.g., curating one's publications on arXiv is, search-engine result orderings are not)
If a question passes all three of these tests, then it is likely to be on topic (though it may fail in other ways); if it fails any of them badly, then it probably should be closed as off-topic.
Now, as with every judgement of on-topic-ness, there will be boundary cases in which the judgement is not obvious. I think that the two arXiv questions that you link are a little bit toward that boundary: they obviously pass the first two tests, and while the functionality is long-term stable, it's a bit questionable whether it's necessarily academia-specific. On balance, though, they were simple enough questions with simple enough answers, and there's no reason to be nit-picky.
For your Sci-Hub question, on the other hand, while I believe it can pass the first two tests, for the third test both the stability and the specificity of the functionality seem extremely dubious. You are asking how to yank many, many terabytes of data from Sci-Hub or from the organizations that it pirates. That's not a scientific problem, that's a rather blatant abuse of shared network resources, and any method for doing so will likely soon be defended against by Sci-Hub.
Sci-hub seems fairly specific to academic papers, and it has recently received enough publicity to make it notable.
If what the asker wants to do is a bad idea, in my view the correct thing to do is answering with an explanation of why it is a bad idea. Closing the question and refusing to answer looks a lot like a poor attempt to censor the website, instead.
@FedericoPoloni Please note that I said "specificity of the functionality": I do not dispute that Sci-Hub is academia-specific, and it certainly has gained much publicity ("well-established" may not be quite so clear, given its current legal challenges). My contention is that it is the third point that is problematic.
You mean stability? Scihub has been around since 2011, and personally I don't think it is going to disappear soon. It is going through several lawsuits, and has had its main domain blocked in several countries, but similar sites like the pirate bay or library genesis have survived much worse in the past. As the meme says, one does not simply take things off the internet.
@FedericoPoloni I mean stability of the particular functionality of mass-downloading 40+ TB of material. This functionality does not appear to be something Sci-Hub is interested in supporting, and which there is good reason to believe it would not want to support.
This functionality does not appear to be something Sci-Hub is interested in supporting, and which there is good reason to believe it would not want to support. I think this is incorrect. Sci-Hub (itself being only a proxy interface) stores downloaded papers in the Libgen library. And the Libgen library offers to download its SQL dump (libgen.io/dbdumps/) and one should be able to set up the torrent client to download all the library items in the dump. This is, I think, how one is supposed to set up a mirror of Libgen.
Questions on websites
Yes, in my view, questions on the usage of websites that target academics should be considered on topic on academia.se. Using websites such as arxiv.org, google scholar, and article submission systems is a part of the work of a professional researcher, and questions on this aspect should have full citizenship here.
Of course, there are other conditions for a question to be acceptable: if a question is too localized (for instance, a very specific website on a single research topic with a tiny audience, or an unknown startup), then it should be closed, and the same if it has nothing specific to academia (for instance, if it is a general question on the usage of a browser --- these are known as "boat programming" questions in the stack exchange culture).
OP's question mentions sci-hub.io, a website which has gained much popularity recently, despite its dubious legal nature. It is 100% targeted on academics, and it satisfies the notability criterion, so I find little justification to close it on the basis of its content.
If any, the only reason for which I could consider closure is if we agree on a very strict policy on questions involving copyright infringement. But this is a different issue than the one on "on-topicness".
Questions on copyright infringement
Since the discussion in the other answers and comments has diverged into legality and copyright infringement, I should probably give my opinion on this part, too.
Lots of sites can be used to infringe copyright, including Twitter and Google. Some of them are used prevalently to infringe copyright, but ultimately the guilt lies with the usage, not with the website itself.
In addition, some forms of copyright abuse are widespread in academia, and a non-negligible part of the community recognizes them as illegal but does not consider them ethically wrong.
My stance is: if a user asks a question on how to infringe copyright, we leave the question open, and point out that it is illegal and/or wrong in the answers and comments. Closing questions does not make the asker aware of the legal and ethical issues; it only creates an illusion of control and censorship, and drives the user away.
If, as @MassimoOrtolano wrote, "the only possible ethical answer to a question about how to bulk download Sci-Hub papers is: You don't.", then we leave that question open and answer You don't. We don't say sssh, we don't speak about this sort of stuff here, because it sends a wrong message.
Can you please elaborate your reasoning on the matter a bit more, in particular, how you draw the distinction between on-topic and off-topic for website usage questions?
@jakebeal I have tried to elaborate.
Thank you, @FedericoPoloni: I am still wondering how you suggest drawing the line on whether the functionality in question is on topic. For example, do you think that it is on-topic to ask: "How does Google Scholar weight number of citations vs. keyword matches when computing the relevance of articles when I search?"
@jakebeal I consider that on topic. But I agree that every possible criterion that we can set is going to include a grey area with borderline questions.
Your thinking is much more inclusionary than mine, then: I would consider it to be off-topic in the same way that "How does the Stanford Computer Science Department in particular weight publication records vs. recommendation letters in graduate applications?" would be off-topic, since it's about the undisclosed and changeable policies of a particular organization. If the community prefers your interpretation, I think that we may end up with many unanswerable questions, but I will certainly respect that decision.
I think that we should not publicly support, in any case, the usage of services that are at the edge, or beyond the edge, of legality, however widespread they are in academia, and even if we privately think that they are ethical because they might constitute a form of protest against the publishing industry. Doing otherwise would open to a number of shaky possibilities that probably Stack Overflow Inc. would not be willing to support (e.g., linking papers or books on the SE sites directly to Sci-Hub or Libgen).
Thus, I think that the only possible ethical answer to a question about how to bulk download Sci-Hub papers is: You don't. Other answers can be interpreted as a tacit, public, support of such a service.
We can then discuss what is the more appropriate close reason for such questions or if we want to put a canonical answer, but I think that the above should stand.
For what concerns clearly legal services, instead, I agree with jakebeal's answer.
Stack Overflow admins have clearly stated it's not up to users to judge the content's legality. Also, users may have different ethics.
@FranckDernoncourt Do you have a link from the SO team that says that is ok to support, through the SE sites, services with unclear legal status?
I can't recall where the message from SO team was. But very related: http://meta.softwarerecs.stackexchange.com/questions/116/should-we-accept-root-hack-jailbreak-related-questions or http://meta.softwarerecs.stackexchange.com/questions/739/should-we-allow-questions-asking-for-software-cracker-patcher-or-keygens
@FranckDernoncourt I don't see those as very related: those softwares are perfectly legal, it's their usage that might (or might not) be illegal.
Same for the use of sci-hub.
@FranckDernoncourt I don't think so, but I'm not lawyer: I'd be happy if someone proves me wrong, but with a solid reference.
E.g. it's legal to download an article that is public domain. Sci-hub also contains articles that are public domain (or permissive license).
@FranckDernoncourt ... and it also contains a lot of material that is not public domain or permissive licensed, and that is the point. It doesn't matter whether you think that mass-scale copyright violation is a good thing or a bad thing: it is extremely dishonest to pretend that massive copyright violation is not the point. Sci-Hub themselves proudly declare that they are a "pirate website." If you want to advocate around Sci-Hub, please have the courage to be honest about what you are supporting and why.
@jakebeal I was just explaining why the two links above were relevant. This thread is not about me but the scope of this website. Do not make it personal.
This argument sounds very hypothetical: if we say that this question is ok, then other questions with "shaky possibilities" may appear, and then Stack Overflow Inc. may want to take action against them. This seems a lot like a slippery slope fallacy. Why worrying now? If a "shaky question" appears, we can close it on grounds if its issues. if Stack Overflow Inc. has concerns, they can speak up and delete what they don't like.
@FedericoPoloni On what grounds we could close those other questions, once we start to support such kind of service? Though there can be reasons to support services like Sci-Hub and Libgen, this support, I think, shouldn't pass through a community site, until legality is established.
@MassimoOrtolano Can you please make one example of these "other questions", so that we know what we are talking about?
Also, I am curious to know what is your opinion on questions discussing this website that can be used to get papers illegally.
@FedericoPoloni Actually, in the answer I wasn't referring to questions but to other possibilities, like the example I gave. I used the word "question" in the comment above just because you referred to it in your comment.
@FedericoPoloni For what concerns the question you linked, I think that the question is perfectly reasonable; this answer, however, is probably questionable.
@MassimoOrtolano You mean linking to illegal copies of articles? It is already well established how to deal with this case in practice: the copyright holder sends a DMCA takedown request, the website owner complies and deletes the link, and everything goes on.
@FedericoPoloni Sure, with more work for everybody. You can add links to this answer of mine, so we can see what happens ;-)
@FedericoPoloni A last note, because I don't want to go on forever: my opinion is the one expressed in my answer, but if the community agrees otherwise, I'll adapt, and I won't cast close votes for questions such as Franck's.
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181 | Does the question on the ethicality of Googling one's homework belong to Acad.SE?
I saw a question on the ethic of googling one's homework. The questioner, though having posted it on Math.SE, asks about the "pedagogical" merit of doing the same. This question has been closed as not constructive on Math.SE, but many would opine it is off-topic as well.
Does the question belong here? The way it is phrased may refer to math problems, but it is an issue that is certainly faced by most professors and students. A (kind of) compelementary question on how a professor should keep himself ahead of the homework-googling menace has been asked by Dave here.
Funny you bring this one up; they had asked us whether we wanted it, and I turned it down as being too pedagogical. This is becoming a recurring issue here; do we want to focus exclusively on research-level academia questions, or do we want to branch out to all aspects of university-level education. We're definitely solidly in the first branch now, but as more users join I'm seeing more and more questions that relate to the second. Personally, I think that, given that we're still in Beta, we should bring this question back up.
Given the current focus of the site, though, it's pretty clear to me that this question is off-topic here.
Thanks @eykanal. Personally I am for including such questions in our site. The question I'd ask myself is who in all SE sites is best placed to address such issues - for which the answer is us, most likely. Moreover ours is a pretty narrow scope in itself, do we really need to limit further?
@Bravo - You're correct, we're the ones who define our scope. I'm not sure what you mean by "narrowing it further"; I'm in favor of expanding the scope to include university-level teaching questions. This has been discussed before, and the community seemed to be in favor of including teaching questions on the site.
Oops sorry. I had misread your last statement on para 1...
As it currently stands I do not think that question belongs here and I would rather not see the go that way. It is an "undergrad" question about how to be a student. A question about how to deal with students who google homework problems might also be "off topic", based on our current focus, but I think it would be a reasonable way to expand the site.
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180 | Are questions on opportunities in industry after a doctorate on-topic?
In this question, the OP wants to know the opportunities in industrial R&D after a PhD in organic chemistry. In general, industry vacancies and requirements do not have anything to do with academia, so Charles has rightly cast his vote to close the question.
But on a previous date, we have enthusiastically answered this question, which asks almost the same question for CS.
How do we decide if a particular question asking about industrial R&D opportunities for PhD and post-doc scholars is on-topic or not? Asking about software jobs after MS is obviously out of scope, but aren't professors in academia better informed than most about research opportunities? Shouldn't we give a concession to questions about industrial R&D after PhD/post-doc alone?
Please vote on the answers! Remember, votes on Meta are different than on the main site; show your agreement or disagreement.
I just realized that this question is almost an exact duplicate of this one.
@eykanal perhaps it's best to close that other one as a dupe of this?
See my comment on this recent question. This question to me seems perfectly on-topic. The questioner is in academia, and has questions that relate to life as an academic, namely, what else can I do outside of working as a professor? Given that statistics (which I'm too lazy to look up now) suggest that most PhD students go on to careers outside of academia, this is actually a very relevant question.
That being said, I agree with @Charles that this particular question was poorly phrased, and could have had a better reception if it was worded better.
I agree with Bravo. I think that professor should know a decent amount about how to help their students prepare for life outside academia. So I think that in fact academia.SE is a very appropriate place to ask such question. When posted here, the questions are likely to be seen by professors, as well as by other grad students who may be preparing for similar jobs.
No. Questions about careers outside academia should be off-topic.
They're suitable to a career-advice site for the world outside academia. This isn't a career-advice site, and it's a site about the world of academia.
Furthermore, the questions will attract subjective answers, and answers localised to one time / place.
NB: this is just my opinion. I'm only giving something for people to vote down or up, as they (dis)agree; I have neither the will nor the ability to dictate site terms
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534 | Why does this question not appear when I am not logged in?
I accidentally noted that a particular question does not appear on the list of questions when I am not signed in. The question comes up in the top five once I am logged in. Why is this so?
Is it a bug in the feature?
As Charles notes, the list of questions on the homepage is altered for anonymous users: instead of listing recently-modified posts, it attempts to pick questions that may provide a good example of what the site's about.
Currently, that means it's very similar to the monthly hot questions list.
If you want to view a list of recently-modified questions without logging in, you can find it in the active questions list.
| Stack Exchange | 2025-03-21T12:54:48.804697 | 2013-05-27T14:54:50 | {
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3262 | Dedicated "This belongs on Cross Validated" off-topic option?
Inspired by, but not particularly picking on, this question: https://academia.stackexchange.com/posts/65930/revisions
We currently have a very small list of default "off-topic" options - namely, just "This should be in meta".
It seems to be that we get a somewhat steady stream of stats questions, almost all of which belong on Cross Validated. Is there enough cause to add that as one of the defaults?
Alternative suggestion to prevent such questions before they are asked and for many other topics.
In the last 90 days, we have migrated one question to Cross Validated (image here for those who do not possess the necessary privileges to see the migration statistics page):
I think we need a history of regular well-received migrations before adding it as a migration path in the "close" interface. From When should we consider adding a default migration path?:
Single digit migrations in the last 90 days and/or rejection rates that can order a drink without ID are signs that the path will be a waste of time to establish.
If you believe a post should be migrated away, vote to close it with a custom close reason and also flag the question for moderator attention and say where you think the question should be migrated to. See this post for more details on when to use this kind of flag and when not to.
Note that we should not migrate posts that are of such poor quality that they are likely to be closed for other reasons on the target site, e.g. questions that are too broad or too vague to be answered in their current state. For those questions, the OP needs to improve the post before we will consider migrating it (see the Don't migrate crap rule.)
More importantly, note that we only have a total of three custom close reasons. To add one right now requires deleting one of the existing ones.
@aeismail I think "Belongs on Cross Validated" would anyways be a migration path, not one of the three close reasons.
@ff524 How do we get that "history of regular well-recieved migrations" if we can only see 90 days?
@Fomite by "regular" I meant "more often than once or twice in 90 days." See When should we consider adding a default migration path?.
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769 | Appropriateness of an overly specific series of questions that appear to have a single theme
I've now seen a series of questions from user10694 that paint a picture of a completely dysfunctional advisor-advisee relationship (Rather than list them here, it might be easier just go to the user page: all of this user's questions are on the same general topic)
In each case, the community has tried (as far as possible) to answer the question as a stand-alone situation, because in all fairness each question by itself does merit attention.
The problem here is the sequence. It's not at all clear to me that the answers are being taken to heart at all: one piece of evidence is that not one of the questions has an accepted answer.
It's also becoming more and more difficult for me to answer yet another of these questions knowing the history of this user's questions. The tone in the questions also doesn't appear to help very much.
Of course the easiest solution is for me to ignore these questions in the future. And maybe that's the right answer. But I'm wondering whether it's worth encouraging this user to try and dig deeper into the apparent dysfunction, or at least show some indication that they're trying to act on the numerous sound bits of advice the community is dishing out ?
I was also about to ask the same thing here. It has become apparent that user10694 is really only here to complain about his advisor, and his behavior seems reasonably close to trolling to me.
@xLeitix - See my comment below.
The problem here is the sequence. It's not at all clear to me that the
answers are being taken to heart at all: one piece of evidence is that
not one of the questions has an accepted answer.
Just because the OP doesn't take the answers to heart doesn't mean other people with dysfunctional relationships with their advisor won't. That is why we don't like localized questions since we want our answer to be able to help lots of people. As for not accepting answers, over at TeX.SE they have some text for common comments including
Since you have some responses below that seem to answer your question,
please consider marking one of them as ‘Accepted’ by clicking on the
tickmark below their vote count (see How do you accept an
answer?). This shows which
answer helped you most, and it assigns reputation points to the author
of the answer (and to you!). It's part of this site's idea to
identify good questions and answers through upvotes and acceptance of
answers.
I think the bigger issue is the sequence of questions. Looking at the votes for each question in isolation some are okay and some are down right bad. Thinking about the okay questions in the light of the entire series makes me think that they are not particularly good questions either. That said, I think we can let the community decide with voting, it is not like the OP is asking hundreds of questions. We can also try and improve the questions through comments and editing.
For better or for worse, the nature of the StackExchange platform explicitly discourages that sort of interaction. The "SE way", if there is one, is to provide answers to well-formulated, generalizable questions. User-to-user communication is not only discouraged, it's simply not even possible on the website.
Within that framework, I would suggest that the answer to your question is that you should just ignore questions from users whom you feel are not taking your answers seriously. There's no real problem with users not accepting answers to their questions, and if the user doesn't continuously post bad questions the mods won't take action. Just ignore stuff you don't want to answer.
if the user doesn't continuously post bad questions - which raises the question when this point is reached. Subjectively, it seems the user has posted plenty of borderline-to-bad questions.
@xLeitix - At this point, I agree with you, and another mod has already dealt with this issue. We'll keep an eye on it, but feel free to mention it if you think something else needs to be done.
In this particular case, the user in question would appear to be just using academia.SE as their personal blogsite to rant about their supervisor (and now, it would seem, to try to find reasons to get them dismissed). At some point, the moderators' tolerance will run out, and the user will get suspended. Given that the moderators here are more active and interventionist than on most other SE sites I'm on, I'm surprised this hasn't happened already. But it's surely just a matter of volume and time now.
But that the user is oblivious to the help they are given, doesn't matter, as long as the user is continuing (intentionally or despite themselves) to provide content that is valuable to others.
The community does have the power to downvote, close and delete poor-quality contributions. It's up to those of us with those specific privileges to be active in using them.
And flag one of the user's lower-quality posts for a diamond moderator's attention, and let them know about the disruptive nature of the user's behaviour.
Unfortunately, we're a Q&A site, not a mentoring site or a counseling site or a support group. If an individual user wants to help this poster in his or her particular situation overall, then I think that an individual should be welcome to do so (and to mention it in answers as appropriate) but I don't know if there should be some kind of site-wide announcement to "try to help user10694 in a certain way".
Some people are beginning to catch on to this user's pattern of posting and are calling him/her out on previous posts as well, especially with a lot of "Run, don't walk" posts. I think that's fair to do.
Basically - I don't think anything should change with respect to this user.
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245 | Are ([career], [career-path]), and ([job], [jobs]) tags synonyms?
When tagging this question: How can I apply to be an adjunct faculty?, I came across four tags that could either be synonyms or at least have more distinct definitions.
To be clear, I think that these could either be merged into two or even one tag with synonyms.
For reference, here are the current definitions of these tags:
career: Career is a person's "course or progress through life (or a distinct portion of life)". Questions related to academic career comes under this tag.
career-path: Queries related to progression of academics in various capacities from a student to a professor and the various stages involved in the process.
The following should be considered as well:
job: Refers to academic job, its advantages and disadvantages. Also related to duties and responsibilities associated with an academic job and academic job search.
jobs: (no summary)
job and jobs are definitely synonyms, and they have been merged.
I'm not as sure about career and career-path, but I'd love to hear what everyone else about those.
job now seems to be frequently misapplied, as per its own description and that of job-search. Sometimes people use both (which is reasonable but perhaps not optimal for job); other times they don't use job-search. Can someone help me figure out if there's a process to do something about that?
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262 | No more "needs work" categories
Along the lines of "Third excellent...", we now have no more "needs work" categories, having just bumped over the 5 questions/day mark. This is more of an announcement than a question, so it can be removed later if necessary.
we dropped below 5 again ... I think it is going to take another week or so (hope I am not being too optimistic) before our questions per day says as okay.
Unfortunately yes. I will note that with over 1000 questions, there are only 11 "unanswered" questions, which is really very good.
Is it some software error? 1050 q/260 days in beta only makes 4 q/day...
@Shyam - I think the value is a rolling mean, but I'm not sure for what period. For visitors per day, it's the rolling 2-week median.
Congrats to all on reaching this nice milestone! (and there's no need to be modest: a lot of SE sites in beta have a hard time maintaining a steady stream of questions after the initial excitement)
Being a newcomer, if I may take this opportunity to give my main impression for my first month here: by increasing our userbase more we will be able to cover more fields of research… and this diversity will bring even more value to the site. Academia is a broad church!
A related reminder (yes, I saw someone say “more like nagging”): we have proposed an ad to run on our sibling Stack Exchange sites, but they need our votes to run. If you have an account on the following SE sites, please go up vote the ad:
TeX: only 1 last vote needed
English L&U: 2 more votes needed
Mathematics: 3 more votes needed
Physics: 4 votes needed
PS: the ad itself is a graphics I created with Daniel’s advice… but I am in no way emotionally attached to it, so please consider improving on it or proposing a better design in the relevant meta discussion.
Thanks for posting, good job to everyone who's participated and made this site as good as it is.
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136 | Contesting a duplicate question: Being a Journal Reviewer
The following question is being considered to be a duplicate of the second.
How do I become a journal reviewer?
How do you earn opportunites to review journals or conference papers?
I was basing the first question on the second. I'm not doubting the opportunities to review papers as a grad student or a post-doc. However, I'm more curious about how one becomes the primary reviewer vs. being a person who helps out with the review. I'm curious about how to separate the two questions or potentially merge them.
thanks for posting this here. I closed your question because it seemed to be completely answered by the accepted answer of the first. The question you posed above (primary vs. "helper" reviewer) here is definitely a different one, but I didn't see that in the question text, which is why I closed it. Why don't you just edit the question to reflect what you asked above and we can re-open it? Note: After you make the edit, add a comment with "@eykanal" so I'll be notified that the edit was made.
I reread your answer it does seem to sufficiently answer my question. Thanks.
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144 | Discussion based questions
Well this question is bound to be controversial. What should we do?
What is being done to make the academic environment more women friendly?
I think a subtly changing the question from what "CAN" be done to what "IS" being done might make it less "discussion" oriented without changing the meaning too much.
Yes, that's what I was referring to (the second part is the "IS")
My feeling (mentioned in comments) is that the second part of the question (asking for references to work studying this issue) is legitimate and concrete. The first part involves discussion and so is not well suited. This also eliminates the need to discuss "why" one should care about the issue - I personally think that's troll bait, but there's no point arguing it on the forum itself.
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72 | How to deal with different disciplines / fields?
Many of the current answers begin with "It depends on your field" / "There is no one answer".
Indeed, each field is unique, although they share common grounds.
For questions that depend on the specific field, I would expect to see many answers, each for its own field, rather than having an answer that says "it varies" and that only gives a brief description of the common grounds.
For instance, for the question
Should I publish my recent result in a journal or a conference?
I would expect to see
Anser A: "In CS, conferences are very important and you should publish there (and then submit the ful version to a journal"
Answer B: "In our field, , there are no serious conferences, thus one should aim for journals..."
(see also this related question)
Do you agree with this paradigm? How do we lead the community to avoid "it depends on your field" kind of answers and replace them with "In field XXXX, the answer is.."?
As a comment I would add that a different option is to have "field dependent questions", that is Q1:"In CS, should I submit to conferences"; Q2:"In MATH, should I submit"... Personally, I believe this option is not good since it leads to many duplications.
See this suggestion of mine, which is related but not identical.
@eykanal: thanks for pointing this out. I believe that tagging the question with a specific field might backfire and lead to the second "paradigm" described in my comment above. This might be helpful to the one asking the question, but less useful to the community.
I'm not sure this is a big of problem as people seem to be making it out to be. Can you find any examples where there are more than say 2 or 3 major paradigms across academic disciplines in regards to any particular question? We already have a good variety of disciplines asking and answering questions, so any obvious differences should be represented. I agree it would be bad if every question needed a dozen answers to be sufficient, but that isn't the case so far (more common ground than different ground).
Ran G.: I would also recommend avoiding the second operation there. @Andy W: This is also where my position is: there are very rarely so many different paradigms that a few answers can't cover the whole spectrum.
@AndyW I guess you are right and most of the questions will have 2-3 answers, except for the "big-list" questions (such as this one). Maybe it should be clarified (in the FAQ?) that it is acceptable to answer according to one specific field, and expect multiple answers.
I think we should allow domain specific questions and cultivate domains within this server.
we should delineate the domain in the question title and use tags
e.g., tag medicine, life-sciences, mathematics, physics, psychology, etc...
IMHO there are two things:
questions explicitly related to a selected discipline,
questions where it is implicit or not well defined.
In the first case we may consider migration to a dedicated SE site (especially if it is technical; if not - it may stay here).
In the second case when the asking person may be not aware if a specific issue works in the same way in every country, in every field etc.
So my approach is the following:
encourage to add some additional data (e.g. field, country),
encourage general answers if they make sense,
then, post factum, change the question title e.g. to How to blah-blah in CS in EU? (if the later are affecting the answers).
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461 | Why was this question on cross-nation collaboration closed?
This question on what's the best researchers could do for their native country was closed. It reads like a sentimental question and may even lead to chatty answers, but doesn't it have some potential? I cut off the emotional and patriotic part and this question seems to ask for thoughts on how to transcend country-borders in academic collaboration. With a minor edit, shouldn't that be on-topic?
Another grouse is with the answer: 1) it is fitting as a comment. 2) it does not answer the question. 3) it reads like a rant. Somehow the irrelevant answer has got 5 votes.
I agree with the the closing. The question is not really related to Academia; it's asking about how academics can be patriotic. That's a nice goal, but being patriotic doesn't have anything to do with being in academia.
Additionally, the question is very broad; what's "the best" someone can do is hardly an answerable question. The best they can do towards what end? Improving academics? Improving science awareness? Helping out research causes?
The question may be salvageable, but I agree with the closing as-is.
Hmmm, yes. If it's about patriotism, then it's best junked. But the last sentence (some ideas like volunteering for seminars, extending hands for collaborations, encouraging new institutes of education) looks seeking general ideas for collaboration and hence my question.
@Bravo - Even the last few sentences are still very broad, containing a few arbitrary examples of possible volunteer opportunities.
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463 | Is delaying the graduation out of beta damaging to Acad.SE?
Over the last few days, we have had rapid closing votes on a question, followed by reopening. Even in questions which are ostensibly off-topic, but not on careful thought (example), the closing votes have been dealt swiftly.
For a site like ours with 4 excellent grades and 1 Okay grade, is delaying the graduation out of beta harmful? More users with fewer points may have the privileges and there is the possibility of handling them without care.
For now, we could appeal to all for sincere consideration before downvoting or closing. We would want to be welcoming to new users and their questions. We also do not want to shuttle back and forth between closing and reopening.
I am down voting because I disagree, but I think this is an important question.
I guess "Disagree" means your answer is a 'No'. The meta definition is confusing at times.
correct, my answer is No.
I'm a little confused. Is the downvoting/closing delaying graduation out of beta?
Quick closures are a good sign. Toggling like that says you should probably be taking advantage of meta to discuss things sooner/more; something that the beta period should be used to educate your users on.
To answer your question, no, I do not think so. The goal of any SE site is to increase the audience and hopefully maintain an active community. The fact that we're having disagreements as to how to deal with questions is probably a sign of a healthy, growing community, which is good. The fact you're asking about it here is a sign that you guys know how to handle it, which is even better :) We want more non-diamond mods, and we want everyone to know how to manage the site.
The only constructive criticism I have is that non-diamond mods (and diamond mods as well, myself included) should search the meta to be familiar with decisions already made by the community so that issues don't arise repeatedly.
On a related note, a reminder to everyone: Please don't ask about graduation from beta. It will happen when it happens. We have no control over it; it's purely a decision by the Stack Exchange team. So far as I can tell using my Super Sekrit Mod Powers™, we're doing great.
As a comment about searching beta: I agree that it is useful to run hrough and look at what has been discussed over time, however, at some point it would be sueful to start assembling certain information in some form of "digest" wiki posts. This has been done on TeX.sx where I also ry to ptovide some input. having such posts to refer to in comments etc. may help the site be more consistent.
@PeterJansson - I was wondering about that, and I was going to ask other site mods how they do it. Can you share a link? I'd love to see how you did that.
Sure. Here is one on welcome messages for starters: http://meta.tex.stackexchange.com/q/430/19384 and one on often asked questions: http://meta.tex.stackexchange.com/q/2419/19384 As I see it the needs here are slightly different but outlining what we expect and providing snippets of standard answers to improve posts can be very useful.
@PeterJansson - Cool, thanks a bunch.
If anything I think it suggests that we are NOT ready to graduate. We need to learn how to discuss closing/reopening/tagging/editing etc within the confines and tools we have.
I personally think we vote to close way too quickly. I would like to see more discussion about closing gray area questions. I think this could happen in either the comments, chat or meta, but right now we are not doing it and not encouraging new users.
While I agree with your second point (too quick to vote to close), I think that's irrelevant to the main question.
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1010 | What is "consensus"?
Inspired a bit by this question: Questions that are lists of things and the suggestion by at least one moderator that "consensus" is important for Big List/SW questions, but also the moderator election questions, wherein many answers (including my own) allude to emerging community desires as something to pay attention to.
When we say "consensus", what do we mean?
For example, on the "Big List" question referenced, my answer, as of the time of this writing, has 2/3rds of the votes in favor and 1/3rds opposed, but with a fair number of votes in both directions (as far as meta-questions go).
I think, if we talk about consensus building, there should at least be some clear notion of what that means.
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942 | A "Theory vs. Empirical Research" Tag?
Based on this question:
How to filter data obtained with practical measurements and simulations to be concisely put into a paper?
Currently, it's got two tags - "journals" and "computer-science", but once you ignore the specifics of it being about a paper looking at FPGAs, it stops being about computer science and becomes more about how to synthesize theoretical and empirical/applied research. That applies to a number of fields, and none of our tags seem to describe this yet - "theory" comes closest, but only touches on one half of the problem.
Any suggestions for a new tag?
That question is borderline off-topic anyways (it already has 4 off-topic close votes on it). I don't think a new tag is necessary.
Eh, it was more inspired by that question, more than "it needs a new tag". It's something I struggle with a lot - what do you do if half the journals you publish in don't ping as "Good" to half your tenure committee, etc.
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1933 | Why Lock the "Academic Environment More Friendly to Women" Thread?
For the reasons above, I have locked this question. If anyone wishes to dispute the lock please feel free to discuss on Academia Meta. – eykanal♦
In reference to this thread.
A couple questions regarding this lock:
"For the reasons above" - is above the lock notice, or the comments. Because the lock notice is just "this isn't considered a good, on topic question". That isn't really a reason. And the comments are fairly vauge in terms of actually figuring out a reason - the largest one, for example, is a suggestion that was incorporated into the question.
How is this question distinct enough from this question or this one which have been protected, rather than locked?
There are answers that provide solid, non-opinion information (admittedly not my answer, which is somewhat more opinion based). The question got 19 upvotes, 4 favorites, and a substantial number of upvoted answers. While I understand that's not in and of itself evidence that the thread is good, it does seem to show that the community thought this question was worth looking at - it's well above the mean and median number of votes for questions on the front page, etc. At the very least, even if it wasn't left open, shouldn't this have been posed as a vote to close rather than a unilateral moderator decision?
I'll say for my part I found this question to be much more interesting and potentially useful to the community than a number of other types of questions we get and answer on a daily basis, such as the "I have no idea how to interact with my supervisor in this surreal edge case..."
I agree strongly enough that I have unlocked the question in the interim. If eykanal or someone else comes by and makes a good case for locking it that gets community support, we can lock it again. Especially since someone spent some reputation on a bounty for this question, it seems fair to err on the side of leaving it unlocked until the issue is resolved.
Thank you for bringing this to meta! I was very taken aback that the question was closed having been following it to see what answers it received.
It may not need to be locked, but I think it certainly needs to be protected --- I have set that bit.
If I had to guess, I would speculate that it was locked in an attempt to protect it from getting highly polemic answers that don't directly address the question. (This tends to happen in the gender tag.)
I don't think locking the question is the correct response, as this also prevents it from getting good answers.
Personally, I think the appropriate response to those answers is to downvote and leave a comment if you disagree with it or believe it doesn't answer the question. I don't like deleting the answers that contain unpopular or slightly tangential content, because:
Leaving a strongly-downvoted answer in place is a useful signal to readers showing what the community apparently thinks is a wrong or bad approach to the question. Leaving the comments in place (as long as they don't get personal) shows the community's counter-arguments to the answer.
If the answer is deleted, other users with the same approach see the question, don't see their viewpoint represented in the answers, and post a new answer expressing this view. Deleting the answer leads to more of them being posted.
Wouldn't the 'protect' option be the appropriate way to address questions that attract such polemical answers?
@AruRay Protection only prevents it from getting answers from brand-new users. It's useful for e.g. preventing hot network questions from getting non-answers from people who don't even realize they're posting on Academia.SE, for example, or for preventing spam, but not much else.
Sorry for making a (small) mess! My concerns is that the question is very old; it's actually from when the site was still in very early beta. We've since defined policies around questions, and if that was asked today, would be closed almost immediately as one of "too vague/unanswerable in current form/too discussion-like in nature". There isn't even a direct question present, it's a "what can we do about X" question, thinly hiding behind "what is being done".
The lock was because it has good content. I didn't want to delete, but I didn't want it to continue to garner new responses, particularly likely it seemed (to me) that it would just generate lots of discussion (as it has; there are many deleted tangential comments).
The "for the reasons above" was intended to point to the three existing comments directly preceding mine. I guess that wasn't clear; my fault.
Actually, if you look at the revision history, the trend shows the community feeling more favorably towards this question over time. It was asked and immediately closed by a SE moderator in 2012; un-deleted by community vote in 2014; and re-opened by community vote in 2015.
It was very old, but that's because we advised someone to put a bounty on it rather than asking a duplicate of an old question: http://meta.academia.stackexchange.com/questions/1926/write-a-new-question-or-start-a-bounty
+1 for moderator transparency!
I was drafting the exact same question when I noticed the question already existed but was stuck on an inaccessible dusty shelf. So I thought, Here's an opportunity to try to resuscitate a failure-to-thrive question! (Which I had never done before.) This, I think, was only partially successful. The answers have been good but I think we could do better. // The skimpiness of the number of answers to the resuscitated question tells me something about the site, sigh....
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1788 | Job Site Community Wiki?
Inspired by this question: Are there any good job directories for academic work?
This question has a number of very specific answers based on field - and while general answers like "Check Science and Nature" or look for a field specific society are helpful, there's a distinct possibility that fields will have little hidden sources - listservs, a particular newsletter, etc.
This seems like the kind of thing a Community Wiki is well suited for. Thoughts?
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1904 | Migration of Content from Open Science SE
I just wanted to give you a heads up that I am about to start migrating selected questions from the closure of the Open Science site to this site.
I would also note that you are under no obligation to keep any of these questions simply because they were chosen to be migrated. It is typically very unproductive to start a long, drawn out negation of what should be migrated ahead of time, so if you feel a question does not belong, simply vote to close it and the migration will be rejected. As always, if you have a question about how anything will fit into your scope, you can always raise the issue in meta. Enjoy!
Thanks for the heads up, much appreciated! If possible, please try to avoid flooding our front page with migrated questions.
Is there a query to see all questions that were migrated to Academia from OpenScience in one place? It's interesting to have an overview of their fate here.
@AlexanderKonovalov Only for 10k+ users (here). Right now it appears as if 21 have been migrated and 0 rejected. You can see them with a Google query.
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779 | Are questions on the theory of academic research on-topic?
Working in academia is not just navigating university politics. It is also about conducting research and teaching one's field to students.
Academia already has an explicit policy of accepting questions on "university pedagogy". This covers the teaching part of a university employee's life.
But research is as least as important as teaching. (In fact I know many academics who are willing to do research without teaching, and none who would like to do teaching without research, so maybe it is even considered more important by academics?). So people in academia need to know how research is done.
And I don't mean the nitty gritty stuff of choosing a varimax or quartimax rotation for the factor analysis in a given experiment. This can be asked on stats.stackexchange.
But generations of researchers have created a body of theory of science and philosophy of science. Starting with epistemological vs. ontological definitions of knowledge, and going into different theoretical perspectives and methodologies. This is a topic which is field-independent; every scientist's work is touched by it, no matter whether she is in psychology, molecular biology or material science.
Doing research without this kind of knowledge is like hacking circuits without knowing Ohm's law. I know it, because I've tried doing research that way for the last four years and wondered why I am in a downward spiral of doing something, getting feedback from my supervisor or from reviwers that it is not the right thing, then trying to correct it (less motivated this time), and still not getting it right. Graduate students need to know it, else they do the wrong things. Professors need to know it, so they can explain to their grad students why the wrong thing they are doing is wrong, and how to find the thing which is right.
There is need for this knowledge within academia. The everyday worklife of people within academia is affected by it. Academics are also currently the only people who have that knowledge. The theorists of science are scientists themselves. The professors who guide us, who define daily what good science is by deciding which article to publish and which to reject, by applying for grants for projects which are compliant with scientific principles, by evaluating their grad students' work, they all have an understanding of what proper research looks like, whether on an explicit or on an intuitive level. Experienced academics are the experts on this type of knowledge, and unexperienced ones are very much in need of it, in order to become better academics.
I think that this situation perfectly reflects the spirit of StackExchange as a place where the experts in one topic answer the questions of the people starting out in their area, in order to make this type of knowledge available to everyone who struggles with becoming better in what he or she is doing.
Therefore, I think this should be part of the on-topic areas for Academia.Stackexchange. It is the right place for it, and the community can only gain from allowing it.
This post was prompted by the fact that I asked a question on this topic and got several reactions from community members who found it off-topic. I don't know why they think so. Butif it is just because "this is not the kind of question we are accustomed to seeing around", then this shouldn't be a barrier. Just because nobody before has thought of asking this kind of question doesn't mean it isn't interesting for the people who ask it and the ones who answer. (And several people expressed interest too).
I would also like to note that they couldn't think of a site which is better suited, and I think I made it clear in my argument above why this is the community to which it is suited, and not any other.
It is up to the community to decide whether it wants to accept or reject this type of question. I would find it very sad if it decides to reject it, because this site would be its natural home, just like in real life, the university is the home of scientific theory.
Doing research without this kind of knowledge is like hacking circuits without knowing Ohm's law. — So, just like most circuit-hacking, then. Most scientific researchers have at most a vague familiarity with, if not an active disdain for, any sort of philosophy of science. You might not consider that optimal, but it's rather insulting to suggest that they're doing it wrong. (Compare with doing mathematics research without a firm grasp of model theory, or computer science research without a firm grasp of computational complexity theory.)
I believe the linked question (and other similar questions) is on-topic and if it is not, then it should be. I do not see why we would consider "How to improve oneself as a teacher" or pedagogical / classroom management issues and we would not consider "how to research" or research management issues.
My vote is to keep the linked question and support these kinds of questions in the future.
It's an interesting question and I have no problem with where it should be posted. My approach is always if there is a question, then let's try to answer. (And I walk the walk; I just told a user how to interact with a visa officer). However, I have a hard time with the OP insisting that "this question is for Academia" = "this question cannot be posted on anywhere else." They are fundamentally two things.
I expressed in the comment that the question is suitable for CV, but got immediately shot down by a comment that "CV is absolutely not the right place." I will be very surprised that a site called Cross Validated will reject a technical question about the definitions of validity and reliability.
And as I have said, I am only expressing my comment on the "This question cannot be posted on anywhere else" bit. I believe Academia would have enough users who are familiar with this idea of validity and reliability to answer the question. And hence this is one of the right homes. I was just very surprised by the declaration "This is not all about statistics!! So, it cannot be posted on a statistics board!!" While the question itself is mostly related to definitions, and the scenarios are also applied.
Anyway, I might have misunderstood your motive. Perhaps you didn't want just an answer, perhaps you thought of getting an in-depth discussion on the deeper meaning of this two concepts. My motive is to provide a suggested place for you to get the answer... and the suggested board needs not to be the origin of that knowledge. Just like if I want to know which of the two floor cleaners I should buy, I will have no problem asking a janitor working in our office, and I bet he/she does not have a PhD in chemical engineering (but more wonderful if he/she does). For this reason, Academia is fine, CV is fine.
I agree with what you say here, you misunderstood my comment because I worded it badly. Please see the full explanation below, http://meta.academia.stackexchange.com/a/784/103.
A clarification on the comment I made under the original question about validity,
CV is absolutely not the right place.
It has created some misunderstanding, because I formulated it badly. It was a hastily written comment, in a moment when I was anticipating my question getting closed before it gets an answer - if you've been there, you know how it feels. Now I wish I had thought more before writing.
Sometimes a question will have a topic which is interesting to more than one type of expert. Then it is up to the asker to decide where to post it. But an experienced asker knows that it will get a different answer, depending on where it is asked, so he chooses the place according to this.
As an example, we had a question on Cooking recently, "determining the sugar content of liqueurs". Now, this is a question a chemist or a physicist can answer too. And indeed, after some discussion in the comments, I posted a question on Chemistry.SE, because I wanted to know which existing measuring tool is better, density or refraction based.
But I think that it was a very good decision on the part of the OP to ask on Cooking first. Because we were able to tell him that, while there are tools for measuring the sugar content, they won't let him solve his original problem of deciding how much sugar to add to alcohol-containing truffles, because sweetness perception depends on much more than just sucrose content. I think that a cook's perspective was more helpful in this case than a chemist's perspective.
Similarly, when I asked my question on Academia, I already knew that I am interested in a theory-of-science perspective. And that while there surely are statisticians who are well-versed in theory of science, I figured that I have a much better chance of getting this type of answer on Academia. So my comment should have been worded something like "please don't migrate it to Crossvalidated, because for this specific question, I know they will not give the kind of answer I am interested in." I didn't mean to suggest that questions about validity are generally not a good topic for statistics, although now that I re-read the comment, I understand why many people thought that I am saying that.
I agree with Penguin_Knight that in general, Crossvalidated is one of the right homes for questions on validity and reliability. I created the current meta question because I think that Academia is another one, (and because there are other questions on scientific theory not concerned with validity), not because I think that it is the single right place for questions of this type.
Thanks for clarifying.
I mostly agree with @Penguin_knight, but want to add a slightly different direction:
I'm active both on academia and on cross validated.
I'd have given the same answer to the same question regardless where it ended up.
As the question is worded, I'd have agreed that it should be moved to cross validated. Not because validity and reliability are not relevant in academia, but because cross validated is the more specialized forum where it is appropriate. That is, it is more on-topic there.
There is one very important point in the meta question here that is relevant for the decision where the question is most on topic: you explain here that you are interested less in an explanation of what exactly constitutes validity and reliability than on the general implications for research. I think if that had been spelled out in the question, the whole move-to-crossvalidated-or-not discussion would have been avoided.
I'm still slightly in favor of cross validated as the most appropriate place. My reasoning why academia is not automatically the right place even if the intended point of view will be more than just statistics is that validation is far from being an exclusively academic question. It is of huge importance in industry.
Maybe not the most compelling reason, but a slight indication: the answers you got so far could perfectly stand on cross validated as well.
While I accept Penguin_Knight's view that the question is suited to both sites, I still don't think that Crossvalidated is the better home. Validity stays validity, no matter if the researcher uses statistics in her research, or not. Maybe in this one special case, criterion validity is only applicable to experimental research which is evaluated with statistics, I don't know. But as a researcher who sees a new term about validity, I first assume that it is independent of statistics, like most of the validity topics.
@rumtscho: well in my world-view on "science" statistics is about how to deal with uncertainty. And that is intimately related to validity, though of course not the same. And cross validated is not only about quantitation of uncertainty - the often more important points of how your assumptions can go wrong and what to expect in that case is also discussed there. But I do respect that you state you'd like to have it discussed over here: it is IMHO also on-topic enough to stay here.
I don't agree with the premise of this question. The information about theory and philosophy of science, including the linked question, seems to me to be utterly irrelevant to day-to-day life of many academics. A more apt comparison than that provided in the question would be to hacking circuits without knowing Maxwell's equations, which is perfectly reasonable.
Of course, questions about how grad students can better understand why they are doing things wrong, or about how professors can better explain to grad students why they are doing things wrong, or so on, should be on topic. I have no objection to that. But I can't see how the kinds of theoretical/philosophical topics that this meta question is about fit that description.
Maybe I didn't describe the type of question I am arguing for well enough. If you think about questions of the sort "is nutrition science currently undergoing a paradigm shift", it is not the type I had in mind. There are many questions of the applied "how do I do proper research" type, which are part of the wider field of theory of science, and I am arguing that it is good for the site that this type of applied question should be allowed here. A discussion whether the other, non-applied type is also a good fit for here, merits its own meta question.
For what it's worth, not having many researchers interested in knowing it doesn't seem a reason not to accept the more theoretical kind, because the few who are interested in the answers get to be better researchers from them. An analogy with cooking: we allow all kinds of food science question and it has not harmed the site, but lead to interesting explanations. We love them, even though 99.999% of all cooks don't want to know the sequence in which the proteins in their steak denature.
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4392 | 2018: a year in moderation
It's New Year's Day in Stack Exchange land...
A distinguishing characteristic of these sites is how they are moderated:
We designed the Stack Exchange network engine to be mostly self-regulating, in that we amortize the overall moderation cost of the system across thousands of teeny-tiny slices of effort contributed by regular, everyday users.
-- A Theory of Moderation
While there certainly are Moderators here, a significant amount of the moderation is done by ordinary people, using the privileges
they've earned by virtue of their contributions to the site. Each of you contributes a little bit of time and effort, and together you accomplish much.
As we enter a new year, let's pause and reflect, taking a moment to appreciate the work that we do here together.
To that end, here is how the moderation done here on Academia breaks down by activity over the past 12 months:
Action Moderators Community¹
---------------------------------------- ---------- ----------
Users suspended² 24 30
Users destroyed 264 0
Users deleted 13 0
Users contacted 48 0
User banned from review 2 0
Tasks reviewed³: Suggested Edit queue 49 2,528
Tasks reviewed³: Reopen Vote queue 8 1,323
Tasks reviewed³: Low Quality Posts queue 21 2,175
Tasks reviewed³: Late Answer queue 3 568
Tasks reviewed³: First Post queue 15 4,946
Tasks reviewed³: Close Votes queue 74 8,595
Tags merged 37 0
Tag synonyms proposed 16 0
Tag synonyms created 15 0
Revisions redacted 27 0
Questions unprotected 1 0
Questions reopened 59 54
Questions protected 82 265
Questions migrated 45 4
Questions flagged⁴ 57 2,847
Questions closed 489 1,966
Question flags handled⁴ 829 2,075
Posts unlocked 13 18
Posts undeleted 27 74
Posts locked 24 341
Posts deleted⁵ 499 2,350
Posts bumped 0 366
Escalations to the CM team 19 0
Comments undeleted 267 0
Comments flagged 32 2,926
Comments deleted⁶ 7,410 3,678
Comment flags handled 2,244 714
Answers flagged 135 2,946
Answer flags handled 1,905 1,176
All comments on a post moved to chat 208 0
Footnotes
¹ "Community" here refers both to the membership of Academia without diamonds next to their names, and to the automated systems otherwise known as user #-1.
² The system will suspend users under three circumstances: when a user is recreated after being previously suspended, when a user is recreated after being destroyed for spam or abuse, and when a network-wide suspension is in effect on an account.
³ This counts every review that was submitted (not skipped) - so the 3 suggested edits reviews needed to approve an edit would count as 3, the goal being to indicate the frequency of moderation actions. This also applies to flags, etc.
⁴ Includes close flags (but not close or reopen votes).
⁵ This ignores numerous deletions that happen automatically in response to some other action.
⁶ This includes comments deleted by their own authors (which also account for some number of handled comment flags).
Wishing you all a happy new year...
Interesting! As a moderator, I didn't realize that over half of the flags are being handled by non-diamond users. Thank you all!
I am guessing a bunch of those are the community bot handling spam and rude/abusive flags, but it does mean that as quickly as we generally handle flags, there are times that our users are getting the job done by raising enough flags.
@StrongBad: Also remember that NAA, VLQ, closure, and even comment flags can be handled by the community at times.
I'm assuming that if a flag is raised to, for example, close a question, if close votes close the question before a diamond gets to the flag it would mark it as community handled. Academia seems to do much better on that than any of the other smaller communities I'm part of, so I think it's probably more than just the bot.
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563 | Are we missing a close reason along the lines of "there are no stupid questions ... oh, I stand corrected, yes there are"?
About this question:
https://academia.stackexchange.com/q/10959/96
Which asks:
I'm hoping to enroll onto a PhD program. I've heard that twitter might help me find a PhD program. This question is inspired by this video in the British Ecological Society Careers YouTube channel: http://m.youtube.com/watch?feature=plcp&v=J9uEYEcCcFY I have not used twitter before. How can I use twitter to help find a PhD? For example, is there a particular group/channel on twitter that advertises PhDs?
And the OP also commented:
I've Googled virtually daily for the past two years without success
This just seems a terrible question to me. But I see no close votes, and when I look through the close menu, I'm not sure I see anything that really fits.
But do we really want this and questions like it?
Is this question's continued existence, evidence that we are we missing a close reason? And if so, what is that reason?
I think you're missing the point of closing a question. Questions are closed, broadly speaking, for being either inappropriate for our forum for whatever reason. Stupid but appropriate questions should not be closed; they should be voted down into oblivion, as that's the tool that we use to convey that message. Just because we have a hammer doesn't mean everything is a nail :)
Just because we have a hammer doesn't mean everything is a nail. fantastic proverb, haven't heard that before. :)
This is a tough situation. It's an on-topic question, so it shouldn't be closed as a violation of the FAQs, regardless of how sophomoric it is. That sets a bad precedent.
The only above-board way to make such questions "go away" is for the community to downvote it into obscurity. Expressing disapproval of a question is allowed, and I think would be appropriate for questions that are deemed unserious by the community. Even then, though, the onus is on the down voters to explain why they're downvoting the question.
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1556 | Who wrote the Help Center claim that we are a forum, and why?
In the Help Center, there's a sentence that claims we are a forum:
To help people answer your question, please recognize that this forum is frequented by academicians from across the globe
Who wrote this, and why is it there? (I'm not asking whether it should be changed, because of course it should be - this site is not, in the usual web sense, a forum.)
The line in question has been there since the begining and was added by an SE community moderator. That said, there is no reason for us not to change it. It would be great if answers could provide some suggested replacement text like this question.
Since there has been no disagreement with my proposed replacement text, I have now updated the help center.
It was previously discussed on meta here. The text was placed in the help center by a StackExchange community manager since there were no temporary moderators here to do it yet, but it originated from the community via meta.
I propose the following replacement text for that paragraph:
Academic customs and procedures vary greatly across countries, universities, fields, subfields, workgroups and so on. Please state your question with as much context as you can to help ensure that you'll receive a directed, relevant answer.
Nice find. I looked and was not able to dig out that discussion question.
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1214 | Answer that *is* an answer deleted by mod because "it does not provide an answer"?
This answer to How is it in my best interest not to submit a paper to two journals simultaneously? was deleted by a moderator:
What can I lose if I don’t adhere to this rule?
Your self-respect.
The claim is that it does not provide an answer to the question. It clearly does provide an answer.
When I saw this answer, the first thing came to my mind was this: This is more likely to be a comment, not an answer.
@EnthusiasticStudent I don't understand what you mean. It was an answer, so there's no question of probability here.
I think, people usually post such short answers as comments, not as answers to the questions. This is what I am trying to say.
I agree. In fact, I posted a short comment on that very question. But this answer was intentionally posted as an answer because it is an answer.
I understand your claim, and I really liked your deleted answer. Let's wait for the moderators to see why your post is deleted.
My best guess at the real reason that the mod deleted my answer is because he thought it was too short to be an answer.
The site already imposes a minimum character count for answers. If we want to impose a higher minimum, we should change the rules and enforce them uniformly.
@DavidKetcheson you circumvented the minimum answer length by quoting the original question. I am not going to say that there are no short answers, but if I encounter a short answer with a flag raised against it, I am likely to agree with the flag.
@DavidKetcheson: As I posted below, I converted the answer to a comment because it was too short. Quoting the question in the answer to get around that doesn't change the fact that it's a one-liner that should be a comment, not an answer.
I "deleted" the answer, although it was actually converted to a comment (which you then in turn deleted). The reason the answer was deleted was because of length, not because it's not an answer. Unfortunately, the mod interface (where this was done) doesn't give the option to leave feedback after such an operation, and I forgot to put it in manually.
Thank you. In future cases like this, a comment explaining the real reason for deletion would be appreciated.
I was not the moderator who deleted the answer, but had I gotten to it first, I would have. I do not think it answers the question in its current format, although it has the potential to be the basis of a great answers. Without the quote it does not meet the minimum number of characters required for answers suggesting it may be too short. To be a good answer you would really need to explain why the behaviour would result in a loss of self respect.
As for a moderator deleting the question, this is one area where our community moderation really let's us down. What happened was that two users raised the "not an answer flag". A moderator agree and performed an action on the flags and deleted the questions. In my opinion the correct way for the community to handle these things is for regular users to down vote the answer so that it has a negative vote total which would then allow users with sufficient reputation to cast a delete vote. This would keep the moderators out of it. That said, historically we have not moderated ourselves in this way and instead users tend to flag and not down vote, or even comment, which to me is a strange combination leaving moderators looking like they are acting unilaterally.
I agree that we should let the downvote mechanism work, and that people really ought to use downvoting more. I can understand the perspective that it is not a good answer, but I still don't understand the perspective that it is not an answer! The point about length without the quote is fair; if you had deleted it and given that as the reason, I would not object.
Answers that don't answer the question may be deleted. This includes:
Posts asking for clarification on the question
Posts commenting on a related topic but not answering the question
Sarcastic/witty one-liners
Rants
Abusive posts
Spam
...?
This does not answer the question. Very meta.
It is a one-liner. I don't see how it could be interpreted as sarcastic. I certainly didn't mean it to be witty. Do you really think that it is witty? To me it just seems sad.
@DavidKetcheson The answer is without context and relies entirely on the reader having an existing understanding of your moral framework with no additional explanation. It is practically the textbook case of a witty one-liner.
"Wittiness" does not seem like a reasonable cause for deletion of an answer: it is a positive quality. Excepting this, none of the given reasons apply to David Ketcheson's answer: it is clearly serious and on-topic. If you want to say that all one-line answers will be deleted and that the given answer is only more than one line because of a technicality, say that. I don't really understand the need for such a requirement -- some questions can be answered in one line (e.g. this one!), and padding an answer seems helpful to no one. But as silly site features go...this is no big deal.
@PeteL.Clark - The answer was not deleted, it was converted to a comment, which was subsequently deleted by the owner. Regarding your "some can be answered", you're entirely right, which is why I said "may", not "will always".
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1032 | 2014 Community Moderator Election Results
Academia's first moderator election has come to a close, the votes have been tallied, and the 4 new moderators are:
They'll be taking over for the moderators pro tempore shortly — please thank them all for volunteering, and share your assistance and advice with the new crew as they learn the ropes!
For details on how the voting played out, you can download the election results here, or view a summary report online.
Congrats to all the new mods, and the old ones !
Congrats to the winners!
Congratulations and good luck to the new moderators, and thanks a lot to the old ones! :)
Fun fact: due to the election and following the removal of my diamond, I got awarded the Marshal badge!
Congrats to all four of you!
Congratulations! I've seen excellent comments and answers from all of you.
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1606 | When did DOI questions become off-topic here?
My question on DOIs for time series was migrated to Open Data. That's annoying. If I'd wanted it there, I'd have asked it there myself. I have an account there.
But instead of being here, where it will be seen by hundreds of academics, and get thousands of views, it's been migrated to a quiet beta site where it will get dozens of views, very few of which will be academics.
Across the whole Stack Exchange, a question doesn't get migrated just because it's a good fit elsewhere. It only gets migrated if it's not a good fit here. So why was this question not considered a good fit here?
For what it's worth, my own opinion on migration has not changed since I wrote:
I would prefer to see a gray-area question be closed (and possibly migrated a little later) rather than migrated immediately.
Migration is qualitatively different from other kinds of closure.
Assuming we don't have accounts on the target site,
Closed Questions
High-rep users can vote to reopen
Users can continue to discuss the closure in comments
OP can edit the question to make it a better fit
Migrated Questions
High-rep users on the original site cannot vote to reopen
Users on the original site cannot comment
OP cannot edit the question to make it a better fit for the original site
In this case, the question had no close votes before it was migrated. It also had some upvotes and no downvotes.
Given this meta post, which seems to be the most recent "policy statement", I don't think this question should be migrated - at least, not unless it's closed by community first. If you delete the version on Open Data, I'll reopen it here.
Done, thank you ff524
As the guilty party, I'll just note that my primary justification for migrating the question was that the question was about how DOI's get applied to specific data sets. It's more a question about how data works—which is Open Data's specialty, than to Academia's. I'm OK if the consensus is otherwise, and apologize for the rash action.
Thank you for the apology, it's appreciated.
I only saw this thread today, otherwise I would have weighed in earlier. I definitely think that migration was warranted in this case. I agree 100% with aeismail's rationale:
It's more a question about how data works—which is Open Data's
specialty, than to Academia's.
Honestly, this to me would seem to settle the discussion. (Incidentally, I don't understand why aeismail adopts a rather apologetical tone in his answer.)
To comment on EnergyNumbers' original question:
But instead of being here, where it will be seen by hundreds of
academics, and get thousands of views, it's been migrated to a quiet
beta site where it will get dozens of views, very few of which will be
academics.
That can't be an argument in favor of not migrating. If a question is off topic, then it's off topic. (See below.) I don't see how "it may be off topic at Academia, but it'll get many more hits here" makes a lot of sense.
I am somewhat active on CrossValidated.SE, which is SE for statistics. They recently added a custom close reason for data requests, directing people to OpenData. Which makes perfect sense, given the missions of the two sites. Yes, of course there is more activity at CV than at OD. But if the number of hits were a criterion, we would post everything at StackOverflow, and beta sites would never get any traffic at all.
It seems to me EnergyNumbers argues that the question is of special interest to academics because the DOI explicitly aims at academics. (To quote the migrated question, "I'm familiar with DOIs been allocated to historic time series, to give academics a unique, citable identifier for datasets."). However, the DOI Foundation's FAQ nowhere contains the word "academic" or variants. To quote from the FAQ:
A DOI name provides a means of persistently identifying a piece of
intellectual property on a digital network and associating it with
related current data in a structured extensible way.
Intellectual property may be specially relevant to academics, but it is so for lots of other people, too. This discussion here reminds me of boat programming, with "DOI" in place of "boat", and "academics" in place of "programmers". And I'd argue that many people who are interested in how DOI deals with "evolving" datasets will not be academics (e.g., industry researchers, technical journalists etc.), and they'd likely rather expect such a question on OpenData than on Academia. (Thank goodness for search engines.)
Across the whole Stack Exchange, a question doesn't get migrated just
because it's a good fit elsewhere. It only gets migrated if it's not a
good fit here. So why was this question not considered a good fit
here?
Compare the on-topic help for OpenData:
Open Data Stack Exchange is for developers and researchers interested in open data.
with the analogous page for 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.
If you have a question 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
... then you're in the right place!
Looking back at aeismail's rationale quoted above, I'd say that the migrated question fits much more comfortably into the first than the second category, although one can of course argue that it's "research-adjacent" and doesn't cover open data in particular.
(No, I'm not going to flag the question for re-migration, given that there seems to be a consensus that it should stay. As may be obvious, if the question had been posted today, I would have flagged it, for the reasons above.)
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350 | Why no link in the header of the main site to our 'About' page?
On the main site, we have a lovely new About page. Five of us have found it (it's linked from the footer of the main site) and read it, and so got the Informed Badge
All the other sites I've seen, have "about" linked in the top header on the main site. But Academia does not.
Please can we have an About link in the header of the main site?
Hmm - I have an about link in the header of the main site in my browser (Chrome), can you post a screen shot where it should be?
I just asked some other mods about this, and I learned that apparently that link disappears when you pass 2k in beta sites, and 5k on graduated sites. See this post for the relevant discussion.
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855 | merge the research-undergraduate tag into research
We currently have 76 questions tagged research-undergraduate. By the definition of the site scope, either:
these questions are about research that's not applicable to postgrad students and academic staff, in which case they should be closed and deleted; or
they are applicable to postgrad students and academic staff, in which case they are about research
Either way, the research-undergraduate tag is irrelevant. So I've proposed making it a synonym of research.
So, I'd welcome your contributions to voting on that syonym: but I'd also welcome discussion of whether this synonym is appropriate. We have discussed undergraduate research here previously, and the top-voted answer says:
if it's a question a PhD student (or higher) could reasonably ask. If so, then it's appropriate
I think this is essentially a duplicate of http://meta.academia.stackexchange.com/questions/645/vote-on-tag-synonyms.
Why 3 downvotes. I think its a valid question
@Ank Voting on meta is not like voting on the main site. On meta, downvotes are essentially "no" or "disagree" votes, not "bad question" votes. Downvotes on this question, for example, indicate disagreement with the proposed tag merge.
I certainly agree that "undergraduate research" is a subset of "research". But "research" is so broad -- it seems to apply to maybe 1/3 of all questions asked on this site -- that narrowing it would be helpful.
The vast majority of undergraduate research is supervised by a graduate student or a faculty member. This seems to make undergraduate research squarely on-topic for this site in the same way as undergraduate teaching questions certainly are. In that supervising undergraduate research has many issues distinct from supervising other research, it seems appropriate to have a separate tag for it.
maybe the tag should be supervising-undergraduate-research, then, as at the moment it's a magnet for off-topic questions from undergraduates - what do you think?
I'm not sure if I feel like the name of a tag should carry so much responsibility for warding off its misuse (in my experience tags are inevitably misused by those unfamiliar with a site), and I am also not so sure that research questions from undergraduates are or should be off-topic on this site: it seems to me that an undergraduate is an "academic" if she is doing university-level research, teaching or administration. But I don't feel especially strongly about this: this is just by way of answering your question.
@EnergyNumbers I haven't seem many off-topic questions from undergrads related to research - the questions I vote to close as being "undergrad questions" are related to undergrad exams, undergrad degree programs, etc.
I agree with Pete that the research is very broad and that splitting it into "sub tags" could be helpful. That said, I am not sure what research-undergraduate would be. Potentially better would be a set of tags like research-supervison, research-advisor, and research-funding.
But again, something like research-supervision can be very different depending on whether the supervisee is a PhD student or an undergraduate student. I think it makes sense to keep research-undergraduate as is
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375 | Voting down and/or closing questions when being nice
Following on from Being nice when closing questions and Being nice when down voting .
While being nice is essential, so is:
voting down bad questions;
voting to close questions that don't belong here or are duplicates; and
voting to delete questions that don't belong here.
What can we do to encourage more of this sort of thing?
Related:
What is community moderation, and what can I do to help?
What should happen to closed questions?
Which of these posts should be deleted?
What's the difference between down-vote, vote to close and flag ?
This question and this answer are my way of trying to encourage more of this sort of thing.
Posters with sufficient reputation could, as well as being nice, be a little more vigorous in casting down votes for obviously bad questions; casting close votes for closable questions; and in the list of closed non-duplicate questions, either voting to delete, or editing and voting to re-open, each one as appropriate.
And both the undergraduate and research-undergraduate tags are hotbeds of closable, deletable questions: questions about undergraduate study are off-topic here. I have a hunch that the very presence of those tags here is problematic.
There are also plenty of bad questions out there with positive scores. Voting down is as important as voting up, in helping future readers quickly separate the wheat from the chaff.
Is there an easy way to skip duplicates? I know I can search "closed:yes" but is there a way to only get non-duplicate closes?
I am not sure how I feel about down voting questions, especially when you have the ability to close vote. I can't think of too many questions which I wanted to vote down but not close.
@DanielE.Shub - See this related meta question and answer
@eykanal nice one - I've updated the answer accordingly
@eykanal the search doesn't work any more. Any ideas how to fix it?
@DanielE.Shub - Quick search on meta brings up this, which I haven't tested; try it out and let me know if it works.
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250 | Can we learn anything from our "Greatest Hits" to date?
Here's a list of the so-called "greatest hits" on academia.SE
These are, roughly speaking, the questions that have got the most positive attention from non-StackExchangers.
So, these the most accessible and useful questions. Or the most populist and lowest-common-denominator. Or, most likely, a mix of both.
What can we learn from them?
(other than there's a lot of discouraged graduate students out there, and they did find the answers helpful)
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138 | Flood of low-quality questions
I've noticed that many of the recent questions asked by newcomers to the site are low quality and/or off-topic, dealing with "what's the best university for discipline X?" and "how can I get into field/program X"? On a similarly worrying note, there have not been any new users asking more academic-related questions, such as those asked by site regulars. To me, this suggests that we are attracting the wrong kinds of users, and we are not attracting the kinds of users we want. My interpretation of the data is that we are attracting typical SO users, who make up a very diverse (and typically non-academic) population, and we are not marketing this site well enough to the general academic crowd.
My question is, what do you think of this? Do you agree? If so, what should we do to fix this? If you disagree, what do you make of the trend?
In response to the comment below:
What academic discipline does “Productivity Science” come under?
This question is completely unrelated to Academia and is unlikely to benefit any future readers of this site.
How can I make up for weak grades while applying for a masters?
This question is almost impossible to answer. Sure, it's common, but there are far too many factors for a definitive answer.
Part-time/non-degree computer science studies
Off-topic, as it pertains to undergraduate work.
How to get enrolled in a German university for Ph.D. in computer science
This type of question is the most dangerous, because the information is freely available on department pages of individual programs. Many questions like this here will significantly decrease the value of this site, as all answers will be "check this link" and "-1, check department webpage".
We have had some very good questions recently (e.g., this, this, and this), but of those three, two were asked by "old" site members, while only one was a newbie. My main worry is that new folks are viewing the site differently than we are, and that the way they're viewing it isn't good for our long-term health.
Can you specify certain questions that you deem as low quality, and explain why you think so on a case by case basis?
@paul - added some text.
It's seemed to me for a while that the core problem with this SO is that bad questions look like the ones cited above, but good questions tend to require an answer that begins "This will depend on the field you are in" or "This varies a great deal across disciplines", followed by a discussion of that variation. Insofar as there's a middle ground, it's a situation where the SO is de facto a Q&A for questions relating more or less to issues in CS & Engineering departments. The SO format was designed to answer specific "How do I ...?" questions, and there aren't many of that sort here.
In light of Sturgeon's Law ("...but then, 90% of everything is crud.") I take the flood of low-quality questions as a good sign.
I don't think the flood of low-quality questions is in itself a bad thing, but what is a problem is the lack of new academic users asking higher-level questions. We got some promotion on the SE blog/G+ feed that's probably drawing in the generic users. I too don't know how to promote things better, except to keep hitting on places like Inside Higher Ed.
I agree but I don't think it's a major problem as long as such questions don't get much upvotes. It's still the kind of most upvoted questions on a SE site that drives me to participate regularly or not at all on that site. Here Academia.se does pretty well. There is a lot high-quality content.
Also, if too much low quality questions are on the front page, pushing some of the better questions with unaccepted answers to the top is a good way of attracting new academcis and not drive them away by the flood of low quality questions.
The low quality questions I noticed in the recent past here were often very localized personal advice questions with bad titles ("What should I do"), unuseful tags, no clear personal context. I'm not really sure if such questions are on/off-topic. There are student consultants for this at local universities. The answers will often vary pretty much for different nations and university bureaucracies. So a question tagged with personal advice should also have a nation tag, otherwise it's hard for new user asking the same low quality question here to find that one and we produce a lot of duplicates/noise. Noise/redundancy is what drives the majority of interesting user away in my opinion, rather than low quality questions. Most suggested criterions when voting to close a question (too localized, not a real question,...) try exactly to avoid this noise and redundancy, low quality is rather handled by rep voting/filtering. Questions on which uni's to choose/are best are imho off-topic, there are "rankings" and choosing the best uni with the highest demands on students is often not the best choice for the average student.
If my SE feed is full of low quality redundant questions, I unsubscribe. There are now so many SE sites, that browsing SE via feeds is the only way for me to notice new and interesting questions, browsing http://stackexchange.com/questions or a specifics site's frontpage is too time-consuming. So what you can do as a high rep user with privileges is edit and tag question titles in a clear way, avoid redundancy. Redundant/duplicate questions should be deleted instead of being closed and therefore still popping up in my feed. If I cant deselect all the personal advise questions on http://stackexchange.com/filters because they are not tagged as such, it's likely I unsubscribe.
I like the idea of making more of the high quality questions appear on the front page and deleting the low quality ones (rather than simply closing them). As Hauser suggests, perhaps we could add some way to filter many of these out of feeds.
Your comment about browsing behavior is interesting. Unfortunately, since this site is in beta, it means that if others do the same, the site visits number will stay low, putting the site under pressure for deletion. I'm not saying you should change how you visit the site, but I'm not sure what to do about it.
What may be low quality to you may not be so to the next person. Lets ask the question. What criteria determines a quality question on Academia SE? And as you have pointed out, there are varying level of quality of questions. Are we only abiding by 'Low' and 'High' quality or are we going to introduce some middle ground?
We would not want to detract others from the site by merely closing their perceived low quality question. And especially closing their question without a valid reason. This I had found to be a real nuisance on SO when what I perceived to be be a totally valid question. Giving a general reason (e.g. This question is not a good fit for Stack Overflow ..) is open to abuse by moderators who merely just wants to 'clean up low quality questions'. Being curtious in ones answer and giving an appropriate reason when closing questions is the way to go instead of the plonking down a generalised answer leaving the person who asked the question at times scratching their heads. If you have moderator rights (which can be perceived as senior), then behave accordingly. As academics we are more precise in our ways when answering our assignment/research questions, lets do the same for the questions on A.SE.
We must bear in mind that people from all over the world with vast cultural differences vists the SE sites. Being mindful of this is of utmost importance. Politeness and curtiousness is the right and safe route to take when answering questions. Would you be short and abrupt when answering an 'high quality' question? I would think not. hence we should show respect when answering/closing questions of those that may not be aware that their question is perceived to be 'low quality'.
Given the name of the website (academia.stack...), if one just glances at that while knowing that the 'stackexchange' sites answers questions, one would think that you could ask any academic related question including ones like 'which unviersity is best to study flying pigs'. Let me put that as an example. I know there is a 'Golf' stackexchange site, hence my thoughts would be I can ask anything thats Golf related including 'Is it legal to eat pork chops while playing a round of golf'. Disclaimer, I no absolutely nothing about the game of golf. But these are the questions we should expect and its all on how we handle these questions. I think it will grow your reputation in more than just points when one can handle that scenario's accordingly.
Attracting academics. Of course we want to attract new academics. Those that are brand spanking new, those that left academia and came back as well as those that has been around forever. The experienced academics can sift through a pile of questions with ease picking up only what they need and ignoring the rest without breaking a sweat or batting and eyelash. I would think that the majority of people asking questions would generally be newbies. We want these newbies to stay. A sure fire way of driving away a newbie is to treat them and their question with disrespect.
So whilst it may be frustrating that there are 'low quality' questions about, I would rather have those questions around and close them with appropriate comments/reasons. The world is full of 'low quality' questions. There's no escaping it.
Note that this question was asked in June and (in my opinion) doesn't really apply now.
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107 | Publicity letter template
In reference to the discussion here, I'm posting a letter I sent to the Chronicle of Higher Education. Please post suggestions as to how it should be improved below. Each post should address a single issue; post multiple answers if you have multiple issues. Our goal is to create a form letter for advertising the site, as much as that is possible.
Hello <person> -
I saw your name on the chronicle website, and I wanted to bring your attention to a new internet resource available for academics that I think may be of interest to your readers. The website is:
https://academia.stackexchange.com/
Briefly, the site allows academics of all backgrounds and experience levels to interact in a group settings, asking questions and sharing experiences and field-specific knowledge with each other. If you're familiar with the website stackoverflow.com, this site follows their model, with users being able to vote up interesting, relevant, and informative questions. The most interesting aspect of the site is how easy and intuitive it is.
I'm currently working on the site as a volunteer administrator (I'm not affiliated with the site in any way other than as a volunteer). I encourage you to check it out, and if you have any questions feel free to email me. Thanks -
Sincerely,
<me>
Maybe I can share the letter I sent out:
I am [sender], a [job title] at [institution]. I am now also one of the moderators of the new Academia site at Stack Exchange, a series of sites dedicated to providing "crowd-sourced" information to users in a Q-and-A format. The focus of our board is questions related to academia in general: admissions, job hiring, advisor-advisee relationships, and more.
Some examples of recent questions:
Why don't people publish failures?
How to improve technical writing
Is web presence important for researchers?
When is it appropriate to decline a review request?
You can see more on the board's website: http://academia.stackexchange.com.
I and the other moderators would be happy to answer any further questions about the board, and would appreciate any opportunity to increase the visibility of the board.
I picked a random cross-sampling of questions that I also felt fit the themes of the group. If I had to pick them again now, I'd probably pick a different set. I'd also pick five or six instead of four.
I think this is a pretty good template. My only suggestions is that the final sentence mentions "other moderators" but doesn't list any way to get in touch with them. Do you think it would help to include a link to the site meta with the text "ask questions about the site here"?
It wouldn't hurt. We could also sign an email with the team's public emails if we think that would also be useful.
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