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3616 | How sustainable is Academia.SE?
Allow me to ponder on the future of Academia(.SE):
I don't claim to be an integral or representative user of this site, but I've noticed I personally haven't been using Academia as much lately. This is probably a natural phenomenon for many users across the SE sites, and isn't necessarily a problem for the sites if they are getting enough new active users (and may be a boon, if you're getting less of me :).
The above was sort of a disclaimer to this observation, which is my main worry: it seems to me that when I have been browsing new questions here, most of them are either duplicates (if not in the technical sense, at least morally so) or about some specialized issue I am not so interested in. I think this partially accounts for my decrease in activity here. It seems to me that this may be more of an issue on Academia than some of the other sites (because there are a lot more possible questions of "broad interest" and/or questions are more focused on changing developments).
If this observation is true, then it seems likely that either usage (measured in some sense) of Academia will eventually peter off or questions will tend to become more and more specialized.
First:
Do other people see a similar issue with the questions being asked here? (mostly duplicates/very specialized) Or is there any data for or against this? (Surely we can get data about numbers of questions that are or aren't duplicates; being "too specialized" may be hard to measure directly, but we could try to measure "broad interest" by counting question votes inversely scaled by the growth of the site.)
Second:
If this issue is in fact real, is there anything we can or should try to do about it?
I think, instead, that Academia.SE hasn't yet reached its full potential: I'll expand on this in the next days (while struggling to digest Christmas lunches and dinners :-) ).
@MassimoOrtolano I think we're still growing too, but I was wondering if we're headed for a peak then a downward plunge or if we'll just sort of flatten out at "max potential."
Having specialized questions is not a problem if they are being answered. In a mature SE sites most of core questions have already been asked and answered, but the site is growing with more specialized questions. In Stack Overflow most non duplicate questions are very specialized, and probably it makes the new questions feed less entertaining for casual reades, but it makes the site more useful.
The issue is over-moderation and not trusting the sites voting model. Like most things on the internet, the less the community decides, the fewer people are interested (distrust of authority?). If any authority exists, it should be applied towards improving the voting model, not moderation.
Regarding duplicates, I did a small review of the data last August in response to Unjustified trend of labelling too many questions as “duplicates”. I heard in the SE podcast that for all sites, as the catalogue of existing questions grows new questions are bound to be more frequently marked as duplicates.
what bothers me the most is that it seems mostly scandalous/gossip questions get all the attention and that we are really biased towards comp. science/math/engineering. So when we drift towards more specific questions as already discussed, the interest decreases.
I doubt that the complexities of human interactions in an academic setting will ever be completely solved. Academia SE will run out of questions about the same time as everything that can be invented has been invented (or the zombie apocalypse, which likely comes sooner).
@user4050 I will say for myself that I make a deliberate effort to provide a non-CS/Math/Eng perspective on things (most often the necessity of LaTeX) because we do indeed have an overrepresentation.
Please back your feelings with some statistics. We have the data explorer, use it to demonstrate what you feel actually happens.
I've also dipped significantly in my use recently, but I don't think that's related to sustainability of the site so much as personal ebb and flow in attention and whether Academia.SE is currently beating out other options for entertaining myself.
I do suspect that we will see a lot of "the core questions" getting answered over time, but I don't think that's going to end up with the site ending up being "done" and pointless. A lot of what we talk about here is about relationships and organizations, and there is never a shortage of interesting human complexities in such things.
Bottom line: I think Academia.SE will become unsustainable around the same time that relationship advice columns become unsustainable. At that point, we can all just live on airborne bacon.
Well, your level of usage was absurd for awhile :) So do you feel like we're getting as many good, interesting questions as we used to? I don't, but I can't tell if that's due to my personal interest ebbing or an actual change in the site.
@Kimball Well, I'm just dipping back in after a few months off, but my impression is that it's about the same. In my experience, after one has been active a while, questions that used to feel fresh are less so since you've seen other similar questions enough times.
It's exactly the same for me.
Some of these questions are probably answerable with the data explorer. Moderators also have tools to look at site analytics. Our site "graduated" from being a beta site in April of 2014. This was during a period of intense growth as measured by most, possibly all, meaningful metrics including number of posts, votes, views, visits, users, and posters. This growth continue for about a year after graduation. Since April of 2015 our growth has slowed, but I see no indication that we are shrinking.
Thanks--I knew about but never really figured out the data explorer, and I wasn't suggesting we are shrinking now, but was wondering if we'll soon hit a point of most "core questions" being asked and answered, which might change the nature and usage of the site.
At its base this doesn't seem all that different from StackOverflow to me. If you look back, questions from 2009 about how to do a very basic thing in Python would get 2000 upvotes and a stream of updated answers over the last 7 years. If you follow the current queue of questions, you'll see instead that they tend to be very specific and that garnering 2 upvotes and 1 answer isn't at all unusual
Does programming change more than academia over time? It seems obvious that it does, and SO will always benefit from an influx of questions about whatever is newest. But the fact remains that there are still dozens of new questions per day about things that have been around "forever", such as Python. They do seem to get more specific, and I would guess the rate of duplicates has risen also. So I still think it's generally a good comparison where their "core questions" are asked and answered, but the site remains very active.
And just like SO questions about Python (or other older languages), despite diminishing returns I'm skeptical the community will ever reach a point where there simply aren't any more good questions.
No you wouldn't. Relatively-general questions with dozens of upvotes are routinely asked on StackOverflow.com . Look at the data explorer.
I see no real threat with specialized questions, as long as they are actually answerable in similar level of detail.
What typically does happen rather more often is that you get questions asking for advice, given a particular situation; majority of which are specialized to the extent that it's difficult to give a satisfactory and factual answer without knowing the people involved and situation in detail. Thus majority of the answers boil down to "talk to your supervisor" or "check with the department administration", something along those lines.
My personal involvement at Academia.SE has also decreased over the past year, partly because of my stress over changing jobs, hunting postdoc etc, and partly because I feel rather disillusioned by academia altogether and I find that many of frustrating attitudes/statements about life in academia are also perpetuated here e.g. "doing research is a way of life, not a job" or the notion of citations and publications being fair.
I realize that a lot of those things that I would like to have feedback on and discuss with other academics are not a good fit for the Q&A format of the site, and that's totally fine. That's why people get a drink and chat after work :)
It's just that there aren't many practical and factually answerable questions about academia, I think. At least, I haven't come up with anything lately... Instead, I think there will be many graduate level questions about interaction with students, teachers or otherwise faculty, about positions and salaries etc.
it seems to me that when I have been browsing new questions here, most
of them are either duplicates (if not in the technical sense, at least
morally so) or about some specialized issue I am not so interested in.
Honestly, one the front page I feel very similarly at times. There are days when I don't have the patience to deal with questions that look very much like "Have you tried asking your advisor?" or are on extremely specialized subjects.
But in my perspective, the site has always been populated by a large number of these questions. They're part of the inherent nature of the site, in the same way "How do I do this embarrassingly simple thing in Python" is part of SO.
There's also ebbs and flows in my participation in communities. I used to be very active on CV, but I'd drifted a bit. There's times here where the site is up all day, and times I haven't checked in a week. And I've definitely seen some sites that have hit unsustainability - I think Academia is pretty far from that point.
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4328 | What are the criteria that determine which questions will receive so much attention?
Recently, I posted a question which at the first time I didn't expect that it will receive this huge ~ 12k attention. Now, I'm wondering why it received this amount of popularity among the academic community in this forum? Because I had similar questions before but none of them really received this amount of attention. I will be very grateful if someone could explain this to me or more concisely define which criteria in my question lead to this amount of popularity.
Questions with outlier level of attention are almost always a result of the "hot network questions" or HNQ.
This has been a topic of a lot of discussion on the main meta as well as the meta for individual stacks. HNQ are great for attracting attention to stacks, but sometimes that attention is a bit unwanted, including votes and answers on questions that are more controversial that end up not reflecting the home stack but rather the SE community at large (without any attention to the quality, note that 2/3 of your answers come from people who are not regulars here; this is typical of questions on HNQ but you will find that most other answers here are by regulars).
Your particular question probably got a lot of attention from people who are interested in automatic plagiarism detection, probably because everyone in the StackExchange community has been a student of some sort at some time, and many are young enough to have experienced automatic plagiarism detection. It probably received less attention (proportionally) from people who are users of automatic plagiarism detection as educators or people affiliated with journals, which is the audience you might get more informed answers from and would be more likely to find in the makeup of the regular Academia.SE community - that's simply the nature of HNQ.
In summary, if a question generates a little bit of attention quickly, it can end up on the "Hot network questions" that people see on the side bar and on the main StackExchange site. These questions tend to then attract a lot more attention from people who are just SE users or casual users of a particular stack, rather than the regulars in a stack. This has an especially large effect on stacks that are fairly small (which Academia is, though it's not the smallest). Most likely, most of that attention is not from the everyday Academia.SE community.
Schadenfreude and the tabloid effect.
Issues pertaining to plagiarism, fraud, retraction, inappropriate behavior of supervisor, sexual misconduct, "stolen" ideas, feeling of despair, etc. attract bored site users more than the serious ones.
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5306 | Only flag spam, that's it
I've been seeing way to many people editing spam, upvoting spam, downvoting spam, closing spam, and using the wrong flags for spam. So, this is a reminder. If you are not on strike, flag spam, that's it. Even if you are on strike, don't do anything. But certainly don't upvote spam.
I have seen people claim that flagging+downvoting counts as 2 downvotes, and gets spam off the front page faster. Is that correct? If so, that would go against your (implicit) recommendation not to downvote spam.
@FedericoPoloni, if it moves off the front page the flags might not occur as quickly, slowing the process of removal.
@Buffy Then it depends on if your goal is removing it from the front page as quickly as possible or deleting the question as quickly as possible. I see arguments in favor of both.
Clearly flagging doesn't work, or at least doesn't work fast enough in the current conditions. Plus, people run out of flags (and downvotes).
Right now the situation is farcical. Although enough flags will delete a question, there are so many spam posts and they arrive so fast (they come at the rate of about one every 15seconds now) that it's not possible for a post to accumulate enough flags to close.
Even if the spam poster is banned, another account under a different username is immediately created to keep the wheel moving.
It's indeed farcical, and calls for intervention by staff. It also seems they have things to fix.
No, flagging does work
I think the site has a way to ban people by IP address, actually, which should help if they are awake and aware.
I don't know why, but removal seems to happen more quickly in the past day or so. There may be a bot at work now.
Update
With the moderation strike ending, moderators are back to flagging. If you do see spam on this scale again, spam flagging as much as you can will help posts like these get in front of mods — at least if they're online. (It's too soon for Charcoal to have discussed its own direction, but the outlook is positive.)
Old answer is below. Let's not get to the point where we need it ever again (SE Inc, I mean).
This cannot be solved with just flagging
(But close voting or editing is absolutely useless.)
I took a look at one spammer and then another. Ten posts from the first and fifteen from the second. Since I have 25 flags, this would have used up all my flags without even putting a dent in the mass of it all — remember, each one of those posts needs other spam flaggers, or four total per post with the current configuration. The sheer number of posts is why spam is usually handled by a semi-automated system (which is now on strike) using flags from users who may not even participate otherwise on this site (many of whom are also on strike). Failing that, mods would step in, but, at least on Academia, the strike strikes again.
Desperate times call for "Contact Us"
Without diamond mods, there are only diamond employees. As a moderator (elsewhere), I used the "Community Emergency" option under my site's contact page, which sent an expedited message to the community team. Shortly after this, the spam posts disappeared. While regular users won't have this option, your message sent via the contact form will eventually reach staff. Then they can handle it, and maybe even pass the pressure on upwards so that the strike can end.
Theres a community emergency button? What are the rules for trigguring it
yeah my original idea of editing out contents is entirely inadequate for an attack of this size. I did not expect things would get that bad…
@Starship-OnStrike Only diamond moderators have the "Community Emergency" option. But even just using the regular contact option would be helpful in a situation like this (especially since it happened during business hours).
@Laurel it has started again so please consider using your button.
I had no idea we had a "community emergency" button. Very cool.
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577 | Why do I get a yellow “0 flag” alert on the top bar?
Why do I get a yellow “0 flag” alert on the top bar, on Academia, where I am not a moderator? It links to the “tools” page, where there is nothing for me to do:
Same situation exists on Meta:
It's weird to get an alert for “0 flags”, especially on a site where I am not moderator anyway… And it's stable, it's not a transient issue, it's been that way for a few minutes.
I've seen that one before, intermittently, when one of my own posts had pending suggested edits, and then the circle went down from 1 to 0 after I took care of the suggested edit, but it did remain a little after.
@gerrit eykanal confirmed that there was no flag (on my own posts or any other) on the site at that point in time…
@F'x it happen to me also ... It went away eventually.
Sorry, this was my bug - fixed now.
This might very well be just a glitch in the system—if there are no messages to be moderated, then nothing should be displayed!
However, as someone with over 20k reputation, you have access to all the same tools as moderators do, but perhaps without "diamond" privileges.
I didn't think privileges on Academia.SE went higher than 4000. (and maybe that's true for Betas in general?)
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3403 | Edit/Delete timeout on chat
I was in an awkward position a few weeks ago when I tried to introduce a colleague of mine to Academia Stack Exchange. This colleague has a neuro/muscular disorder that makes typing quite difficult. Occasionally she will hit the wrong key (typically the largest keys like enter and the spacebar), but most of the time she is just slower to type than a fully able-bodied person like myself and, statistically speaking, you the reader.
Whilst introducing her to the site, she prematurely posted a comment on the chat after accidentally hitting enter. When she tried to edit the comment, she typed about 40 words, hit enter, and was told the comment was lost to the abyss because she was too slow. The ability to edit the comment timed-out before she could finish, and the comment she spent 1 minute writing was gone for good. She was then unable to delete her half-written message, also due to the time-out.
I understand the rational behind the time-outs, however I must say that their timeframes are particularly short. Clearly the site recognises the need for quick-edits. Clearly those quick-edits need to be done.. quickly. But the definition of "quickly" is very different for someone like myself, and for someone like my colleague. Perhaps the cool-down period should be extended from what it currently is, or perhaps even better, once someone starts the process of editing their message (which you can only do within a reasonable timeframe), the editing itself can last indefinitely so long as the textinput is being updated once every 30 seconds.
I'm aware that such rules could be "exploited" programatically, however I see the risk-reward ratio being significantly in favour of reward.
This isn't site-specific, so this feature request probably belongs on the main Meta Stack Exchange.
Yes, sorry, this is specifically the chat part of the site. I'll add that to the title then check the link ff524 kindly pointed me to.
@ff524: According to the SE policy (which I disagree with), it’s okay to have this here, but it’s will certainly get better exposure and similar on the main Meta.
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195 | Where can I read more detailed descriptions of the badge requirements?
The descriptions of the badge requirements on the FAQ are a nice start, but I often would like more detail about the specifics. For example, why is it that no one on academia.SE has earned the generalist badge? It turns out, there is fine print saying that each of the top 40 tags on the site must have at least 200 questions (so, for us that will be quite a while). It would be great if all of this fine print was collected on a single page somewhere. Is it?
The answer is at List of all badges with full descriptions over on meta.stackoverflow. I've had a number of questions about the internal workings of academia.SE and particularly badges. I find that almost always the question has already been addressed at Stack Overflow, and a google query with the key word "stackexchange" (rather than "academia") is the way to go.
I'm posting this question and answer here in hopes of saving other users time slowly rediscovering what I slowly discovered.
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169 | What does the "application" tag mean (and what should it mean)?
I noticed that questions labeled with the application tag generally fall into the category of applications for a course of study or fellowship. However, a few (I think two currently) use this tag to mean the application of theory to do something "useful", often leading to a marketable product. My tendency would be to create a tag called application of theory or something similar for the second type. However, I also realize that the term application is ambiguous, so I'd like to slightly rename it to avoid the confusion. One possibility is application process, but that seems only slightly better.
So now, my question. I haven't done much retagging before, is this something I should just do, or are there more guidelines I'm missing? Second, does anyone have better suggestions than application process and application of theory?
Tag wiki is created to mean applications for a course of study or fellowship http://academia.stackexchange.com/tags/application/info
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3256 | A question about a typographical arrangement
Where can I ask a question about arrangement of numbered lists of axioms in a mathematical manuscript?
tex.stackexchange.com? (i think no, because it is not specific to TeX)
academia.stackexchange.com?
writers.stackexchange.com?
other?
What is the thing that you want to know?
If you're asking about how to actually lay things out typographically using LaTeX, then it would be appropriate for TeX.SE.
If you're asking about typical customs in how such things are presented by scientists, then it would be appropriate for Academia.SE.
Academia is not for domain-specific questions about academic subjects. It's for questions about academia itself.
And just because a Stack Exchange looks like it ought to be the closest fit for a question, does not mean that a question belongs there. Most questions don't belong on any Stack Exchange site.
What is your criteria for determining that this is too domain-specific? This site is happy to take some kinds of domain-specific questions.
@jakebeal this site seems happy with domain-specific stuff as long as it's at the maths/computer science/programming end of things. A legacy of the site's origin. And that makes for an unhealthily skewed culture on the site.
What criteria would you propose, then?
For this kind of questions my criterion is: if it's a question of style that does not require extensive technical answers, it's on topic; if, instead, the answer requires the discussion of technical details about the specific subject, then it's off-topic. For me, the OP's question clearly falls in the first category (you don't need math to answer), while, e.g., this question falls in the second.
Of course, the boundaries between the two categories are fuzzy and should discussed case-by-case.
@jakebeal I propose a criterion that domain-specific typography questions are off-topic
@EnergyNumbers I was hoping you'd have a somewhat more general principle describing what causes you to judge something as "too domain-specific." Your comment just now essentially just restates your conclusion. If you can explain your reasoning a bit further, it's possible I might come to agree with you, but without explanation that is quite unlikely.
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410 | Sudden influx of close votes on old questions
There is a sudden (I only noticed it today) influx of “close” votes on questions of the site. I opened my browser this morning, and got this:
I reviewed all of them, and half a day later this:
Most of the questions are old (or very old), and have stayed open for a long time. Many have only one close vote, some have two. Apart from one or two that I believed to be genuinely off-topic, the others were fine. Not very good questions, but decent enough to stay in my opinion… especially so long after they were asked and answered (all of them had answers).
Of course, the above is only my opinion, and others might find that they should be closed. But, the shear number of votes involved makes me suspect some serial-cleaning activity. If so, I think it should be discussed beforehand on Meta (as for deletions), to allow people to discuss such large-scale closings. Another thing that I find weird is that none of these questions had any recent comment indicating why people voted to close.
Why am I posting this? Because I think the person (persons?) who has entered a close-voting spree should post on Meta to start a discussion about such a large-scale project. Also, so that mods and users are aware of this (possibly destructive) situation.
I hope me doing so isn't overstepping boundaries. If you feel so, please comment and I'll try to word my message better.
Unfortunately, this is difficult to police while still in Beta, as anyone can vote to close. That being said, I completely agree.
Not quite anybody; 500 rep is required.
Don't most graduated sites have a lot more 3k-users than Academia has 500rep-users?
That's exactly why I asked this question. I suddenly saw 46 entries for closing a question. I thought that there was some heavy handed moderation activity being underway and I didn't feel very comfortable with it. Thanks for bringing this up.
I believe most of those close votes were mine. I apologize for not responding sooner, but have been traveling and have not had time to formulate a response. I think it is reasonable to describe the situation as serial cleaning. I do not think it is fair to assess my behavior as possibly destructive or heavy handed. As I will describe below, my cleaning approach was principled and I could have discussed my intended behavior on meta or chat before hand, but I chose not to. I think the SX vote-to-close system works well and that not every individual question needs to be discussed before voting to close. My approach to cleaning was as follows:
I sorted the question based on number of votes and started working backwards from the lowest vote total questions. I did not look at any questions less than a month old or with a vote total greater than 1. Given our propensity to up vote and disinclination to down vote, I thought that the number of votes these questions had accumulated over a long period of time made them of questionable quality/fit and worth looking at a little bit. I then read and thought about each question. For question that I thought should be closed, I then looked at existing answers to see if I was missing something. Questions I did not have a strong opinion on I left, others I up voted and many I down voted and voted to close.
I purposefully chose not to post a comment about why I was down voting and voting to close since these questions were very old and I did not think it was useful for them to be bumped to the front page. I figured that bumping them to the reviewer page would be enough for people to make a decision and possibly discuss tricky questions. Some of the question I think can be improved with an edit, and I hope my close votes will bring attention to these and help us improve those questions.
As for being heavy handed or destructive, these questions had little or no support from the community (i.e., down votes, votes to close, and a lack of up votes). I simply added my voice. I was not voting to close question that received strong positive support but that I disagreed with.
So in answer to the question: I think that serial editing and re tagging, where an individual can actually change the content (albeit temporarily), should be discussed on meta/chat. I also think that if someone is targeting a particular class of question (e.g., teaching, software, or big list) for closure, that we should discuss it. I don't think we need to discuss when an individual is voting to close low quality/poor fit questions.
Finally, I don't think F'x is over stepping his bounds and I apologize if my answer seems defensive.
"I purposefully chose not to post a comment [...] since these questions were very old and I did not think it was useful for them to be bumped to the front page." Posting comments doesn't bump questions.
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478 | Bad rendering on iPad mini
See on the right hand side a bug in rendering on the iPad mini's browser...
This and other variations have been posted on Meta.SO several times.
One example: All Stack Exchange sites in a small window causing display problems?
I also posted the same thing you are reported and was told by a diamond that it is a known issue (I deleted the question).
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704 | Merge figures and graphics tags
The tags figures and graphics have the same description on their infotab. Although the tag-info of figures mentions that graphics is a synonym, they are actually not listed as synonyms. So far, I cannot see a real difference between questions tagged with graphics and figures. Therefore, I would suggest to merge the tags figures and graphics.
But I cannot yet suggest tag-synonyms or mergers with my few points.
Related note: please do not flood the front-page of the site with massive retagging of old posts.
Sorry for that, I did not know that all retags would appear as "activity" on the frontpage.
I don't believe retagging is the way to go here. Not only does it flood the front page, but it hides the problem that figures and graphics are synonyms. I also don't have the required reputation. That said, even if I did, tag synonyms are not really being voted on so nothing is would actually change.
Except one case, my retags were adding either figures or graphics tag, were non was present before. (While retagging the exception, I realised this synonymity.)
I merged the two tags, and made them synonyms.
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5391 | Tag for Ph.D. studies pursued concurrently to employment
Some people do a Ph.D. while working (almost) full time in non-academic industry. This usually involves going part-time, and having buy-in from one's employer, and of course the Ph.D. will take longer and usually not be quite as "deep" as a full time Ph.D. I know at least one person who did this; they were extremely bright and very driven.
This (rare) situation generates challenges at the intersection between academia and the workplace, which I would argue are quite on topic at Academia.SE, for instance:
Intellectual property issues stemming from working on similar topics at work and in one's Ph.D. project
Interpersonal issues, e.g., between one's supervisors at work and in academia, possibly complicated by one's work supervisor changing
"Selling" academia-related travel or other time requirements at work
...
Example questions that might benefit from this tag:
Cancelled PhD Study ended my career plans
Part time PhD while working, who owns IP?
Possibly What are the caveats in pursuing a PhD mainly for fun?
Non-CIFRE Industry PhD in France and Are theses done in industry (French CIFRE) a disadvantage in academia?, and other questions about the CIFRE program in France
German doctorate (Phd) in industry; Working in a company or University?
I found these by searching for "industry" in the phd tag and winnowing out everything that was about the relevance of an "academic" Ph.D. for industry.
However, we do not have a tag for this situation, which is definitely more specific than phd. Something like phd-while-working or phd-while-in-industry. (Probably better than phd-while-employed, because many full-time Ph.D. students actually are employed by universities, with contracts stipulating teaching or research assistant work that is sometimes hard to disentangle from the research that aims at the Ph.D.)
Do we want such a tag? (Do we already have one that I missed?)
I am very skeptical of any new tags and have deleted many. Before I would hold fire I'd like to know how many existing questions would benefit from this tag rather than their current ones. I think the question you link is poorly tagged, actually, but haven't thought how it might be improved. We have the quitting tag of course. And the part-time tag. I'd also frown on a three word tag, but that is personal.
Also note that in (parts of) Europe PhD students are normally employed by the university and even in the US, a TA is a kind of employment. So such a tag might be misused or hard to make clear enough.
The time-management and productivity tags might apply.
@Buffy: fair enough. I added some more examples, and did not have to search long, about 20-25% of questions about "industry" in the Ph.D. tag are about this situation. I agree that most Ph.D. students are employed by the university, so we should make the distinction clear in the tag. I honestly don't thing the quitting, part-time, time-management or productivity tags are especially and discriminatively relevant for this situation, though.
Note that a combination of tags can help distinguish a case, often just as well as a specialized tag. And it allows for some variations.
I'll note that I haven't downvoted this since the advice for downvoting doesn't imply disagreement with the proposal, nor does upvoting imply agreement with it. I think the popup advice for this is misleading in general, here and at the main site. Yes, I think it is useful to ask this question. No, I don't think we need such a tag. It is therefore impossible to properly interpret votes on many questions.
The answer comes a bit late, hopefully some people still see and vote:
How about a tag like phd-outside-university, which is a bit more general and includes also PhDs done at non-universtity research institutions like e.g. Fraunhofer in Germany and not just industry. It also includes situations where people do a PhD "on their own", that is self financed and without working in industry (also not that uncommon in places like Germany).
I think there are general differences when doing a PhD at a university and outside, especially when it comes to things like
how much contact there is with other PhD students
the working situation (and related issues like work-life balance)
the networking opportunities
getting funding for publications and conferences
the frequency with wich a PhD candidate meets with their primary supervisor (at the university)
the amount and type of work required by the PhD candidate outside of their PhD work
as well as probably a range of other issues.
so that might be the distinction that makes the creation of a new tag useful.
So: yes, lets create the phd-outside-university tag, I think it is useful.
I think that is a different issue completely. Some people earn a phd for research done outside a university as this suggests. Others do it inside the university, but while employed for other tasks outside the university. These are completely different and confusing/merging them won't be an advantage for tagging. For this one, a combo (two tags) of PhD and Industry seems to suffice.
I don't find the arguments in this answer convincing. The differences between a PhD done on your own, outside work hours, and a well-funded industrial PhD or PhD at a renowned research institution (that is often located next doors to a related university departments anyway) seem more substantial than the differences between your average phd-outside-university and average phd-inside-university. Not to mention that the latter category also has significant in-group variation in all qualities you mention.
I'm going to vote against this proposal. I don't think it is needed or helpful. Some of that is expressed in my comments.
The first example in the question is badly tagged. I haven't tried to fix it.
The second example above is more about intellectual property for which we have a tag, though it isn't included.
The third example doesn't ask about the difficulties of such things but might benefit from the work-life-balance tag.
The fourth example is about funding (again, no tag) and not about difficulties of the degree process per se.
The fifth example is about an opportunity in Germany for specialized research, again not about the difficulties of the process.
I'll note that not every such question is currently optimally tagged, but that is a common problem here.
But I also think that the OP's concerns are more about work-life-balance than anything. This is easier to maintain if you are employed by the university itself, either formally or as a TA or RA, but not fundamentally. Many people enter part-time study to get a degree and we have that tag. Others do part time employment for funding and we also have that tag.
Very few people in the US are free to study with no "work" obligations at all. A "free ride" for doctoral study is now very rare.
We have lots of tags, probably too many. Some new users think that all keywords should be new tags and add them. I generally remove them asap, unless they are the names of specific countries.
Color me opposed. Sorry.
"I also think that the OP's concerns are more about work-life-balance than anything" - do you mean me? Sorry, but what gave you that idea?? I have no issues whatsoever if the community does not believe this tag is useful, but honestly, work-life balance is the tiniest issue people in this situation have to deal with. It seems like my post was not well posed, so I will update it.
@StephanKolassa, sorry if I misread it, but that seems to be the intent in your first sentence(s).
OK, thanks. I removed the first sentence, which was absolutely not intended to convey this message.
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4996 | Closed shopping question (?) has no closure reason and odd explanatory closure text
This question Warwick or Durham University for Mathematics was (presumably) closed as a shopping question. The resulting system generated text however does not say so (only curtly remarks “this question is off-topic”), instead seems to address people with closing privileges, inviting them to edit or migrate the question if possible. It is not helpful to OP.
Is this because I am one of the close voters, and other users see a “shopping question” text? If yes, that’s new, isn’t it - I think I used to see the boiler plate text stating a closure reason?
Note that, per Massimo’s answer below, the question has now been re-closed with the closure reason stated.
Does this answer your question? New audience-specific texts for our custom close reasons
@GoodDeeds: Thanks! It might be related to system changes, but the displayed text (which gives no reason at all) is not part of the new boiler plates, for all I know.
It comes from the privileged-user guidance here: https://academia.meta.stackexchange.com/a/4711/68109 . This is not the same text the OP will see, they see the post-owner guidance text. The general post notice is seen by everyone, which is the "curt" part.
@GoodDeeds: Thanks again! That explains the text. That said, what was missing the most was giving a closure reason to OP. Instead of the new boiler plate for, say, shopping question, it just curtly said “This question is off-topic” (off-topic being a link to a list of all closure reasons).
I see, thanks, so I misunderstood the focus of the question. I have retracted my duplicate close vote.
@GoodDeeds: My question was two-fold (no closure reason/why do I see the text), and you did answer my second question. So thanks again!
It’s probably due to the fact that the votes to close were for different reasons, not only for shopping.
I have now re-closed the question as a shopping one so that the OP gets a clearer message.
Thanks! Correct me here, in the case you suggest, wasn’t in the past the highest voted reason displayed? If that is still the case, does this happen when two (or more) reasons get the same vote count? That said, the old text seemed to indicate that we had a shopping question as one suggestion was to “re-formulate the question as helping the user make a choice instead of asking for a list,” or so.
Oh, yes, that must have been it. The second text suggestion was to migrate it, so we probably had equal votes for “shopping” and “not within the scope.” That should explain what happened, but I’m not fond of the system-imposed resolution (that I realize you here at academia have no power over) resulting in “no real feedback to OP”.
@gnometorule I'm away from my computer and cannot investigate much on what's happened. I hope someone else can add more details; otherwise, I'll check in the next days.
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544 | Home for undergraduate questions- Proposed Undergraduate SE
Given that the consensus here has become "undergraduate questions are off-topic unless relating to graduate admissions", we need to support the proposed Undergraduates.SE so that these questions have a place to go.
Undergraduates SE
The observation that "Undergraduate questions are off-topic here" does not lead to the conclusion that "We need to support the undergraduate SE proposal". This site can stand by itself. If there are enough individuals who are in favor of an Undergraduate SE site, the site will be created. The fact that we get a number of off-topic questions that happen to relate to a current site proposal is really not so relevant to any of us; if we want to support a new site, then we should sign up, if not, then not.
On that note, if you do not intend to support the site, please do not sign up. The last thing a new site needs is a community of uninvested invdividuals.
~~~
For what it's worth, I'm in favor of the idea of an Undergraduate site, but I do not think we should support it simply because lots of questions that are off-topic here would fit there. The point of the site is not to be a repository for our unwanted questions.
I was kind of aiming for the "it would be nice that they have somewhere to go so that we don't have all of these off-topic questions to begin with"
@BenNorris - It would be nice, but only if that site was active and growing. Having a site where questions go to die is arguably worse than not having a site at all. I stand by my comment; only support if you intend on being an active member.
@eykanal I am not sure what "Follow it" really means in Area 51 terms. The FAQ states 'if you are interested in a proposed site, click the "Follow It!" link'. I think of "interested" and willing to "support" as being two very different things.
I think we need to be careful about what is meant by "we". I think the academia.se community would be well served that when closing off-topic undergrad questions that we mention the undergraduates.se proposal. I think we should do this whether or not we intend to follow/support the undergraduates.se proposal/community.
I for one will not be following or contributing to the undergraduates.se community, but I see no problem steering questions people that way.
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4680 | I need help adapting my academic workflow to the COVID-19/coronavirus crisis – where do I start?
The current COVID-19 crisis impacts academia in several ways: teaching and exams are moved online, conferences are cancelled, travel is restricted, etc.
If you are here because of this, here is a brief introduction to our site and resources that may help you.
Finding existing questions
We have the tag covid-19 for questions specific about the Corona crisis, but older questions about online-learning and similar may apply here as well. We maintain collections of questions and external resources sorted by topic:
remote teaching, learning, and exams
conferences
other
New questions
If you have a question that is not covered by this, please ask it.
Please ensure that your question is focused and clearly states which information you need.
Be aware that the following questions are not suited for our site:
Scientific questions on immunology and epidemiology can be asked on Medical Sciences or Biology.
General travelling questions can be asked on Travel or Expatriates.
Math Educators SE and Computer-Science Educators may help you with questions that are specific to teaching in those fields or that are about teaching outside of academia (e.g., at high schools).
Questions on the regulations of individual institutions can only be answered by those institutions and may be quickly outdated in light of the crisis. Please see this FAQ for more information.
Questions whose answers will be mostly based on speculation about upcoming political and administrative decisions and the further development of the crisis are not suited for this site (and you won’t get good answers anywhere).
Chatroom
We also have a chatroom for online learning and our general chatroom where you may find informal help.
However, to talk there, you need 20 reputation on the site first.
Contribute
If you can, please contribute, in particular by curating the lists of relevant questions.
If you find any question that should be referenced here but isn’t, please add it.
You can also link relevant resources on other Stack Exchange sites or the Internet in general, but please mark them by stating where they point.
If you can provide better or complementary answers to some of the relevant questions, this is also very welcome.
You can propose other things we can do as a community here.
Is it worth posting this to meta.SE as well??
@ScottSeidman: I don’t think it will get much visibility there, in particular not by those who need it. Of course, it may also be useful to have similar collections on other sites like [travel.se], [health.se], …
Thanks for doing this. Lots of effort. Appreciated.
Thank you so much! Next time my colleagues are complaining about our students getting too much help on math.SE, I will point out that when you really need fast answers, the SE sites are where to go.
Remote teaching, studying, and exams
General and Other
Tips for transition to online classrooms given university shutdowns in response to COVID-19
How to get students to use the course forum?
What makes an online course a valuable learning experience for a student?
How much work is preparing a MOOC-ish course
How should faculty implement STEM classes that require hands-on lab experience in online learning platforms given COVID-19 pandemic?
How shall we teach math online? (Math Educators SE)
Tools for running classes remotely (Computer-Science Educators SE)
Please do a bad job of putting your courses online (blog post about time investment and differences between emergency online teaching and regular one; somewhat US-specific)
Advice to those about to teach online because of the corona-virus (Tony Bates)
Online Teaching with the most basic of tools – email (Homonym)
So You Want to Temporarily Teach Online (Inside Higher Ed)
What Teachers in China Have Learned in the Past Month (Edutopia)
Other Collections (all external)
Educause
Distance Design Education (blog dedicated to the eponymous topic, but with broader applicability)
Exams, Exercises, and other Evaluation
What methods can be used in online exams to genuinely test the students' knowledge and capabilities?
How to detect cheating when students take online quizzes or exams from home?
Can online recording of work area at home be made a mandatory criterion for passing exams midway through a course?
Creating a secure test environment for a programming lab practical
YouTube video assignments?
Online tool for receiving student files
How is a Coursera exam typically conducted?
Are online exam proctoring services efficient and trustworthy?
Should a professor give students a take-home exam when the answers might be available online?
Other students can easily cheat on a test and the grading system is relative – should I cheat and what else can I do?
How to prevent cheating on take-home exams
Fellow student asked question from take-home exam on Stack Exchange
How to design online tests and prevent cheating? (Computer-Science Educators SE)
What evaluation methods can be used that don't involve testing but are adaptable to online courses (Computer-Science Educators SE)
Lectures and interactions
Alternatives to big-name proprietary remote-lecturing tools
Software to live-stream presentations
How do you record your lectures?
How to create PDF of slides with audio?
Etiquette or useful guidelines while making video lectures
How important is seeing the face of the instructor?
Is there any system that enables online office hours?
How much effort does it take to record video courses?
Using Discord to support online teaching
My professor is not teaching his online course himself, but uses publicly available videos instead. Is this appropriate?
Online Whiteboard Application with Simple Latex Support (Math Educators SE)
Course Design and Material
Online vs hard copy, which texts are students more likely to read?
Are there any legal issues in having someone's book as the basis and as a textbook for an online course?
Digital media rights for online courses (US)
Can you describe a required online science course that used discussion well?
How to read a textbook for distance learning coursework - do I need to work on fact recall, or is understanding enough?
Humour
Michael Bruening
– I will survive (teaching online) (YouTube)
Useful tips here too
And also here.
@luchonacho: Thinking about it, I see no reason why we should not also collect external resources. Feel free to edit them into the answer.
@luchonacho: On a second thought, I would not include those links. The first is very specific to that university’s systems; the second one is paywalled.
Other questions and resources pertaining to the COVID-19 crisis
Publications
In this time of crisis, would the journals Nature and Science prioritize papers about COVID-19?
Has the rate of papers uploaded to arXiv changed due to Covid-19?
How does the COVID-19 crisis affect durations of peer review and editorial handling?
Acknowledging local government for quarantine measures
Remote collaborations, job interviews, etc.
What are useful tips and tricks for collaborating remotely?
How could one prepare for a telecon interview for a government lab?
Advice/guidance when interviewing for a faculty or postdoc job via Skype or phone?
What kind of video conference software do academics use?
How to present a paper via skype?
Evaluation criteria for 3-minute teaching demonstration over Skype?
Coronavirus, school lockdown and future uncertainty
Asking for status of faculty position search during coronavirus pandemic
How can I best adapt my seminar slides for a virtual presentation?
A few simple tips for better online meetings (COVID-19 edition) (MIT Media Lab)
Employment and Applications
Postdoc position "on hold" due to covid-19
academic job offers during Coronavirus
Who might lose a job in academia due to covid19?
Can I still ask my prospective advisor (guide) for a confirmation letter in the middle of Covid-19
Can PhD programs rescind their PhD offers from this cycle due to COVID-19?
Working from home or without direct contact
Working from home tips from our experienced remote employees (Stack Overflow Blog)
Conferences
How to deal with the COVID-19 outbreak while organizing a conference?
Can I put an invited talk on my CV if the conference was canceled?
| Stack Exchange | 2025-03-21T12:54:48.851228 | 2020-03-12T14:10:32 | {
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396 | Does not having an answer to a question make the question(s) any less valid?
I see a trend among some members to shoot down questions they presumably not have an straight-out answer for. I don't think this makes much sense. Nobody has answers to all thinkable questions, besides we don't all think (and express our thoughts) alike. Shooting down questions that you might not have an answer for prevents others who might actually have an answer (especially if the users "shooting-down" are high-rep users).
I am a supporter of productive critique instead of destructive attitude and can imagine the above mentioned attitude hurting this site in the future.
Am I the only person who feels this way?
Would you mind adding some examples to your question? What you describe doesn't sound familiar to me.
Questions that are closed usually have run afoul of the FAQ's for the board. It's not a sign that there isn't a good question to be asked—it's an acknowledgment that there are problems with the question as it is currently being asked. Not having anything to contribute is not a reason to close a question.
I think that you might be misinterpreting: the criterion for closure is not “they do not have an answer”, but rather “cannot receive good, objective, fact-based answers”:
not constructive
As it currently stands, this question is not a good fit for our Q&A format. We expect answers to be supported by facts, references, or specific expertise, but this question will likely solicit debate, arguments, polling, or extended discussion. If you feel that this question can be improved and possibly reopened, see the FAQ for guidance
not a real question
It's difficult to tell what is being asked here. This question is ambiguous, vague, incomplete, overly broad, or rhetorical and cannot be reasonably answered in its current form. For help clarifying this question so that it can be reopened, see the FAQ.
There are many questions that get no immediate answer, and it's fine. Some of mine have been in that category, taking a month or more to get an answer. That's fine, unless several users (5) think that it simply will not get such an answer: not because they don't know, or because they don't think someone knows, but because the question is inherently impossible to answer in the “Stack Exchange” Q&A style.
| Stack Exchange | 2025-03-21T12:54:48.851848 | 2013-02-05T13:44:29 | {
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914 | Votes/answers/views and question title end up in two separate rows
I think it's a bit unpleasant, lots of wasted space... is it a bug or a feature?
Using Chrome on OSX Mavericks, btw.
EDIT: I double checked with Safari and FF, it looks ok. Also Chrome running on Mint 14 looks fine as well. The problem seems to be specific to Chrome on OSX :s
This bug happened on Chrome at 110% zoom, but that was fixed very recently. Do you use an unusual zoom level even above 110%?
This happened to me when I wasn't using the default rendering size. In Chrome, make sure that there isn't the little magnifying glass in the URL bar suggesting that you're not viewing at the default zoom level.
This definitely appears to be a bug. I can't reproduce it on either Chrome or Firefox under Mavericks. I would first check, though, if you have a plug-in that's influencing this behavior.
dont use any extensions beyond Ad-blocker Plus
Check that, maybe? As I said, this isn't something I'm seeing in Chrome. Does this persist as you resize the window?
Disabling ABP does not help, also I have ABP on my linux machine as well, which looks OK.
| Stack Exchange | 2025-03-21T12:54:48.852040 | 2014-04-24T12:29:10 | {
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3711 | Code being displayed above question listing
When I visit Academia.SE, there is some code being displayed above the question listing:
docsHero.RenderPartial(Html); storyHero.RenderPartial(Html);
macOS 10.12.3, Chrome 56.0.2924.87 (64-bit)
I cannot reproduce this. Does this problem persist on a reload?
According to a comment on a main Meta.SE bug report, it's been fixed:
Rolled back to the previous build, then double, triple and quadruple checking the view. Still looking at what happened, but basically, it's a banner that isn't always shown, so I didn't see it and it doesn't always show for everyone. Sorry about that! – Michael Stum♦ 1 hour ago
Properly fixed it and rolled out the latest build again. – Michael Stum♦ 53 mins ago
| Stack Exchange | 2025-03-21T12:54:48.852164 | 2017-04-06T18:29:38 | {
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4332 | Avoiding conflicts with supervisors
Quite a few questions at Academia are about conflicts with Supervisors, both for students and for post-docs. A question there about how to avoid such conflicts from arising, starting on the first day, would likely be closed for a variety of reasons - broad, opinions, shopping, etc.
Is this a suitable place to discuss that and preserve any advice given? The chatroom is too ephemeral for it, I think. But quite a few new students could benefit from advice from other academics.
How can you build a strong and positive relationship with your supervisor from the first days, even if he/she is aloof or judgmental?
NOTE: The question has now been asked on the main site.
I suggest the question title and contents should be rephrased to "Dealing with Conflicts with Supervisors". Conflicts are sure to take place in any long-lasting relationship, and the phrasing "avoiding conflicts" suggests students and/or postdocs are responsible for initiating them and therefore ought to stop from doing it.
@Scientist Preventing and avoiding conflicts are useful, though. But maybe the frame needs to be changed to "between Supervisors and Supervisees" to make it clear everyone is responsible for conflict handling and avoidance.
@aeismail Sound also like a good alternative.
The problem is asymmetric, of course. I'm more interested in what a student could do so as not to later wind up feeling trapped. There is one user on the main site who seems to feel she is deeply hated by her supervisor. I'm not assessing fault, but it would be good to get advice about how the student can make such situations not develop in the first part.
I don't disagree that some supervisors should behave better, but the student can't control that. They can only control their own actions.
So a companion question would be about how supervisors can "do the right thing." But I don't think it is the same question.
"problem is asymmetric" & "They can only control their own actions" -- I believe there are also supervisors seeking peers' advice in this community, and that some students and postdocs would wish to add answers & comments. If you want supervisors only to contribute unilaterally, I'd suggest specifying that and emphasising on this focus.
Actually, I think anyone can comment. Students can suggest things that supervisors might/should have done. Supervisors can suggest things students should do (like scheduling an early meeting, as a simple example).
Likewise students who had a good or bad result from some actions might share that with fellow students (and their advisors). Etc.
Related: https://academia.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/975/dont-walk-dont-run-either?rq=1
I think sometimes students make foolish decisions about how they choose their supervisors. They join labs only because they are accepted or because of the reputation of an institution. They join labs without seriously considering other options, without interviewing in person, without meeting their PI, without having outside support systems. Admissions systems in some fields and in some countries make it worse, and abusive people can be skilled at hiding it, but the advice I always give prospective students is that advisor choice is the most important grad school decision.
@BryanKrause, yes, that is exactly the kind of advice I'd like to make available generally. I think a lot of new grad students are unaware of the potential traps.
Agreed. The approach I favor for these sorts of situations (common theme in questions that often have to be closed) is that we create a community wiki question and answer, like here: https://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/38237/how-does-the-admissions-process-work-for-ph-d-programs-in-the-us-particularly The question as posted would be closed if it was made by a user, but a Q&A curated from the community in meta is appropriate. Future questions that are answered by that post can either be closed as duplicate rather than for other reasons, or at least mentioned in comments.
I've posted a proposed question as an answer here. Please help improve it and advise on the suitability for the site itself.
Just a note on wording: "avoiding conflicts" is a little too close to conflict avoidance, which has some negative aspects to it. "Preventing conflicts", or "avoiding problems" (as you use in the suggested question text) gets the point across without this baggage.
@Anyon, noted. I'll work on the wording.
Just for the record. "There is one user on the main site who seems to feel she is deeply hated by her supervisor." -- not sure if we're referring to the same student, but in my experience a frequent situation where students & postdocs came to SE Academia ask for help is when they feel cheated/used/abused by an advisor (for students) or supervisor (for postdocs). This is very different from directed feelings, such as hatred, as the advisor couldn't care less about the student as a person. I don't think in such situation there is any way of avoiding a conflict, but just dealing with it.
I've added a link to the question on the main site. Usually meta questions about proposed canonical questions are not considered "moot" but kept as a record of the discussion.
The following is a proposal for a community wiki question at Academia. Feel free to edit it. It focuses on student actions. A companion question might be formulated for advisors to get advice.
I don't actually know how to make it CW on the site.
Title suggestion: Building a healthy relationship with your supervisor
Some graduate students and post-docs have reported serious problems with their advisors and supervisors. Some of the problems are severe enough to be career ending. Not all problems can be avoided but it is possible that some can be if the student or post-doc takes some actions in their first days of the new position. The goal is to build a solid and positive relationship with the advisor from the beginning so that small problems later don't escalate.
What can a student or post-doc do, starting in their first days and weeks, to help assure a strong and positive relationship with a supervisor?
There is no assumption here that it is all up to the student, but what can a person do in a new environment to maximize their chances of having a good and lasting relationship?
likely tags: advisors, graduate-study
I appreciate this initiative and will contribute when I get more time ! I am just afraid beginners in SE Academia don't look into the Beta discussions, but perhaps I am wrong.
@Scientist, the intent is to post it as a question on the main site.
Perhaps it's worthwhile not just to focus only on the first days and weeks, but also on what to do continuously? I say that because I'm pretty sure that "clear and ongoing communication" is a big piece of the puzzle here, but I'm somewhat agnostic as to whether it's enough if it's addressed in the answers.
Perhaps the question is too broad, attracting rather obvious answers, e.g. ensuring open communication, meeting expectations, dressing and behaving properly according to local standards, etc. This all depends on specific context and strongly culturally biased. I think early conflicts take place exactly when one part is clearly not meeting the obvious. Perhaps a more productive phrasing would be around "What are the most common sources of conflict with academic supervisors, and how to avoid escalating them"?
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1777 | Appropriateness of certain behaviors on this site?
What are this community's standards concerning the following behavior?
I posted a question asking what would be a good journal to which to submit a paper arguing in favor or a certain proposition. I didn't try to argue for that proposition in the question; that would be off topic and would take far to long.
Next time I posted a question on a different topic, a person who disagreed with the opinion that had been mentioned but not defended in my earlier question posted several comments in which he called the proposed, and in fact not yet written, paper a "rant", and "ranting". This about a paper he has not read, since it has not yet been written.
As far as I could tell, he made these comments only because he objected to something about an earlier question on a different topic. I told him I would not "stalk and harass" him like that. I did not report his behavior to the moderators at that time.
Then I got a message from the moderators saying someone, whom they did not identify, had complained that I was "stalking and harassing" him, using my words, not quite verbatim. Naturally this gave rise to a suspicion about who it was. The moderators suspended me for seven days. One lesson is the person more inclined to report things to the moderators does so first, and whoever does so first wins. It's all about timing. The moderators are anonymous and it is not possible to contact them except by flagging a posting (and you can't flag comments) and they cut you off from being able to reply to them when they inform you of their decision.
When the suspension ended I did flag a posting from the person who stalked and harassed me, explaining that my concern was not about that particular posting but about the behavior of the poster. After two days I've heard nothing. So it seems it is about who goes to the moderators first.
Are the behaviors described in the bullet points above considered appropriate by the participants in academia.stackexchange.com or by its moderators?
PS: I am told in an answer below that I omitted many relevant details. But I still don't know the nature of the complaint about me, and I am left to guess. I was explicitly told that the nature of the complaint and the identity of the complainant would be kept from me.
@santiago : I can't say it had occurred to me that question-and-answer sites are not forums.
@santiago : Having about four years of experience posting daily to math.stackexchange.com, I am well aware that it is about getting answers and is not a discussion forum. What I meant was that it had not occurred to me that the word "forum" would be construed as excluding such sites.
What I do not understand is are you asking (1) why you were suspended (2) why another user was not suspended, or (3) something else entirely?
@MichaelHardy For anyone familiar with them, internet forums are commonly understood to be a very specific type of site. Stackexchange sites are not like them at all, and have very different traditions, etiquette, and expectations.
Just a comment: you can flag comments. Mouse over the left of comments, where votes appear - you'll be able to click a little flag with the mouseover text "Flag this comment for serious problems or moderator attention."
@RogerFan : Maybe so, but at the time I used that word it hadn't occurred to me that anyone would construe "forum" as excluding question-and-answer sites.
@MichaelHardy I'm just explaining the disconnect. santiago was using a definition of the word that you were apparently unaware of, but which is how it is usually understood in this context. That definition, which implies a certain form of threaded message board, certainly does not match stackexchange sites.
Ok so you picked up a stalker who strongly disagreed with your earlier question. It would have helped to have linked to both posts. The first one was Where to submit an article exposing widespread fraud in academia?. And also in http://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/12638/finding-institutions-that-attract-students-who-want-to-learn . 'Academic fraud' has a precise- well-defined meaning and not just 'bad didatics/pedagogy/spoonfeeding algorithms to students'. ...
... It's not whatever you want it to mean. I'm not condoning whatever the other person did in retaliation, but if you try to unilaterally redefine universally-understood terms and resist all objections to that, then that will cause annoyance. Certainly they should not have followed you around posting obnoxious comments, and you can and should flag each such comment, promptly (don't mention the downvotes though). But part of this goes back to your earlier posts on 'exposing widespread academic fraud [in teaching calculus]'. You really need to tone those accusations down bigtime.
Looking back at the discussion on those two posts, I suggest you rephrase in terms of e.g. 'How specifically can we improve student engagement/ tap into students' curiosity/creativity to go beyond just getting a grade, in teaching calculus?' That's a lot more engaging for SO users to constructively address, not an accusation and not a rant.
Then the third reincarnation was Identifying students' purposes and institutions' purposes. You have to phrase things as a bona-fide question soliciting constructive answers, not "I am offended by the practice of making it a personal policy to treat learning the material ONLY as a price paid to get a grade to put on one's resume, rather than as the thing they're there for", which honestly is a rant. Also, seriously rephrase it without so many instances of 'I... me... my'
@smci : I'm glad you and I agree that academic fraud is not just bad didatics/pedagogy/spoonfeeding algorithms to students.
@smci : How would you know whether I need to tone down the accusation of widespread fraud when the paper making my case fot that is still a work in progress and you haven't seen it? I didn't come here to make that accusation and support it, but only to ask where would be a good place to publish a paper doing so.
Really, you have to stop posting repeated rants on the exact same theme. That only attracts stalkers/griefers/flamers.
@smci : OK, from now on I'll only say that we should have reverence for the status quo. ${}\qquad{}$
Michael: you know the adage "How to disagree without being disagreeable?" It's especially important in academia, a land of fragile egos and big-fish-in-small-pond. Right now you're not persuading anyone to your point of view, just getting frustrated. This is sad because you're obviously conscientious and passionate about teaching. But you're alienating almost everyone with the way you're expressing yourself. I tried to look into your exchanges and be helpful, but to use your phrase, I am offended by your response. What rational incentive do I have to continue discussing?
@smci : Could we note that I have never posted anything on stackexchange in which I attempted to argue the case that I said would be argued in the proposed paper? How can you object to "repeated rants" that I have never once posted?
Your post is leaving out many, many relevant details of the actual story as it occurred, so much so that the case you state is a purely hypothetical situation.
As such, in response to the hypothetical question, no, that would not be an appropriate moderator action. Suspension is a fairly severe punishment, only used after a written warning (or rarely when the initial offense is particularly severe). Also, there's no such thing as a "who reported something first" concept; I'm not sure how that would ever actually play out in practice, but each flag is judged on it's own merit.
Additionally, you stated above that "moderators are anonymous and unable to be contacted." To address those two points:
We are not anonymous; we're right here. Regarding who performed a particular action, we try as much as possible to discuss amongst ourselves when issues come up, and actions taken by one are fully backed by the rest of the group. You don't need to worry that what one person did cannot be defended or addressed by another. Even more so, in many cases, we frequently do respond to specific instances of moderator action (see here and here for two examples).
We are very easily able to be contacted; you just did so! Posting to Meta is the correct venue, and as you can see by simply browsing questions, we post here a lot.
Edit to add:
After I posted I remembered... almost every mod message ends with the name of the moderator who originated it. I just checked, and this case was no exception. You were aware of who contacted you, as it was stated explicitly on the email you received.
How do you know there's no such thing as "who reported something first"? You'd have to know how you would have reacted had the situation played out differently, when you don't know what the differences would have been. What if I had contacted the moderators first, and said.... what? You don't know. But you are indeed anonymous, or, if you prefer, pseudonymous. After you blocked me from contacting you through the usual channels, I looked at the very list of moderators to which you direct me, and found no way to find out their names, except yours, and you've thoroughly hidden your......
.... contact information from Google. You say I left out many many relevant details, but how would I know which details might be relevant when you deliberately avoided specificity about the nature of the complaint and said nothing at all about the identity of the complainant? It was in fact not until several days after our last communication that I even guessed who it was, and as of this writing it's still only a guess.
@MichaelHardy - Not sure what you're talking about. My profile page lists my email address, my linkedin profile, and my personal homepage/blog. Googling eykanal brings up (way too much) information about me. Regarding the "first reporting" issue, I can't think of anything else to say past what's written above.
OK, there are many details you consider relevant that I did not include because you kept them secret from me. If you were to tell me what they are, I could consider them. But the facts I report in my two bullet points are facts.
An additional point: all the "actors" in this situation—not just yourself—were told to drop the matter and leave each other alone. You were not "singled out" in that respect.
@eykanal Judging by some things that I've seen, if I were a mod I would do everything in my power to keep my personal contact information hidden. Just because you moderate a site like this doesn't mean that you have to open yourself up to harassment outside of the site.
@RogerFan - Your sentiment is entirely appreciated, but that's why the good Lord created the "delete" key. Thus far, the majority of interactions I've had as a result of that info being public have been positive.
@RogerFan : You neglect the fact that SE does not generally provide a way to contact moderators through SE. Sometimes it is allowed and sometimes it is not. If we are to believe the pseudonymous moderators called "StrongBad", the moderators don't even know that sometimes it is not allowed. I had thought that this was simply cowardice and dishonesty on the part of the moderators, but it appears that SE has kept them in the dark about it. Also, one of the moderators has said that SE employees do not forward things to moderators, but in fact SE employees had already told me....
....that they do forward such things, and they encouraged me to send them things to be forwarded when during times when the moderators shut down my ability to contact them directly.
@MichaelHardy SE provides many, many ways of contacting the moderators (flags, chat, meta, comments, etc.). Maybe putting some limits on contacting them is how SE protects their mods from harassment from confrontational users. Maybe they do forward things, but they filter the messages and don't forward ones that aren't worth forwarding.
I see a Stack Exchange participant who perceives unfair treatment, and is wondering if things are working differently in practice from how things are supposed to work. Also, this participant is confused about some moderator actions.
I have a suggestion for you, @MichaelHardy. If you haven't yet tried this, hit the "contact us" button in the footer. Write as calm a letter as you can (mainly so you don't upset yourself further), and include links and quotes so that someone who is just coming into the story can follow what you're saying. You can include specific questions about things you haven't understood, and you can include specific complaints and suggestions.
I am a pretty recent arrival at SE, so I can't guarantee that this will be helpful, but I do think it's worth a try.
By the way, please do experiment with flagging comments. Here is a page that talks about comment flags: How does comment voting and flagging work?
I am a little confused about what that page says about downvoting comments. Maybe that part is obsolete. But what it says about flagging comments matches my experience.
I think this is excellent advice. That said, the SE team is pretty active and watches out for these types of issues involving users with high rep at different sties. Myself and the other mods also try and make sure we keep the SE team informed about issues.
There is a lot going on in this question and I will attempt to tackle it, but if I miss something, let me know.
Then I got a message from the moderators saying someone, whom they did not identify, had complained that I was "stalking and harassing" him, using my words, not quite verbatim. Naturally this gave rise to a suspicion about who it was. The moderators suspended me for seven days.
To be fair you got a message saying that there were complaints about users harassing each other. You were told that we were contacting everyone involved and telling everyone to stop it and that we were not taking any further action. You then took what the mods decided was a combative and harassing response, and it was at that point we suspended you for 7 days.
The moderators are anonymous and it is not possible to contact them except by flagging a posting (and you can't flag comments) and they cut you off from being able to reply to them when they inform you of their decision.
I am not sure what you mean by anonymous. We are listed here https://academia.stackexchange.com/users?tab=moderators, but obviously I am not the real Strongbad. We watch meta and chat, so there are ways to contact us publicly. We also have a tool to contact users privately, and once contacted, you can reply privately. The ability to reply may expire at some point, I do not know. I am pretty sure you can flag comments.
When the suspension ended I did flag a posting from the person who stalked and harassed me, explaining that my concern was not about that particular posting but about the behavior of the poster. After two days I've heard nothing. So it seems it is about who goes to the moderators first.
We saw the flag, discussed it amongst ourselves and the SE employees. We decided that it would be best if an SE employee handled the issue. I believe when the flag was cleared, you received a message saying essentially "give us some time". The SE employees are busy, but I am sure they will get to the issue.
Are the behaviors described in the bullet points above considered appropriate by the participants in academia.stackexchange.com or by its moderators?
We are left to guess which question and comments you are referring to. You did raise a couple of flags saying you felt bullied, but they did not point out specific comments and did refer to the multiple down votes you received. Looking more carefully at the comments, some of them are less than nice and probably should be deleted. That said, no one specifically flagged the comments as rude. I am leaving them for now to aid the conversation, but if you flag them in a few days as rude, I will delete them. That said, the comments that I see are not over the top and while we discourage that type of behaviour, I do not think it is bad enough to require moderator intervention.
"You then took what the mods decided was a combative and harassing response" Did I? I asked for specificity about the complaints and I was told that was "combative". "We also have a tool to contact users privately, and once contacted, you can reply privately." That last statement, "you can reply privately" is absolutely false. The truth is, I can reply privately if the moderators have decided in advance to allow it, but not if they haven't. Check the facts! "I am not sure what you mean by anonymous. We are listed here" Here is the fact of the matter: Only pseudonyms are listed.
"I believe when the flag was cleared, you received a message saying essentially 'give us some time'." I received no such message. When and how was it sent, and to what address?
@MichaelHardy regarding the flag, can you see this. http://academia.stackexchange.com/users/flag-summary/7229? The response to your flag was "helpful - The SE team doesn't forward private contact to moderators, please give them a day or so to respond." I assume they will respond to your email on file, or possibly the account you contacted them from.
@MichaelHardy as for replying privately, I am not sure what you mean. You have been replying to our mod messages.
This is the first I've seen of that item. You say the SE team doesn't forward private contact to moderators. But the SE team explicitly told me that they do forward such things.
I have replied when I was allowed to reply. There was at least one occasion when I was not allowed to reply, and I am surprised to find that you are not aware of that.
@MichaelHardy I was elected a mod based on my pseudonym. I am not sure why knowing who I am in the real world matters. My preferred way of being contacted for SE related stuff is meta, chat, comments, and flags. Is that not enough?
Correction: there were at least two occasions when I was not allowed to reply.
@MichaelHardy can we do this in chat?
It is not enough on those occasions when I am not allowed to use those methods to contact you.
You wrote "The SE team doesn't forward private contact to moderators" after the SE team told me they do forward such items. Should I conclude that they never forwarded it to you, after they told me that they would?
You do realize, I hope, that you are ... now ... exhibiting a combative and harassing behavior?
"It is not enough on those occasions when I am not allowed to use those methods to contact you." This one almost made me lose it.
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3959 | My "Then fix it dear Henry"-type answer get massively upvoted
Sometimes I read questions here on the site which require thought, and empathy, and are helped much by varigated experience. And if I have an answer for those, I'm glad to get some upvotes (and I often do).
But quite a few questions on the site really seem to me like "There's a hole in the bucket, dear Liza"-type questions. And if I provide a "Then fix it, dear Henry" answer, occasionally those get massively upvoted, as if I've found a cure for cancer.
Here's a recent example:
Q: Professor is upset about student comments about her lectures. What should I do?
A: You're not even in the same university, so do nothing.
I think it's ridiculous this gets over 60 upvotes within a couple of days while, say, this answer or this one have barely a single upvote.
Am I wrong to perceive this as anomalous, or undesirable?
Edit: Trivial answers win again... reputation for nothing, badges for free.
You're seeing the effect of the "Hot Network Questions" sidebar.
It seems to me if you're worried about having provided bad information that seems popular, two options are to edit the information to make it good, or to delete it entirely so it reduces the amount of bad information on the Stack. Another way to look at it is that maybe the collective thinking is actually smarter than your own thinking, and you're wrong about how bad your answer is. On that note, imagine my surprise when I actually went to look at the answer in question and found out that I have upvoted your answer. Are you saying I was wrong to do that?
I think that's actually an excellent answer. Learning to sympathize with other people's problems without always trying to fix or help them fix their problems is a very important and valuable life skill. I got into my 30s before I was told that when people talk about their troubles, it doesn't mean they are asking for help. That was a big surprise to me and I still struggle with empathizing over fixing. Also, 60 votes can seem like a lot, but in the grand scheme of Stack Exchange and even on just Academia, it's not huge. There's an active Q&A now with 250+ votes.
@ToddWilcox: So, different ideas of what's a trivial answer. But, you know, in hindsight, I lifted the answer straight out of the Kobayashi Maru scenario - Sulu's strategy.
@ToddWilcox It's an interesting one - I'd say this was a good answer to a question that, as written, is a better fit to interpersonal.SE. In my opinion the question needs editing to make it more about academia and less about the interpersonal relationships of academics. But I guess a good answer to a bad (or at least inappropriate) question still deserves an upvote!
I see that Heinrich and Liesl have switched roles in the decades since I heard that song as a child. It seems to be an improvement over the old version, which had "Lieber Heinrich" and "Dumme Liesl", but in the old version Heinrich ended up looking "dumm" because all his trivial suggestions don't work. In the new version, does Liesl end up looking dumm?
@AndreasBlass Ja, aber ich denke dass es ist only die englische Version. ("Yes, but I think that it is only the English version" with English substituted for unknown German words. I tried.)
There are two preconditions for the upvote: first, someone read the question and your answer (the number of people who do that is completely outside your control). Secondly, they liked the answer. They probably didn't think very deeply about it; it's just a "hear, hear", or "well said" reaction. In this case I suspect they thought the OP was making a fuss about nothing and that you had found an elegant way of saying so.
I think you're confusing common sense for superficiality ;-)
@MassimoOrtolano: I was talking about cases where these coincide. Next we'll have questions like "I can't find my advisor, where could he be?" And we could answer "Have you tried his office?" And "Email him to ask where he is" and get a ton of votes too.
It seems like this is common. In the SE system, the questions that get the most views (and hence upvotes) are the clickbait ones: those that end up in the hot network questions list, and/or those that tend to attract strong, polarized opinions (for instance, those about sexism, just to cite a recent example).
In other SE sites this effect is even more pronounced. In Mathoverflow, for instance, the most popular questions are superficial questions on recreational math games, or "soft questions" on writing papers, or "big list of all examples of ". A genius answer on a deep, technical topic will typically get you ten votes or fewer. In Physics.se, an enlightened discussion on the fine points of quantum field theory will attract much less attention than a simple explanation on "why does a feather fall slower than a ball".
I find that this is true also with academic papers: my most cited papers are not the ones I am most proud of --- and every time I speak about this fact with a colleague they tell me that it's the same for them.
It's just life, in my view. The most popular movies or songs are not the favorite ones by critics. The politicians that get the most votes are not the most suited persons to run a country. And we could go on listing examples forever.
I don't think there is an easy way to fix this phenomenon. The only ideas that spring to my mind are a more nuanced rating system (bad-meh-good-genius), or a "pagerank-like" voting system (the votes of "experts" on a given topic count more). Both ideas would change SE radically, though.
Indeed, this has been my experience across the board, including doing technical work in industry. People generally only read/share/laud work that they understand, so accessibility is a key factor in acclaim.
+1 I've had a saying for some time: "Your best stuff will go almost totally ignored".
Q: Is life fair; more specifically, does the work I do which I highly value get the same recognition as a quick one-off that happened to go viral?
A: Nope. cf. Charles Dodgson
+1 for the name-dropping. He did actually get some recognition for his real work. Moreover, he got paid to do it...
I'm pretty sure that the recognition differential was pretty similar to what you're describing, though. It is hard to doubt that he worked much harder to produce a work such as "The Formulae of Plane Trigonometry" and his other mathematical work, but their recognition is close to zero compared to Alice's Adventures in Wonderland which has never been out of print.
You are being a bit superficial when you describe your example answer. It was, IMO, more constructive and helpful than the somewhat derisory "then fix it dear Henry" would suggest.
So I think you earned the points fair and square.
And in any case, sometimes people need to get a straight and simple answer like that and the votes are, I suspect, for you being the one who phrased it best.
Even the OP in that case accepted the answer.
So, somewhat in the same vein as "well fix it dear Henry", drop the guilt trip and accept the points as a mark of respect for your common sense from the OP and your fellow users.
I think it's ridiculous this gets over 60 upvotes within a couple of days
One of the examples you gave of a post you seem to think got few votes but perhaps deserved more (remember that's a decision for other people to make, not you !), was made 2 days after the higher voted accepted answer. I think perhaps you have to accept that stuff falls off the radar for most people.
That doesn't make your post less useful (and someone clearly thought they were), so I think you may need to treat this as karma that balances out - you got more points that you think you should for one answer, and less for another couple - the net effect was maybe just right.
Personally I am constantly surprised by which answers get votes and which don't on SE generally. It's never quite what I expect and often the highest votes I get will be on answers which I regard as trivial or obvious.
+1 for your point regarding timing. The effect of an early answer gaining some points and then always appearing before later ones is so powerful it's scary. And takes quite a lot of discipline to resist deciding what to upvote before you've read a bit further down.
I think your upvoted answer deserves its votes, even though it was easier to write than the others you link to.
This kind of effect often happens on the more technical SE sites: short, easy to understand answers to beginner questions get a bunch of votes; difficult, technical answers to highly specific questions take an hour or two to write get crickets and tumbleweed, because it's not worth the effort for most people to read them.
Broadly speaking, the two effects balance each other out. Look at your rep as a whole and think of the rep you got but "didn't deserve" for this question as making up for the rep you "deserved" but didn't get on the other questions.
Like the "balance" idea - easy answers can give just as good value to the OP as more developed answers ,accept the votes : don't worry...
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4351 | Academia.SX-like question(s) on Slashdot
https://news.slashdot.org/story/18/11/06/1452238/ask-slashdot-how-to-fix-an-outdated-college-tech-curriculum
An anonymous reader writes:
As a student, what's the best way to bring change to an outdated
college tech curriculum?
The background on this is that I have 15 years of experience in the
field and a very healthy amount of industry-recognized training and
certifications. I'm merely finishing up my degree to flesh out my
resume -- I haven't learned much from the program that I don't already
know. However, the program would have benefited me greatly 15 years
ago. It's a great program, except for a biometrics class that is
absolutely behind the curve. The newest publication on the syllabus is
from 2009. This is simply teaching the students outdated and often
wrong information.
Additionally, a lot of the material seems like it was stretched to
make a full semester class in biometrics in the first place -- most of
the material, honestly, could be compressed to about two hours of
lecture and still be delivered at a reasonable rate.
What's the best way for a student in my situation to get this fixed so
the school stops wasting student's time with outdated and wrong
information?
I very much suggest reading some of the replies/comments there - and not just the highest-rated ones.
What do you think about:
The way answers are penned and commented on over there as opposed to on Academia.SX.
Whether Academia.SX should make those kind of questions (i.e. on another site, but in an Q&A+comments format similar to what we have here) accessible somehow to people searching on Academia.SX?
So... is this a question? Sounds kind of like a general announcement...
@eykanal: See edit.
Stack Exchange is not a discussion board, so I'm not sure what do you mean by "... as opposed to discussions here"? 2) as of whether this question is on-topic or not, I'll leave it to this community to decide (I'm just a passer-by)
Re: 1. See edit.
This is a very broad question as it currently stands and isn't really answerable. Since this is meta and not the main site, I'll leave this open for now so you can make edits, but if we can't figure out how to make this question more specific we'll probably end up closing it.
The way answers are penned and commented on over there as opposed to on Academia.SX
I've tried to read various topics on Sladshot in the past but I find it very hard to follow responses in such a format. I've thus stopped following any discussion there a long time ago. Honestly, it just pisses me off (disclaimer: I'm an old fart and I don't like certain forms of communication).
Whether Academia.SX should make those kind of questions (i.e. on another site, but in an Q&A+comments format similar to what we have here) accessible somehow to people searching on Academia.SX?
I think that our chat is the right place to post links to posts, documents and discussions about the academic world that can be found elsewhere. There are already many examples of such links.
So, thanks for your second suggestion. Unfortunately, the negative vote count on the question doesn't suggest people are very thrilled about seeing these links.
@einpoklum At the moment, there is just one negative vote on your question and I wouldn't read too much into this (it might be due just to the way the question is formulated). The good thing about the chat is that you really don't need community consensus to post links that may be of interest there.
@einpoklum don't worry about a few down votes. That said, chat is probably the best place for links like that. I have posted links in chat to stuff I like.
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2198 | Would a question about review and response to manuscripts be on topic?
I have recently been asked to review a paper, and realistically, it's got flaws. I am going to suggest in my review that the paper is rejected.
However, I have had a previous experience where I suggested rejection but gave a detailed and constructive review anyway, and then saw the paper published and unchanged a few months later in another journal. I am concerned that the same will happen again and am looking for normal solutions to this and would like to ask on the academia stack exchange, but I'm not sure it's on topic - I've had previous questions go off topic.
Would asking about this problem, and asking how/if one should pursue cases where flawed papers get sent to you for review, or even what to do when you see a paper with a technical/theoretical flaw published?
In short the question would ask what to do when a published paper has a flaw which you notice, and whether one can do something proactively when reviewing the paper.
What are the options when you notice a critical flaw in a paper?
One could simply ignore it, but this is damaging to the research community. Could one write a response article which identifies and explains the flaws? If it is for a paper received for review could one contact the editor to request the publication of a response alongside the article?
Yes, questions about peer-review or dealing with flawed published papers are very on-topic. So, you could very well ask questions along the lines of the following:
I am peer-reviewing a paper with serious but not obvious flaws; how can I avoid that the authors just take it to another journal, when I reject it?
I am afraid that the answer will boil down to nothing, but that does not invalidate the question and you’ll never know whether somebody has some solution – that’s what this platform is for.
A seriously flawed paper I peer-reviewed and rejected got published without major changes by another journal. How can I let the scientific community know.
While we have questions along this line¹², they are not about the case that you reviewed the paper. So, if they do not answer your problem, I see no problem with a question that sufficiently addresses why they don’t.
In both cases, I have not thoroughly checked for a possible duplicate to exist; so you should still do this.
Also, please refrain from providing information that allows to identify the paper, the journals or the authors.
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1792 | Are questions about journal data on topic?
Are questions about journal statistics on topic here?
e.g.
what is the impact factor of journal x? (probably shouldn't need to ask it here as this info is widely available)
what is the average review time for journal x?
what are the average times from submission to acceptance/publication for journal x?
what are the current (2015) rankings for journals in the field of x? (such info can be found for older rankings, but recent info is generaly behind a paywall... example of rankings)
Personally I think they could be on topic because they are objective (rather than subjective shopping questions) requests for information which is highly relevant to academics.
The questions you have listed are indeed not shopping questions. However, they are still not appropriate for the site, because they fall under the "too specific" category. If we allow such questions for an arbitrary journal X, then we have to allow similar questions for every journal. We don't want to have the site flooded with such questions, so this would be off-topic.
On the other hand, questions about how to determine these statistics in general would be OK, since they are not tied to individual journals.
In addition to what Aeismail said, if the answers to the first three questions aren’t available on the journal’s website, they are very difficult to obtain (unless you work for the respective journal). Therefore most of such answers are either very easy to answer or very unlikely to ever be answered.
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4191 | Why is “What are illegal or/and inappropriate question on job interview?” too broad?
The irony of putting on hold this question How should I handle questions about family/spouse on the job market?
is that it limits my right to apply for any position without being the questioned why I choose such a distance, therefore limiting my right to look for a job and have a right to be employed.
The question is concise; it refers to a specific webinar intended for career development of US- and Canada-based academic staff. It talks about the special situation when the applicant or presenter is confronted with the silly question and it mentions the legality of a situation that actually happened.
I didn’t want to make this question only US-based, because I thought this is an international platform and that people from other countries can contribute answering.
"I didn't want to put question only US-based, bcs I thought this is international platform and that other countries can contribute answering." there are 100+ countries in the world. Surely a question with 100 possible answers is too broad for SE!
@AndrewT. why there is only US based ?
@dawn made good comment with reference http://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/0003122417739294
@SSimon Having read two questions and your comments, I'm still finding it very difficult to understand your English, as a native English speaker.
I tried to edit the emphasis of the original question as outlined below. I didn’t actually remove any of the questions because I wanted the existing answers to still fit.
I’d like to see this question reopened. Can people take a look at it now?
First, I want to say that I think that the question posed about how to handle job interview questions about family is important, and is answerable within the framework of the site. I've expanded in more detail some of what I said in the comments. Also, I don't have close or reopen vote privileges, and I up voted the original question in any case.
I would say that the title doesn't quite match the body of the question. The question in the title "What is an illegal or/and inappropriate question in a job interview?" has infinitely many answers, and therefore doesn't fit very well in the Q&A format. However, what you're discussing in the body of the question is, in my opinion, focused enough for it to be answerable in the Q&A format.
The other aspect is that the legal question is very specific to location. If you ask "Is it illegal to ask about spouses in a job interview?" and you want answers for both the USA and the UK, these are basically different questions. The site discourages asking multiple questions in a single question. Aside from this, I think the legal question may not be best suited to this site. In my opinion, it might get better answers on workplace.stackexchange.com, although having said this, the Stack Exchange network in general shies away from legal advice. Still, I think this question is a valid to ask here and should not be closed provided it is asking about a single location.
Apart from the legal question, you also asked "How should I respond to these questions as an early stage career academic?". To me, this is the part of the question which this site is best equipped to answer. As you said, even if the question is illegal, you still need to handle it somehow if it's sprung upon you. It perhaps could have some geographical focus, but I think it doesn't need to have one to be a valid question.
In summary, to me, the legal question and the "how to handle this" questions are separate, and should be split off into separate questions. The "how to handle this" question is good, and is exactly the sort of question this site ought to be able to provoke good answers for.
I agree with this. That is in fact why I provided an answer and tried to focus on the what to do and avoid the legality issues. The comments by the OP on the questions and answers suggest they are looking for a big list of answers with each country being handled separately. That makes it too broad and likely off topic (labor law is an entire field).
I also agree - it is an important question and something I often struggled with on the job market. I think @MJeffryes or I would be happy to edit your question to make it more answerable. Please let us know if you would like us to do so.
I think the comments to @StrongBad's good answer are exactly why this question is too broad. StrongBad attempted to give an overall view from a couple common contexts and give some guidance. The comments are then flooded with people saying "oh but in my jurisdiction _______" - that isn't a good format for SE.
By the way I agree entirely with this meta answer about how to reframe the question in a more appropriate way for Academia.SE: namely, to abandon the "legal" question and focus on the "how to handle."
Your question title
What is an illegal or/and inappropriate question in a job interview?
is an open end question.
There are a lot of things that could be illegal or/and inappropriate to ask in a job interview depending on the local law and the local culture.
Legal and appropriate are two separate questions. Legal in one place does not necessarily imply the question is appropriate in another place.
These are the reasons I voted to close as "too broad" and "leave it closed" when I reviewed the Reopen queue.
However, in your question body
it is illegal to ask a candidate in a job interview about what would friends or/and family think about your job appointment with the institution.
sounds like an answerable question to me if you add a location to it.
Why is the open end? I ask about very specific situation in specific context.
even if I was a man, questions about harassment and abuse of power shouldn't be closed
questions about harassment and abuse of power shouldn't be closed – Yes, questions shouldn’t be closed because they are about these subjects. But questions about these subjects do not get special treatment. They can be closed like every other question if they do not meet our quality requirements.
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4675 | What are the limits of "shopping" questions when it comes to software?
I posted the gist of this as an answer to the meta thread on faculty support during the corona virus, but it was suggested that it might make sense as its own question. What questions should be closed as “shopping”?
Here’s the meta thread from 2017 that the documentation links to. The points of interest contain “a commercial online service”, linking to another discussion on that specifically.
Here’s an older discussion from 2015
And another from 2015
And then we have current posts where people are asking for lists of software that can be used to teach remotely, in light of the corona-virus closures. Here are three:
Creating a secure test environment for a programming lab practical
Alternatives to big-name proprietary remote-lecturing tools
Software to live-stream presentations
Two of these are closed, and the other has a close vote. These have been very slow to earn closure votes, with the still open one sitting at one vote for several days, which suggests a lot of the people who spend time in the review queues don’t see them as closure-worthy. But at the same time, the language on commercial software seems to directly relate. There are two related questions here:
It seems to me, when I read our official documentation, that these count as shopping questions. Is there another interpretation I’m missing?
Should we be closing these sorts of questions (if not off scope for another reason)? If not, does it require a change to the language in the rules?
Personally, I would prefer an end to all questions about software. The questions about ArXiv and Google Scholar are particularly useless and boring.
@AnonymousPhysicist: If you find a certain type of questions boring, just don’t look at them or ignore the respective tags. It’s inevitable that in a community like ours, not everybody finds every kind of question interesting. I personally do not care about graduate admissions at all, yet I would not declare them off-topic for that reason. The more crucial question is whether such questions have any inherent problems when answered.
@Wrzlprmft I did not realize I could ignore tags. Thanks! Of course I will probably see the question before it is tagged.
@Wrzlprmft "The more crucial question is whether such questions have any inherent problems when answered." That is not what determines our scope.
@AnonymousPhysicist: That is not what determines our scope. – Well, if a vast majority of our community does not care about some question, that’s a problem, because there is no curation, community moderation, voting, etc. If you so wish, this is why we have a scope to begin with. But this is not why we close shopping questions: They are perfectly within our scope (in the common meaning of the word), but they cause other problems (described in the shopping FAQ). The existence of this question and the votes disagree with your assessment that nobody here is interested in such questions.
@Wrzlprmft None of the answers has more than two net votes so far. That's a tiny number. Six people voted for the question, but it's unclear what their position is.
The current global corona pandemic is an event that is unprecedented in this age (you#d have to go back to 1920). And I hope it won't happen again for quite some time. In light of that, maybe a good idea is not to change what is allowed in general (shopping questions usually are bad), but allowing those questions temporarily for the coming weeks until the whole spook is over, then locking them with historic locks. This is a unique challenge for most of the world, a little bit of flexibility/lenience might help solving practical problems now that aren't necessary good Q&A for the future
Before considering closing them, keep https://softwarerecs.stackexchange.com/ in mind
@AnonymousPhysicist I presume they're useless and boring because you've found a setup that works for you. In that sense, you are not their audience, beyond perhaps sharing your experiences. That doesn't preclude them being relevant and useful for others.
@elduderino260 No, they are useless questions because the answer was available from the manual or nobody knows the answer except Google or the answer is "because Google/ArXiv feel like it."
(Disclaimer: I am the author of Alternatives to big-name proprietary remote-lecturing tools )
First of all: we make the rules
We are free to consider on-topic whichever questions we deem answerable or useful to academics. The fact that "no shopping questions" is a thing, in general, should not prevent us from accepting these questions. If we believe they are good ones, we can make an exception or modify the scope of the "shopping" definition.
Are these useful questions for academics? In my view, yes. Using software to teach, do research and write papers is a part of our work. These questions are intrinsically more answerable than university-shopping or conference-shopping questions.
Softwarerecs.se is a bad idea for specialized needs
I have already it written several times in comments, but I believe [softwarerecs.se] is a bad idea. Suppose you need to find a good linear algebra book; would you ask a linear algebra expert, or a "book expert"? Questions on the software needs of academics are much more likely to receive a useful answer from the audience of our site than from the audience of softwarerecs.se.
We people who use conferencing software for teaching have different needs than the other users in industry. For instance, I imagine that typically people in industry do not have a video-conference with one person speaking most of the time and 200 other passive users who are mostly listening and should not have their mics on all the time. They (often) do not need to share and record written notes, or to reproduce complicated mathematical formulas in chat.
To sum up, I think that this is the right site for this kind of questions, and that we should amend the definition of "shopping question" to make them on-topic if they are not on topic already.
To clarify what the difference between your answer and mine is: 1) Do you disagree that questions seeking recommendations of software with a general target audience should be disallowed or 2) Do you disagree with categorising your question (and the other one) as my Point 3 (instead of Point 2)?
Option 2: I believe videoconferencing is specific enough to academics to have a place here.
Okay, thanks. I had another look at your question where you explicitly say: “My requirements are just streaming my desktop's content and my microphone.”, which would be just private broadcasting and doesn’t seem specific to academia at all to me. (For example, I see this all the time for general non-academic computing conferences.) However, in this answer, you mention that you want student feedback (just not all the time). What am I missing?
Yes, student feedback would be appreciated. I will edit the question. I suppose also non-academic computing conferences have questions from the audience, though?
Thanks for clarifying. I will edit my answer in reaction to your edits and not to use conferences as an example (because it is unclear). If I understand everything correctly, you should agree with it now. — I suppose also non-academic computing conferences have questions from the audience, though? – Yes, but those are usually from the live audience. I have never seen a specific technology for online questions (though I don’t doubt that it exists).
@wr Well, "symmetric" videoconferencing (everyone has a microphone and can speak) or chats handle questions just fine, for instance.
"Softwarerecs.se is a bad idea for specialized needs" This is irrelevant, in my opinion. There is no rule that all questions must be on topic somewhere.
@FedericoPoloni: Well, "symmetric" videoconferencing (everyone has a microphone and can speak) or chats handle questions just fine, for instance. – But not from a mass audience. You somehow need to moderate questions, etc.
Status Quo
There has never been a clear consensus whether shopping questions extend to software.
Hence it is missing from the shopping FAQ.
Having a policy for this is long overdue.
I suggest:
Suggested Policy
Do not close questions on how to solve a practical problem that is specific to academia or teaching. If the answer is to use a software (commercial or not) with certain features, that’s okay. Such a software can be explicitly named, but a good answer provides a list of alternatives (should they exist). It is even okay to ask such a question if the answer is most likely a software.
Do not close questions that seek recommendations of software for purposes that are specific to academia or teaching, for example software for managing grades, courses, citations. However, such questions must adhere to these established rules from Software Recommendations SE.
Close questions that seek recommendation of software that has a more general target audience, e.g., software for general video broadcasting or collaborative editing. These are best asked on Software Recommendations SE. Very roughly speaking, telling people to use a software for collaborative editing is within our expertise and scope; telling them which collaborative-editing software is best is not (when they already know that they want a collaborative editing software, and have no further academia-specific needs).
If possible, edit questions to those described in Point 1, i.e., asking how to solve a problem. This even applies to questions as described in Point 2.
Rationale
There are two purposes of closing questions (that are relevant here):
Avoid questions that we cannot answer or whose answers we cannot reasonably evaluate.
The proposed policy limits questions to those which really need the expertise of academics (as opposed to general software specialists), so this is fulfilled.
Avoid questions that are not well suited for the Stack Exchange format in general, e.g., due to having no objective best answer.
This is why we close questions shopping for journals, universities, fields, and similar.
The existence of Software Recommendations SE shows that such questions can work – if they adhere to strict guidelines on the specifics of the software.
Such questions are not anymore about “What is the best citation software in general?” but “What citation software fulfils fulfils my specific requirements?”.
In contrast to questions shopping for journals or universities:
these requirements can actually be described within the scope of a question
there is little risk of the typical bad answers to shopping questions (e.g., from people blindly championing their field, university, etc.),
we are not giving anybody the illusion that we can reasonably make a life decision for them.
Your Examples
Creating a secure test environment for a programming lab practical should not be closed as per Point 1: The question is asking for solving a specific problem, not necessarily with software. For example, a valid answer to this question could also be that it is inherently impossible to achieve the desired behaviour.
Alternatives to big-name proprietary remote-lecturing tools and Software to live-stream presentations fall under Point 2, though they seem duplicates of each other.
Point 4 avoids unnecessary closures, XY problems and the resulting comment explosions, and focuses questions on our main area of expertise.
“I agree with everything but Point 2”
Please feel free to suggest the respective alternative as a separate answer, so it can be voted upon.
You can either copy my policy and modify the respective part or write something like “Wrzlprmft’s answer, except Point 2”.
Ideally provide a rationale.
I like your point 1. Focus on the problem, not the software. For example rather than asking What software allows remote discussion? instead ask How do I stay in contact with students remotely? I'm not sure about Point 2 if point 4 cannot be met.
I would like to focus on 2 out of the 3 debated questions, as I believe that 2 of them fall into the same category: "Software to live-stream presentations" and "Creating a secure test environment for a programming lab practical". The first, I voted to close as shopping question and the second I voted to leave open.
The guiding principle for me is what would constitute the accepted answer.
I think that the same rationale would also apply for the highest upvoted answer, but first for reasons of brevity and second, because we are talking about the closing of a question, it seems closer related to the OP than the upvotes, I base the following discussion on the accepted answer.
The first question asks for software recommendations for streaming presentations in an academic environment. Framed as such, natural answers would entail what the posters' experiences with such tools were in the past (e.g. Skype, Slack, Teams, ...). Suppose now it attracts three answers, each listing three suggestions with the rationale why the tool did work for the poster (i.e. we are looking at "complete" answers of similar quality). What would the criteria be for OP to accept the answer? What he likes best? What he ends up using? The first answer? In my opinion this ceases to be Q&A and becomes a forum post all inclusive with extensive chat-like commenting. Members of the community will tend to upvote based on their preferences and perhaps even downvote based on their bad experiences with the tools, again, because there is no other inherent quality that might differentiate the answers. Further, what would be the benefit for a prospective reader? Plagued with the same question, happy to have found it already answered, how would he interpret the answers? Simply put, such questions merit a discussion and lists of preferences. I guess that it also could be construed as opinion-based under circumstances, but either way, closing material.
Further, this is the epitome of "boat programming" question. I.e.: "As an academic, what tools should I use for live-stream presentations in order to facilitate lectures, office hours and exams?". The same tools are used in industry, family meetings, online role-playing games, etc. for a reason: the use cases are the same (need to communicate with a group, possibly with video support, share documents, present, etc.). So, the fact that the tool is for academia makes it in no way different or more special.
As for the second question, although it could be seen as a shopping question, there is a another question, more relevant to Academia SE, underneath: how do we secure the integrity of exams that are forced to be conducted remotely. A serious question which warrants serious consideration and quality of answers, which would also be applicable to other readers. This is also a good example, as one can compare the answers in both questions. So, at worst, this question needs some editing for clarification, but I wouldn't consider it a shopping question.
As you say, two of these questions are closed. The third seems like it might be salvageable: the title text (Creating a secure test environment for a lab practical) does not ask for a specific "shopping" recommendation, but the second paragraph does seem like it is asking for either a software solution (which is shopping) or technical help (which is off-topic). Perhaps someone will edit it, or perhaps it will be closed, but it seems like things are generally working as they should.
These have been very slow to earn closure votes, with the still open one sitting at one vote for several days, which suggests a lot of the people who spend time in the review queues don't see them as closure-worthy.
One possibility is that users found the resource requests useful/interesting even if they are technically off-topic, and so chose to "skip" voting on the question. Perhaps the recently-created chat will fill this need.
Personally, I don't think chat fills my needs. Chat is messy and hard to search. Any information you write on chat will be almost impossible to find one year from now. I try to avoid using SE's chat as much as possible.
Suggested Policy: Close questions that seek recommendations for software for teaching purposes, for example software for managing grades, courses, lectures, and citations.
Rationale: These questions are uninteresting to site users. Most of them will also be opinion-based, as the different software companies have mostly copied each other's features. Most people only have experience with their own institution's software licenses, so for proprietary software few people will have broad experience to inform their opinions.
So, you are fine with questions on citation software?
If there is this meta question, it's because this kind of (main) questions are actually interesting to certain site users. Like graduate admission questions are interesting for certain users and totally uninteresting for others. But the point is not that of being interesting or not, it's that of being useful.
@Wrzlprmft No, those are terrible questions.
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4385 | Questions that are non-anonymous rants/accusations against specific individuals
I'm a bit concerned about a recent post (now deleted, link for 10 k users only) which was a pretty aggressive accusation with both the specific supervisor and accuser clearly identified.
I think most of the answers and comments are directed towards helping OP understand why their accusations are likely unfounded, but I wonder if we want things like this to be part of Academia.SE. There is enough background here to pretty much absolve the lab involved in my opinion, but in other situations that may not be the case, especially circumstances where the facts/details are less publicly available.
Most of this Q&A is about the specific question in question. Please note that we now have a general policy on such questions.
In general, I agree with the Massimo’s and Sascha’s answers that such questions should stay as long as they can be sufficiently anonymised.
They can help others in similar situations and as long as the personal links are borrowed in some edit history (and stay civil), we do not leave the impression of being a place for public accusations – which I consider very important.
Now, while the specific question can be sufficiently anonymised (I just did that before reading through the answers), all the upvoted answers depend on information the asker posted in comments or external links.
Even without removing any of this, this becomes very confusing and highly individual advice which heavily depends on the one-sided details we are provided (even though even those seem to point against the asker).
This is of little use to future visitors and I do not think it can be made useful without a major editing job to the question and all answers, which would probably be too radical for an edit in some cases, removing major portions of some answers.
I would therefore opt to delete this question and (if desired) start from scratch, i.e., post a new question, that is sufficiently generalised and anonymised.
+1 for "we do not leave the impression of being a place for public accusations" - I think this is my biggest problem with the so-called question from the OP. FWIW I actually agree with the responses of people like Sascha and Bryan but I didn't want to pile on in the comments
I think the public accusations of asker of this question is used against himself and clearly showed that his claims are certainly false and the guy himself is a fraud. So, I believe it should not be deleted cause it's a good and unique example of how false claims could be easily identified with the help of internet...
@AloneProgrammer: First, even if we undelete all the answers and comments that we can, this example is barely understandable without spending quite some time digging through all the material and in particular the asker’s personal website (which may be gone down sooner or later). Second, I do not think that this example is deterring anybody from doing anything. Third and most importantly, I do not want our site to be a place where people can shame themselves as much as I do not want it to be a place where people can shame others.
@Wrzlprmft: How about if we edit the question in a way in which we see it, and then lock it down. Something along the lines like a title like "How can I gain scientific credentials or money by applying public social media pressure and misleading statements"
@Sascha: Something along the lines like a title like "How can I gain scientific credentials or money by applying public social media pressure and misleading statements" – That would be a blatant case of judging and shaming the asker, which is far out of line and violates the code of conduct. In fact, I would even consider your suggestion borderline. The asker still deserves a minimum of respect.
@Wrzlprmft yes, it's borderline. The respect would be given by not supposing that he had criminal intent, but a misguided character. As for shaming, towards those in science he already did that himself - nobody held a gun against his head when going public. Towards those still on the path to being scientists, they may be misguided by his current question. In the current form the question still does public shaming on people most likely innocent. The question in the original form is an insult to all his supposed co-workers and all researchers working 60h weeks to obtain decent publications and a
@Sascha: In the current form the question still does public shaming on people most likely innocent. – The current question names no specific people at all. — The question in the original form is an insult to […] – I do not see how that would be. (Mind that I am referring to the question only here, not to the tons of comments, external links, etc.)
@Wrzlprmft: It's good that the question is deleted because even with the original question only + the full name of the person asking, identifying his supervisor takes less than 1 minute with google. I have seen personally the effects of such people on teams and chairs. The mistrust and polarization they seek to create to flip a situation randomly to their advantage is bad - i will put separate question about that topic at some point.
I know my comment here is not directly related to this question but I found something really strange (at least to me it's extraordinary strange!!!) in OP's linkedin page! In his linkedin page, the OP claimed that he hold two faculty! positions in Virginia Tech and University of Virginia at 2013 and 2017 respectively!!!! To show proof of his claim, he put the scan of his employment verification letter!!!! I mean how someone without PhD even for a few months could be hired as a faculty member in these two reputable universities in the US?! Please excuse me that this comment is off-topic here.
@AloneProgrammer: Yes, that’s clearly off-topic here. At best you could ask on the main site what you can do in such a situation (if anything) – without revealing any identifying details.
However unpleasant they are, I think we should deal with such kind of questions. For two reasons.
It can be challenging to write one, but a balanced or straight answer to a thorny question can be extremely helpful to the asker and to future visitors. And I think that our community has certainly a number of people capable of giving good advice even in such controversial cases.
Once a non-anonymous question of this sort has been posted, all the mechanisms that are available to standard users and moderators to get rid of it or to make it anonymous are too slow or too weak to be effective, and the damage is already done. Better deal with it face up, then.
Regarding your second point: I do not think this is a case which calls for radical anonymisation and de-publishing. The asker has already decided to go public with this information and published a webpage about this, so all the information on our site is already out there anyway and the asker doesn’t mind. However, we want to avoid the impression of being a place for publicly shaming people and thus we should keep the question anonymised and neutral through edits and similar.
@Wrzlprmft and Massimo: true, the info is already out there, irrespective of academia.SE, but I have some concerns that by allowing such a specific accusation as a question, there may be a perception that academia.SE is legitimizing the complaint
Yes I worry about the same as @YemonChoi and especially if the case were less clearly a ridiculous accusation.
I vote to delete this question. I agree with Sascha
In the meantime, it becomes IMHO more and more clear that the guy is a
fraud, and not just deluded.
My answer isn't meant to help this guy, but to show his false accusations. I guess he just wants to be famous by public shaming other people.
I wondered about the same thing regarding this question. I would leave it open:
It could be that the person asking is really severely deluded. While I thing that the answers may or may not be helping him to understand that, there is a chance that they do
The question in itself is not a bad one - I had an (much more specific) idea in a research proposal which showed up later in a paper of the group I applied to.
Sometimes I also saw people failing in communicating due to their cultural background and research projects being transferred due to nepotism and/or racism
Only after looking for some time it seems that this is not just an unplanned rant, but part of some attempt to defraud people - here the answers could also serve to people who have such a case in their team.
So the answers may be do not help the person asking, but others who are at a point in their scientific career where they would go down such a path could profit.
The OP is at this point clearly showing that he has a highly distorted and false world view of the effort involved in research leading to a successful publication. He is attacking with a religious zeal to convince others that he is under all manner of professional and personal persecution. No answer will be marked as one that correctly addresses his starting question.
I vote to NOT delete the question. Over time, I believe the content can serve as a worthwhile reference for others who may be starting out as ignorant of the research method and/or as religious in their zeal to prove some measure of personal persecution in the face of a distorted world view.
As desired and/or demanded by the guidelines, and as the effort permits, I agree that sanitizing references to specific details may be needed. I do not believe the general message will be significantly diluted by such an effort.
==> In the meantime, I vote to CLOSE the question IMMEDIATELY to further answers and comments.
I believe the content can serve as a worthwhile reference for others who may be starting out as ignorant of the research method and/or as religious in their zeal to prove […] – I started reading the entire question and all related material when this Meta discussion started. I found it very confusing and if this weren’t an issue of moderation, I would have stopped reading. I strongly doubt that the audience you have in mind will get the message – if they find the question in the first place.
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5366 | Please flag spam as spam; it doesn't matter if it is AI-generated as well
A long-running spam trend is to embed a malicious or merely promotional link inside some block of text, either written by low-wage workers in a spam farm or by stringing semi-random text along automatically. Sometimes they are loosely related to a question topic, otherwise not. Sometimes the link is just snuck somewhere in the block of text, other times it appears as something like "find out more here:" at the end. More recently, this spam trend has been adapted to substitute AI-generated content since this is so easy and cheap.
It doesn't really matter. It's still spam. Flag as spam. We don't need to handle it under any AI policy because it's just spam. I've seen a couple different people raise custom flags about the AI content while others are simply raising spam flags on the same post. The spam flaggers are doing the right thing, but the custom flags won't be seen by the system as validating the spam flags. Flagging as spam will help the content get handled as quickly as possible.
While Charcoal's Smoke Detector usually picks them up and helps spam flag them a bit faster, manually reporting ones that are missed will help future ones be more likely to be caught. You can use SOCVR's Request Generator userscript to generate the report message in the chatroom, or do so manually.
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3668 | Low upvote contrast under the "Linked" and "Related" headings
This is my first meta post, so if I have done anything wrong, please alert me.
While browsing a question, I noticed that the upvote counts for the links under the "Related" and "Linked" heading have extremely low contrast, to the point that, (for me), they are barely visible.
I found this under Google Chrome v55.0.2883.87 m, the latest Windows 10, Nvidia GeForce 940m (driver v376.33 ), and Intel HD Graphics 4600. Also, I do have full colour vision and my vision is not impaired in any way.
Is it intended? Or is it just me? I just wanted to bring it to the attention of whoever does the styling.
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3781 | Why are the moderators on this website so anal?
I have seen multiple questions and comments deleted, closed, and moved without much justification. Why can't the moderators etc. just let the people ask and answer the questions peacefully and without censoring unless there arises a serious problem? Just let people talk. Look at how the New York Times publishes pretty much all of the submitted comments. I have posted to the New York Times for 5+ years and none of my comments has ever been censored/blocked/deleted by the editors. It's called freedom of speech and freedom of association.
Regarding the last sentence: Those things really have nothing to do with this and bringing them up just makes it look even less like you did your homework before posting this.
If you repost this on CogSci.SE you could get an explanation of Freud, including the problems with Freud and why, although he is still influential, he has mostly fallen out of favor within psychology. Essentially, we are this way because we toiled trained well at an early age. ::shrug::
Why can't the moderators etc. just let the people ask and answer the questions peacefully and without censoring unless there arises a serious problem?
Most content that is deleted on Stack Exchange is deleted because it simply doesn’t belong where it is posted (and not due to censoring).
This is necessary as, no matter what you do, there always will be people who ask questions that do not fit the topic of a site or cannot reasonably be answered within this format, use answers for asking questions or similar, and use comments for dumping their opinion and having discussions.
The success of the Stack Exchange model is based on keeping the site clean from such misplaced content.
That this is a good thing is demonstrated quite well by most of the rest of the Internet, where relevant information is often buried under tons of garbage and comments are a write-only area for those who have a desperate need to share their opinion.
For example, comments on news pages may be less moderated, but then I hardly ever read them and if I do, I usually quickly regret it.
It's called freedom of speech and freedom of association.
Nope. Please read this educative cartoon (which is about even stronger cases, but still gets the general gist).
I'm reasonably sure that calling someone an asshole, even by association is a failure of the "be nice" policy.
@Valorum: Who called whom an asshole? If this refers to the word anal, it has – for reasons that are beyond me – found its way into non-scatological English.
Your cartoon calls him an asshole, as I said, by association.
@Valorum: I think anybody reading this has to make quite some stretch to associate this to himself (as does every reader of XKCD), in particular since nobody said anything about whose posts this is about. Anyway, see my edit.
I have seen multiple questions and comments deleted, closed, and moved
without much justification. Why can't the moderators etc. just let the
people ask and answer the questions peacefully and without censoring
unless there arises a serious problem?
Because the StackExchange network is expressly meant to be a curated source for information, not a free-wheeling discussion of whatever happens to wander in.
Just let people talk. Look at how the New York Times publishes pretty
much all of the submitted comments. I have posted to the New York
Times for 5+ years and none of my comments has ever been
censored/blocked/deleted by the editors.
"Don't Read the Comments" is one of the great rules of the Internet for a reason - the lack of a curated comments section leads, very, very often, to a rambling cesspool of insults, digressions, spam, and any signal gets swiftly lost in the noise.
It's called freedom of speech and freedom of association.
Freedom of Speech and Freedom of Association only apply to the government (and a specific government at that) - the Academia StackExchange site is not obligated to indulge any post that wanders in.
In order to create a sense of community and an enjoyment of free-spirited exchange of ideas the moderators should censor less and listen more. Freedom of speech underpins a MARKETPLACE OF IDEAS. Let the readers judge for themselves what they want to read and to answer. The moderators repeated interference (based on my small sampling) is paternalistic and the mark of centralized communist system. Let the invisible hand of the marketplace of ideas decide which posts gain multiple views and responses and which posted questions get ignored.
@FredSmith: This cannot work on the scale that posts of this site have. Most posts are so short that, in order to judge their quality, I have to read considerable portions, if not all of them. I cannot judge to not to read it then. Also this site is not about sharing or developing ideas.
The moderators here work quite hard for a position that pays nothing. They work in academics, and thus have too much spare time to waste. For example, look at this:
What happened to my comment?
Moderator @ff524 deleted the valid comments because she didn't like it (not related to her research?). No other moderator on any other StackExchange site would have done that.
That does not seem to be an accurate description of the reason for @ff524's supposed actions. She made it very clear, in response to the question you link to, that the reasons for deletion of comments were procedural. It is also not clear to me that the deletion was the unilateral decision of that particular moderator
You appear to be suggesting that academics are underworked? This is the opposite of my own observations ;-)
I work in academics and yet I am not a paternalistic censor. It's called a marketplace of ideas because the invisible hand is supposed to guide consumer preferences, not a centralized censor. Being an academic, having little time to waste, and being paternalistic and censorial are not associated together.
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3739 | Hit approve instead of reject on a suggested edit
I accidently hit approve instead of reject on a suggested edit on Academia SE. Is there anything I can/should do about it like an undo or something like this?
Is there anything I can/should do about it like an undo or something like this?
No, there isn’t (probably it would be needed only very rarely). All you can do is wait for the edit to finally fail or pass review and act upon it in the latter case. If I am identifying your case correctly, the former should just have happened.
Do not worry too much. Nobody is going to bite your head off for one wrong review.
One can also flag to the mods for attention, but that's overkill in most circumstances.
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4726 | Two answers per day get downvoted – will the system notice this?
So I have noticed that two of my answers get downvoted each day.
I have seen other posts that mention the system notices serial downvoting, but will the system notice two a day across several days?
I know that the system will revoke downvotes of say ten in a row as that is easily spotted but will it pick up insidious downvoting that is slow?
If the system will not, then how do I proceed? Getting an answer that it won’t be spotted and can’t be changed will suggest the system needs changing.
In your case, to meaningfully change your reputation, a user would need quite a lot of sock pupets.
It is not even clear that the system will revoke ten downvotes. There is more to it than sheer numbers. -- In any case, could it possibly be related to your answers?
@user151413 yes! Especially when some of the highest voted answers get downvoted, which is why I noticed...
@SolarMike I think you take these things far too personal!
I can only see it happened once, yesterday, but given the close proximity this does look like targeted voting. The script runs in the early UTC hours so it's safe to assume it didn't detect this.
As mentioned in the FAQ What is serial voting and how does it affect me?, you can flag one of the affected posts for ♦ moderator attention, but with only two votes there's nothing much for them to see either (source: I'm a moderator on three other sites in the network). I'd recommend doing that if the pattern continues (and is not reversed automatically).
Thanks for the answer. I will see what happens and do what you advise. Cheers.
Mind that it is more than a single downvoting event, but not all of this is visible to non-moderators since some of the posts in question were deleted since then.
Ah, good catch.
The system will not automatically reverse this kind of downvoting, but it will eventually still show up and you can flag one of your posts for moderator attention and we can then investigate this.
I your particular case, there are indeed some hints of somebody systematically downvoting you. I will investigate these and address them as appropriate. Since this may involve Stack Exchange staff (as only they can see and undo individual votes), this may take a while.
Thank you for looking and acting on this, much appreciated.
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4738 | How is this offensive?
https://academia.stackexchange.com/a/150925/25124
Do Japanese-Americans not want people to talk about what happened to them during WW2? If that is the case, I want a source.
I upvote this question. Being an Asian American (I am Asian, US citizen), I don't feel it offensive. However, I am not Japanese. I don't know the exact feelings they have. If you are a Japanese American, please express your feelings toward the subject answer.
@scaaahu It's not about being offensive towards Japanese Americans but towards other minorities and is incredibly ignorant in that regard.
I removed most of the comments, not because I want to suppress the discussion, but it was drifting towards personal attacks from all sides. Please do not make any assumptions about each other’s experiences, expertise on the subject, or similar.
Perhaps theose very Japanese-Americans do not want to be the source...
A comment left on this answer stated:
This seems to be more of a snarky comment than a good-faith answer.
I agree with this:
This is not an honest attempt to answer the question, but instead it suggests playing a rude practical joke on the students in question.
This suggestion is based on taking the request in question overly literal by replacing one group with another, which mocks the request and is rude to both groups involved.
Moreover, suggesting such a blatantly bad action is rude in itself, in particular since the asker expressed a clear desire for finding a non-risky solution.
More explicitly, what happened is this:
Group A¹ is currently experiencing a huge distress.
As a result, a professor was requested to make an exam of “questions that relate to life experiences of marginalized minorities”.
The question asks how a professor can tactfully decline such a request.
Your answer suggest to make an exam about the experiences of Group B, which would comply with the literal request (since Group B also is a marginalised minority), but is obviously not what the request aimed for.
Taking some serious request overly literal is a rude, practical joke and light years away from a tactful reaction. Doing this when dealing with an extremely painful topic is even worse.
The last point is independent of who Group A and B exactly are, what exactly their experiences are, and how these experiences compare to each other, in particular this is not about which group had it worse.
It also does not matter whether the request in question is valid or not.
¹ Mind that I am using placeholders here because the exact identities of the groups do not matter for the point I am making here.
Rude practical joke? The answer has a strong argument for it, Japanese-Americans suffered horrendously during WW2. "Offensive" can't be an acceptable reason to delete something since it is a completely subjective feeling. Some Canadian-American might be offended by the answer because it didn't mention that minority, but would you take such a remark seriously?
@MassimoOrtolano No one in this thread is able to make an argument for their opinion which is a pretty strong indication that it is wrong.
@d-b: Just because you disagree with the arguments or even if they should be completely wrong doesn’t mean they do not exist. Quoting an excerpt from my answer and putting a question mark behind it is not a counter-argument which you can expect to solicit a reasonable response. Nobody disagreed with your assessment of Japanese American history. Finally, offensive can indeed be an acceptable reason to delete something as you should know. If you want to fight that battle, this is not the right place to do it.
Your addition in particular this is not about which group had it suggests to me that the subject answer is an NAA.
@scaaahu: I have the feeling you misunderstand me, but I don’t know how to clarify: When I say that “this is not about which group had it worse”, this refers to my assessment on why the answer in question is rude. I concur that the answer in question is NAA (since it does not address the question of how to tactfully decline), but the primary problem is that it is rude (which is also what this meta question is about), partially because of making an excessively bad suggestion.
This is a very poorly reasoned explanation. I don't see how you can infer all this from an answer that has almost no content.
@AnonymousPhysicist: I am only drawing two things from the answer itself: 1) What is being suggested (which would horribly backfire while complying with the letter of the request). 2) Taking the request overly literal was the intention of the author. — I don’t think we disagree about Point 1. Point 2 is by it’s nature a judgement call and I can see that from the post alone, one might be inclined to assume negligence instead of intention. However, previous and subsequent comments (most of which are now deleted) do not support that assumption.
Neither of those points are supported by the content of the answer. The "suggestion" does not include enough information to determine what implementation would look like, and therefore does not tell us if it would "backfire" or not. There is also no evidence you are wrong. I did not see the deleted comments, but it's the answer you have labeled offensive.
I think the answer deserved to be deleted because it didn't make much sense, and could be considered spam.
It's completely possible that it was a well-intentioned post. It's also possible it's based on nasty obnoxious intentions. There just is not enough information to tell, since "look how that turned out" is vague.
The answer is also misinformed. Concentration camps still exist and people are sent to them now.
Wrzlprmft said "Taking some serious request overly literal is a rude" but I see no way to connect this argument to the answer in question.
Where/how does concentration camp exist today in America?
@hensti: Why America?
@user111388 Because the question concerned America.
I think your answer was removed for the wrong reason. I agree that it requires quite a stretch to claim it's offensive, but - it's true that "this seems to be more of a ... comment than a ... answer".
Also, what @AnonymousPhysicist said.
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4757 | Can the predefined off topic reason for closing please link to the on topics description?
I'm not sure who is actually responsible for the 'reasons for closing' choices when voting to close so I don't know how to get it edited. One of the options is that it is off topic. But that reason does not actually link to https://academia.stackexchange.com/help/on-topic, the only link is to a meta discussion about undergraduate being within scope in certain situations. As well as voting to close, I left a comment that the content of research is off topic and included the link, but that sort of thing should happen automatically.
Related: New audience-specific texts for our custom close reasons.
This seems like a good idea to me. Let's wait a little while to make sure there is a consensus, and then we'll make the change.
To be clear, the current close reason in question in this: We can turn "outside our community's scope" into a hyperlink to the help center.
Note, this would only change what the close-voter sees when they are voting to close. The question-asker is already provided with a post notice that includes a link to the document in question:
Higher-rep users are given a different close notice, but this also includes the link:
Edit 22 July 2020: This is done.
If I had realised the OP gets a link to the relevant help once there are enough votes, then I wouldn't have left the comment on the question that triggered me to ask about this. But I would still find it useful to have the link in the vote closing text because I had to hunt it down to check the wording of the 'content of research' bit.
This will put us four characters over the limit – Not necessarily. [clearly outside our community’s scope](/help/on-topic) should work and that’s within the character limit.
I had no idea you could reference "local paths" like that! Awesome.
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4447 | Add tag "reference-letter" as a synonym for "recommendation-letter"
Can someone please create the tag reference-letter as a synonym for recommendation-letter? The tag-info excerpt at recommendation-letter begins:
Questions on recommendation or reference letters ...
so it's clear that reference letter is an accepted idiom for the same concept. But users who begin to type reference when entering a tag into a new question are tempted to choose references, which redirects to citations, and is usually not what was intended.
(A recent example is this question Can I ask a non-academic for an academic letter of recommendation?, which was originally tagged citations.)
I just added the synonym. Enjoy!
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4422 | How do I find out which user I had this conversation with?
In this chatroom I'd expect there to be a short exchange between me and another user about the issue of comments being deleted because they express opinions that offend someone. However, those comments aren't there for some reason.
Question: How do I find out who I was talking to so that I can discuss this issue?
The only comment you made or that was @ addressed to you that wasn't copied to the chat room was one made to https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/13301/gillonba
They do not seem to be in the room and I cannot seem to super ping them into the room. It is probably better to create a new room to discuss comment deletion anyways.
Thanks. $;;!!$
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4724 | Should we turn the cap the other way?
I was noticing something just now around the toolbar. This is what it looks like for me on the regular site:
and this is what it looks like for me on the meta site:
Looking at those pictures, do I have four badges on the regular site and two on the meta site, or do I have 14 badges and 12 badges? At first I actually had trouble telling, and the reason is that the tail of the cap in the toolbar looks like it could potentially be the number "1".
I recommend potentially moving the tail of the cap from the right to the left. It shouldn't cause problems with the reputation score in this case, partially because of a much greater margin between the reputation and the graphic, and partially because of different colors between them.
It's possible there may be other places on this site which would have trouble with the tail being on the left, in which case I recommend one of three things: Either alternate which side the tail is on, increase the margin between the cap and the badge count, or just redesign the graphic for the cap.
This is a fantastic point, well highlighted. I think this is partly an issue of your fonts, though. Just because I imagine UI team will ask... do you have any script blockers or UI changing extensions loaded? Also, browser/machine info?
@eykanal Thanks, just AdblockPlus really. This is in Firefox on a Windows 10 machine.
I second @eykanal; for me, the tassel ends well below the line the numbers appear on and it is not easily confused as part of the number.
Since Academia has graduated from beta, it makes sense that the tassel is on the right (looking at it, left if you were under the cap). I propose leaving the tassel as is.
For those, like me, who have never had to don such a cap: is there a preferred position for the tassel?
@MassimoOrtolano - one enters the graduation ceremony with the tassel to the left and, at the appropriate moment everyone switches the tassel over to the right (their left/right) signifying that they are now graduated. No clue when the tradition started...
And, after receiving an undergraduate degree, the tassel is always worn on the left. This applies both to faculty members (or others) attending the ceremony in regalia, as well as to students receiving higher degrees.
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4735 | On the closure of “Are there any scientific papers that were retracted by the publisher due to the reader comments?”
Yesterday, I asked a question in Academia.SE: Are there any scientific papers that were retracted by the publisher due to the reader comments?
Disclaimer: I am not racist, and I am fully aware that this paper was written with crooked intentions. I do not approve the motivation of the authors who published this study.
With this said, I genuinely wondered whether there are any other publications that were retracted with the same official reason:
because of the sources cited within the article, and critical comments from readers.
Wrzlprmft stated in the comments:
I am closing this question because:
Taken literally, it asks for a
list with no best answer.
The next best question is whether this is
commonly accepted practice, however, until the retraction notice is
published, it is not clear what this is.
Even then, the question
must outline clear criteria on the answers to avoid being overrun with
people sharing their opinion on the retraction.
So, I looked up some questions. Those are the ones I immediately found when I typed "are there" in the search box:
Are there any trustworthy Mathematics fee-based open access journals?
Are there any examples of legal issues with academic fraud?
Are there any guidelines for labeling axes in plots/graphs?
Are there any researcher digital identification services or directories, similar to ORCID and ResearcherID?
Which tells me that (1) is not really a reason to close a question.
Also, (2) is plain wrong, because in the very same link I have posted, there is official retraction announcement, and I have written that verbatim in the question.
As for (3), I am willing to give examples from the top questions in Academia.SE:
How should I deal with discouragement as a graduate student?
How to avoid procrastination during the research phase of my PhD?
How to avoid being falsely accused of harassment by a student?
How to read papers without falling into a rabbit hole?
None of those questions meet the criterion: “[T]he question must outline clear criteria on the answers to avoid being overrun with people sharing their opinion.”
Bryan Krauses comments encouraged me to check some questions that are answered by the users who voted to close my question for opinion-based:
What are some good ways to keep students coming to lectures?
Reasons for not releasing bottom-line answers to old exam questions?
How to avoid and address a lack of gender diversity in grant proposals?
What am I being paid for? (postdoc)
How to write the data section when data is reused from a previous work?
I believe my PhD dissertation was unfairly graded too low (cum laude): what should I do?
I got the following comment from a reputed math journal. What does it mean?
If the above questions are not opinion-based, I firmly believe that my question is very much not opinion based.
I asked the question over a simple debate with my colleagues. They claimed that there are many papers retracted without any solid reason, I claimed that there should be at least one clear reason or the follow-up actions should be taken.
By follow-up actions I mean:
Re-evaluation of all the publications that took the approval of the same reviewers and editors.
If the sources used are not credible (as in the official notice), then the papers those are based on those resources, in which 15 of them are published by Elsevier, should also be retracted.
It should be clearly stated that why are the resources not credible, and how was it determined after eight whole years. Because the paper in question is a survey paper, and one cannot claim it was falsified data because the data they provide were already published many years ago.
Facts:
I have formed my question very well, and clear.
This is a genuine question, stated out of curiosity, without any provocation or comments on the matter.
The answer to my question can be one example, or many examples. There is absolutely no restriction in the rules of the site which states that I cannot ask a question of which answers can be many.
None of the reasons that were stated as the reasons for closing are accurate (see above).
My question:
Why was my question voted to close, and was closed by one of the moderators? Has Academia SE become a place where we cannot even ask questions due to current political situations?
Personally, I thought it sounded like you were intending to criticize the retraction, particularly by mentioning the "right practice" which implies that this was the wrong one, and later in comments that seemed to indicate little understanding of why a paper would be retracted for these reasons. If instead you had the goals mentioned here, that was not at all clear. It also seems like you might have been asking a bit of an XY question that isn't going to elicit answers to address the actual debate you had.
@BryanKrause Duly noted. However, I would still argue that if my question implies that the practice is the wrong one, then one of the answers could be "you are wrong about your assumptions." Still, I don't believe that this is a reason to close the question. If needed, I can sill provide many examples of similar questions which assume false things.
There are lots of questions that are left open that shouldn't be, based on one of the 'bad subjective' cases at https://academia.stackexchange.com/help/dont-ask Sometimes they just fall through the cracks, other times the types of questions allowed fluctuates over time.
@BryanKrause I agree, there are many questions that got slipped out of attention. But those questions are not cars crossed through a DUI. They don't just go away. They are still there. They have answers, and even accepted answers. But no action taken against them.
It may interest you that the retraction notice has now been issued.
@Wrzlprmft Thanks for the notice!
I voted to close the question because it did not have internal logical consistency.
First you quoted:
This retraction comes after a thorough review of the published article, the sources cited within the article, and critical comments from readers.
Then you said:
I wonder whether there are other examples which the publisher retracts an article because of the sources cited within the article, and critical comments from readers.
The quote you gave did not include a retraction reason. The quote is only a statement of what occurred. The logical inconsistency is because you changed "comes after" to "because."
Therefore, I voted to close as unclear. In fact, the question was sufficiently unclear that I am unsure if it is opinion-based. It is also possible that it is a shopping question.
People often select the wrong close reason.
My first point is about taking your question (“[Are there] other examples which the publisher retracts an article because of […]”) literally.
This is admittedly not the best approach, but it’s one which you have to expect others to take when answering and which is easy:
If the literal question is already clear and without any problems, that prevents a lot of problems right from the start and we do not have to go much further (except for bewaring of the XY problem).
Unfortunately, your literal question has the problems I described:
It asks for a list and presumably a lot of answers will be equal and going by your introduction, some answers won’t satisfy you, e.g., if we provided you with an article that has been retracted because half of the citations point to nowhere.
Now, while the literal approach highlights some issues with your question, I do not think this is how you wanted your question to be understood, which brings us to the next point.
So, I looked up some questions. Those are the ones I immediately found when I typed "are there" in the search box:
[…]
Some of these questions are indeed problematic given our current rules and what we know to work well and I closed the first one for that reason.
If my vote didn’t unilaterally close, I would also close the last one; feel free to cast a close vote if you agree.
Others have not been answered with a list of items because they were not taken literally, which brings us again to the next point.
In general, there are some old questions which should be closed but aren’t.
If you stumble upon them, please flag or vote to close.
Also, (2) is plain wrong, because in the very same link I have posted, there is official retraction announcement […]
Said retraction announcement ends with:
The retraction notice is currently being finalized and will appear in the journal imminently.
My understanding of this is that we can expect a detailed elaboration of the retraction in the next weeks.
At the time I posted this answer, the article in question showed no sign of the retraction. Now, two weeks later, it does and this notice is clearly different from what you linked.
While questions about the rationale of the journal may be appropriate on this site, we can only speculate about this rationale from the brief outline given in the announcement.
I do not think any good can come from this kind of speculation.
None of those questions meet the criterion "the question must outline clear criteria on the answers to avoid being overrun with people sharing their opinion."
Here, the topic of your question indeed is relevant as it makes it considerably more likely that it will escalate into a debate about the retraction itself, attract trolls and racists, and cause other problems.
The comments your question attracted so far already give a taste of this.
This is not primarily your fault, but good intentions do not suffice to prevent this.
A good (but not perfect) way to avoid such problems is to be as specific as possible about the answers you want (again bewaring of the XY problem) and thus excluding pure opinions, etc.
So: Yes, I am putting your question under higher scrutiny, but not to censor the topic but to ensure that it stays within our guidelines and to be able to have questions and answers about it without attracting trouble.
In general, closing a question is about avoiding answers and thus – strictly speaking – it is not about the way the question is phrased or intended but about the answers we expect it to receive.
Often this does not make a difference, but here it does:
I closed your question because it bears a high risk to attract a problematic collection of answers in its current state for several reasons.
You also revealed your motivation (the Y to the X, if you so wish):
I asked the question over a simple debate with my colleagues. They claimed that there are many papers retracted without any solid reason, I claimed that there should be at least one clear reason or the follow-up actions should be taken. By follow-up actions I mean […]
There are many opinion-based aspects about this: What exactly constitutes the solid reason your colleagues talk about? You on the other hand talk about what should be done. We do not answer how the world should be here, we can only discuss how it is. Yes, we have ethics, but that should always be with respect to either generally accepted standards (e.g., on plagiarism), a specified authority (e.g., COPE), or at least solicit a neutral assessment of the ethical dilemmas.
"In general, closing a question is about avoiding answers" I'd really prefer if it were about making it easy to find questions the community is good at answering, by getting rid of bad questions.
@AnonymousPhysicist: I do not see much of a contradiction here. Broadly speaking, if the community can reasonably answer a question, there usually are no problems with the answers, and thus answers do not need to be avoided.
@AnonymousPhysicist I think many people, including veteran users of the sites, forget that question closure is a temporary state when no positive answers have yet been posted. It allows for the question to be edited and reopened in a way that will attract good answers, and prevents someone from providing an answer in the meantime that becomes invalidated by future edits to move the question within site guidelines. The purpose of "close" is to prevent people from making effort to answer a question that will either be changed or removed in the future.
Calling any question an XY problem is not good - it's for the asker to determine if the answer doesn't match his or her needs, not the answerer or anyone else.
@Allure: In general, that’s utopic and dangerous. Answering the Y of an XY problem often is harmful to the asker as it pushes them further down a dead end of thinking. In particular on a “soft-topic” site like this, context matters and we must not ignore it. Moreover, if askers could identify the specific question they need to ask, they would have enough knowledge that they would not need to ask in the first place. This particular case is a bit different: If you ignore context, we can only answer the literal question, which brings us to Point 1 and all its problems.
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4534 | What's it like being a moderator on Academia Stack Exchange?
For the upcoming and future elections, could you please describe what it is like being a moderator on Academia Stack Exchange?
In particular:
What are your most time-consuming or challenging duties?
What are the specificities of this site?
Acknowledgement
Idea blatantly stolen from Graphics Design Stack Exchange.
10k+ users with moderator privileges - please post answers as well! This is a great question and shouldn't be limited to diamond answers.
@StrongBad Considering the answers so far, I do not understand why there are moderator elections right now. Apparently moderator is a permanent position. So why are new elections needed?
@AnonymousPhysicist because we need more help. We had a private conversation amongst ourselves about our availability going forward and the amount of work/time moderating requires and decided that having two more people would make things better.
I agree that five mods for the size of this site puts a lot of burden on each. I compare this with a beta site I frequent that has three. And occasionally one or more of the diamonds might have external responsibilities (or even vacations) that take them away.
I've been a bit over 10k rep for a year or so and have never used any of the "moderator tools". They don't seem very useful to me. I edit a few tags, I guess.
Can any current mods give an indication of roughly how many hours a month they spend on it?
Are there any concerns that we have no candidates yet with only 2 days to go? Is that normal?
Hmmm. Was it the above comment that kicked you over the line?
@Buffy I was kicked by various stimuli :-) But we still lack of enough candidates :-(
I think you would be a good choice, but there are others who, I think, would not be. I wrote a new meta to raise the issue of too few candidates.
Some old questions get bumped to the top of the active queue by "Community". Usually they have few or no answers. Is this an explicit mod activity or always a bot (or a mixture)?
@Buffy It's an automated process from the Community user, see the answer to this faq: "The Community user will bump non-negatively scored, open questions every hour that have at least one answer scoring 0 and none scoring more than that."
But is the "Community user" a bot or a human person? Or, is it ever not a bot?
@Buffy, no, it's not human. As defined here, it is an automated user agent. You can also click on its profile to see the description. I don't know whether it could be defined as a bot or not.
Nice question! Here's my two cents, with the caveat that this is only me; different mods moderate differently.
Time-consuming – This is a fairly laid-back site to moderate. Sure, flags pop up and comments need to be migrated and occasional bad actors pop up, but the community is pretty mature by now. The number of bad actors is quite low. The most time consuming part is just dealing with mundane flags. Pretty straightforward.
Challenging – Moderators need to be willing to make people unhappy. In almost all cases, the person you are making unhappy is making a lot of other people unhappy, hence the moderation. That said, the fact that your job involves unilaterally silencing/removing/disciplining bad actors does take a certain personality. Don't sign up for this job expecting everyone to like you.
On a similar note, you're going to make mistakes, and they'll be pretty public (cough), and you'll have to own up to it, or at least bear your frustration in silence. That can be challenging.
Specifics to Academia.SE – There are a few of these, and my expectation is that if you're considering running for moderator, you should be familiar with general site mores. We tend to leave chat discussions running for longer than some other sites. We tend to treat off-topic questions somewhat strictly. In my opinion, we are a good deal slower/less inclined to close questions as duplicates than I think we should be. There are probably a bunch of other nuances, hopefully the regulars can help with this list.
Edit to add: @Buffy, touché. It's worth mentioning that this comment thing is a completely typical moderator brouhaha. You do something that (you think) is what the community wants based on history/old meta posts/community mores/"its what we always do"/whatever, and then 20+ people publicly disagree with/pile on you, and any reply you make will probably be used against you in some way. If you're the kind of person who would get really bothered by this, you may not want to be a moderator.
To be fair, this has been the most kind public disagreement I've seen in a while, so props to the whole community for not being meanieheads on this one.
I've noticed that comment threads are often very long.
@Buffy - amended answer :)
Hmmm, actually it wasn't a criticism of you or the practice. Just a comment. I'm active at CSEducators where a comment stream of 5 is getting to be too long. Someone on this site complained that moving comments to chat removes the possibility of deleting their own comments. I try to delete my own obsolete comments when I notice them. But the longer comment streams was one of the first things I noticed when I started to get active here.
@Buffy I think that many questions here need comments because frequently the askers or the answerers do not give enough context or present a very limited point of view and the academic world is really diverse.
@Buffy - Ah, I thought you were referring to a recent set of comments I deleted that caused a minor kerfluffle. Generally, yes, comment threads here are long, which is why we migrate a lot of comment threads to chat.
Blatantly stealing from my own answer on Graphic Design SE, but accounting for Academia’s peculiarities:
First of all, the following are “duties” for the moderators as a team.
An individual moderator can always decline a specific task.
Also, a moderator can always take a break when they see fit.
I would group the main moderator activities into three categories:
Flag handling
This can be all sorts of things from rudeness over migration requests to too many comments on a post. You can find some statistics on flag handling here, but it doesn’t tell you what kind of flags we get.
Most importantly, the amount of time consumed by different flags varies wildly. For example, a clear case of a question posted as an answer with an existing constructive comment can be handled in five seconds. However, a too-many-comments flag usually requires you to read the question, answer, and all the comments and then make a decision which should be left where they are, completely deleted, or moved to a chatroom.
The most prominent kind of flags in times of consumed handling time are certainly too-many-comments and individual comment flags. Since Academia by nature attracts a lot of comments, it also generates a lot of these flags.
Investigating and addressing problematic behaviour
This can be users who are frequently rude, commit vote fraud, perform consistently bad reviews, post subtle spam, vandalise their own posts, etc. Moderators have the tools to investigate this and react accordingly, which usually involves at least a moderator message and often a suspension.
Such cases are more time-consuming than the average flag, but they happen less often. In 2018, we sent 48 mod messages, and this probably counts multiple messages, when there was some back and forth between the user and the moderators.
The challenge here is to gather the relevant information (with tools), read and assess it, decide how to react, and finally to communicate the result to the user in a constructive manner.
I second StrongBad’s answer that one of the perks of Academia SE is there are very few users in the grey zone where you don’t know whether to do nothing, to warn, or to suspend.
On the other hand, since we deal with life-changing decisions, sensitive information, and ideologically charged topics quite frequently, things occasionally get serious.
Typical manifestations are suicidal users, users wanting to purge all their content from the site, and users calling you a nazi because you deny them their constitutional right to be an arsehole.
Governance
Moderators can change some parts of the site’s interface and mechanics such as certain parts of the help centre, close reasons, tag synonyms, etc. In most cases, these are initiated by a community consensus. Moderators also act as an interface between the community and Stack Exchange (the company).
In my opinion, moderators also need to incite discussions on meta and propose community rules if there is a pressing need.
Sometimes, only moderators can notice such problems since they have access to more information and see the community from a different angle.
However, on Academia often the community takes the initiative here, and there are few such issues nowadays, since – at least as I see it – our policies have converged to something that works well and finds broad agreement within the community.
These activities can consume some time, but if they do, they are fortunately not very urgent.
I am happy to add more if people ask specifics ...
To give you an idea of workload, as a team we handle about 150 flags and delete 500 posts a month. Most of the flags are related to obsolete comments and easy to handle and the vast majority of the deleted posts are comments, many of which are moved to chat. We contact users privately about rule violations and suspensions a couple of times a month.
Before becoming a mod on AC.SE, I was a moderator on a smaller beta site. This means I had knowledge about the tools and thought I understood what the job would be like. I assumed the worst part would be dealing with problematic users (the ones we have to contact by private message), but I was wrong. Our problematic users tend to either need to simply be told/reminded what the rules are or their behavior is so obviously problematic that all we have to do as moderators is go deleted (and I get to say it in my Strongbad voice). We really don't have many instances where we labor on a decision about what to do and when these cases do happen, a short discussion with the other moderators (both here and across the network) generally leads to a reasonable solution. I actually find it rewarding when my actions steer a user into becoming a valued contributor and when I can clean up obvious junk.
The thing that I find most difficult as a moderator is dealing with long chains of comments. Deciding when they should be moved to chat and which ones to leave behind takes a lot of time and thought. No matter the decision, people get upset. These comment conversations happen frequently enough such that after being alerted by flags, we act unilaterally (we if we screw up we can always un-delete the comments). Again, in terms of scope, while we don't track how many comment threads we move to chat, with only 500 deleted posts a month, we maybe move 15-20 threads in a month as a team.
"Deciding when they should be moved to chat and which ones to leave behind takes a lot of time and thought." You know, ignoring them is perfectly fine. I ignore quite a lot of the comments that are not deleted.
@AnonymousPhysicist but that is not what the community wants and being a mod means sometimes having to do what the community wants. I will also point out, that in most cases, once the comment chain gets long, they tend to devolve and lead to bad behavior.
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5204 | Why was this offensive?
Why would I ever create a new exam when I can just re-use an old exam and then accuse any student of obtaining a copy as cheating? was deleted as rude or abusive. Why?
I was not involved in the deletion of your question, and this is not an answer to your meta question. However, you have been here long enough that you should have a good sense of what we do here. The question was basically: "Is it ethical to reuse the same exam each year and accuse students of cheating when they find out the exam questions?" There is no reason such a post should require > 500 words, five numbered questions, and references to Edward Snowden and short skirts.
@cag51 I have insufficient rep points to see the deleted question, but is it related to https://movies.stackexchange.com/questions/118499/in-s3-of-veronica-mars-wallace-buys-previous-exam-papers-answer-keys-is-his/ ?
@YemonChoi - looks like it, the last link on that movies.SE post points toward the one under discussion here. Though, the (much longer) post on academia neglected to mention that the question was inspired by a movie.
I wasn't involved in deleting the question either. However, pulling it up it strikes me as intending to provoke outright, and provoke a discussion, using currently trendy buzzwords and topics galore for maximum division. This is not a discussion site.
Side note: this seems to be part of an eight year old occasional rehash of the concept of studying previous university exams questions and answers and whether that should or should not be considered cheating or an honor code/integrity violation. Recently the saga bled into Movies.SE. Oldest post from this asker on the subject that I can find is here: https://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/27872/when-is-it-wrong-to-look-at-previous-exams also see: https://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/27871/are-identical-make-up-exams-fair
I was not involved in the deletion of your question. But here is why I would arrive at the same decision:
Taken out of context, your last paragraph is misogynistic victim blaming.
Within context, I have the problem that your post is not really clear (it has too many unclear references and does not describe its line of thought well) and thus I cannot tell why that paragraph is there.
Thus, I turn to the most lenient interpretation (in dubio pro reo) of why that paragraph is there:
You want to illustrate the concept of victim blaming to somebody who never heard it.
But even then, the word choices and tone of the paragraph are totally out of place and re-iterate the victim blaming itself, thus violating the Code of Conduct:
No bigotry.
We don’t tolerate any language likely to offend or alienate people based on […] gender, […]. […]. When in doubt, don't use language that might offend or alienate.
Posting incomprehensible text is abuse. Please consult the help before posting questions.
We all write something that is accidentally incomprehensible occasionally and some of us are worse at avoiding this than others. Posting something incomprehensible only constitutes abuse if it is intentional. I see no indication that this applies here.
@Wrzlprmft I do not agree that intent is required. I vote to close based on contents of a question, not intent.
Sure, intent doesn’t matter for closing as unclear (or for any other reason), but abuse is something different. You wouldn’t flag every unclear question as abusive.
Correct; but "unclear" is not an accurate description of this particular post. "Incomprehensible" is.
Why juxtapose the two sentences in your previous comment then? This is not about closing the question for being incomprehensible (which I would agree with) but for considering it abusive for being incomprehensible.
It was simply an example of a common situation where intent is not relevant. Talking about intent is pointless in the context of this site, where everything is just text someone posted.
Talking about intent is pointless in the context of this site – If somebody post something that is intentionally incomprehensible, it’s vandalism, and the default action is to flag as rude/abusive and nuke or suspend the user (as diamond moderators). You would not do this if something is incomprehensible on account of an honest mistake (e.g., a sentence missing its verb). Of course, we cannot divine true intent, so everything of the above has to be modified with “with reasonable certainty”, but that applies to every analogue interaction as well.
@Wrzlprmft Missing one word is not what I meant by incomprehensible text, and I think you knew that.
No, then I honestly have no idea what you mean. I see missing one crucial word (from a short question) as bad as the post in question in terms of incomprehensibility – whether I look at how difficult it is to divine the actual question, the estimated lack of diligence, or the probability of intent. In particular I see no difference between this post and a short question with a crucial missing word that could make exactly one of them abusive by any criteria for abusiveness.
Are we looking at the same question?? I have some issues with it, but incomprehensibility isn't one of them.
@ScottSeidman Apparently not.
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4528 | Can I ask about my previous employer asking me not to publish?
I want to ask the following question, but am not sure if it is appropriate for this site. Can you help me tell if it is okay to ask here? If not, can you point to a better forum?
I consider myself part of the community of scholars. I have a few publications, but have worked (hard) in industry for more than a decade.
I had a former colleague, one who works at a former employer, review a paper that I was planning to publish. They shared it internally, and the company requests that I not publish. They say: “The only people who would care are the competition.” I've put some decent hours in it. Do they have the right to do that, to tell me that I can't publish, if the content isn't theirs and/or isn't (remotely) confidential?
I agree with the bulk of wrzlprmft's assessment, but I slightly disagree with the conclusion. I think this would be an interesting question.
The first point is something you should include to the best of your ability in the question itself ("my contract limits my ability to...") and will probably address more in comments as users probe. The second one is partly what you're looking to find out. The third one, while specific to your situation, is only moderately relevant, as I'm not really sure that it matters that much. Assuming we're talking about work done at the company in question (and not, for example, a WayMo/Uber situation), the only work that matters is what you did. The last question about relationship is always a factor but something you'll always have to assess for yourself.
That all said, there are a number of visitors to this site who are academics working in industry, particularly in computer sciences. From our FAQ:
This site is for academics of all levels – from students to senior researchers – as well as anyone in or interested in research-related or research-adjacent fields.
If you have a question about...
inner workings of research departments,
academic writing and publishing,
...then you're in the right place!
In that light, this definitely seems on-topic to me.
The answer to your question mainly depends on four things:
What exact contract did you sign with your former employer?
What is the pertaining legislation?
To what extent does the paper build on things you did, learnt, or similar while working for that employer?
How much do you value your relationship to your previous employer?
I therefore do not think your question would be well received for two reasons:
In its current form, we can only answer with: “It depends (on the above points).” We tend to close such questions.
It is not really about academia, but about intellectual property in an industry setting. Your employer probably does not care whether you publish in an academic journal, on your blog, or similar.
The only exception from this is if you think for some reason that your employer is challenging your right of publication on basis on the rules for academic authorship only, but that would be rather unusual.
As for obtaining an answer to your question, I strongly suggest that you answer the four initial questions. Obviously most of these can only be answered by yourself. If you need help to understand the relevant laws in general, your question may be suited for The Workplace or Law SE. Note that on neither site (and the rest of the Internet) you will find free individual legal advice.
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4673 | Can we help support faculty suddenly thrust into online learning?
I don't know how much help I can be, but I've created a chat room where people who suddenly find themselves in a situation where they have to entirely change their teaching toolset in the next few weeks can post resources, or at the very least, collectively whine.
I suppose this meta-thread can also serve as an exchange of sorts, if no one objects.
Nice initiative, thanks!
@MassimoOrtolano -- my worry is that at the universities where faculty find themselves in this situation, on site support mechanisms will be absolutely swamped, and giving these people a place to try to get some help is a good idea.
My institution has just decided to move instruction offline for all students after next week's spring break, likely due to fears of students returning from various vacations despite the fact that cases in our local region are low right now. I suspect many others will be making the same considerations. Seems like this is a good initiative, thanks.
This is a good idea. I was also wondering about this in regards to software shopping questions. We've had at least three recently:
Creating a secure test environment for a lab practical
Alternatives to big-name proprietary remote-lecturing tools
Software to live-stream presentations
Two of which are closed, and one which I expect will be. But at the same time, this seems like a reasonable site to come to in order to find this sort of information. Should we direct these sorts of questions to the chat?
Those would be very welcome in the chat, but I wouldn't close the questions either, if they're good questions. The level of support people need might not fit perfectly into the Q\A model, which was my real motivation for starting the room. Ideally, what we would do is open an online teaching SE, and be lax on enforcing rules.
Maybe a community wiki in meta or the main site would be a good idea. I'm a little out of my league here.
It might be worth opening this as a separate Meta question, and clarifying what the limits to "shopping" should be in these cases. The shopping close reason doesn't get too specific on this, and it seems like https://academia.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/4062/what-to-do-with-questions-asking-to-evaluate-commercial-online-services is the main guide instead, which seems more narrow than the types of questions that are being closed.
@BryanKrause That was actually what I originally intended to do, but then I saw this question and added it here. I went ahead and followed your suggestion too.
Here is the separate meta post about what to do with the links in question (and related ones)
I created a Meta post to welcome and guide people visiting our site for this particular reason, collecting relevant questions and giving instructions for new questions. Please contribute, in particular by collecting relevant questions.
A few other groups are also busy in this field and open to participation:
EFF
FSFE
FSF
IFLA
NOYB
SFC
In other languages:
Chapril
Continuité Pédagogique
Framasoft
iorestoacasa.work
Italian Wikibooks
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5287 | New contributor to Academia, inquiring about if discussing studying methods are fair game
I am new to this site, and as such, I would like to inquire on whether questions about studying and studying methods, in general, are fair game on this website. (I cannot ask a question on Meta yet, as this is my first question on this site.) If not, I would like to know where you can ask these questions. Much appreciated!
Study methods are very individual, so there is not a ‘right’ answer.
@JonCuster: While many questions on this topic may suffer from this problem, there are certainly questions that are sufficiently narrowed down or objective, e.g. “What are the pros and cons of Method X?”
Okay, thank you for your help! Have a good day!
In principle they can be on-topic. However, you will need to take care when framing your question, because:
Undergraduate issues are off-topic
Questions whose answers are a matter of opinion are not allowed
Questions whose answers depend very much on an individual or their circumstances are not allowed (because they wouldn't be useful to others)
Agree, though for the first bullet, I think our stance is that undergraduate "admissions, life, and culture" are off topic. Most aspects of undergraduate coursework and research are on topic.
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4325 | Do the answers and opinions on Academia Stack Exchange reflect the opinion of whole academic community?
I'm wondering what is the similarity percentage of answers and opinions, which are given on Academia Stack Exchange to users, to the opinion of academic community as a bigger entity? In other words, do the answers here necessarily reflect the accepted answers to questions or problems of whole academic community?
The reason why I’m asking this question is that when I see the profile or background of people who give answers to the question on this site, it seems the active people here are the individuals who really care about computer stuffs but their research is not necessarily about computers or computer science. So, maybe this similarity could bias the answers in a certain direction, which may not reflect the opinion of the academic community as a bigger entity. I mean, a lot of experienced and old professors in the academic community don’t even know this site exists. My question is basically: if someone answers a question, how similar is this answer to a hypothetical answer if you would ask someone in academic community who is not on this site?
Why downvote?! If someone thinks this question has some problems, please discuss it here...
I didn't downvote, but I don't see how this is really answerable. Most people here are pretty open about their background, give answers as people with those backgrounds, and probe question-askers for context so they have some idea of how close they are to their own context. Often questions have different answers posted from people with different backgrounds.
There are (more than a few) questions on this site I didn't have an opinion on before reading others' answers. Assuming I'm not unique in this respect, how would you define the "opinion of the whole academic community" on such a question? For other cases things are so field-dependent that there certainly isn't a single "academia-global" opinion. (I also didn't downvote by the way.)
I also don't understand the 4 downvotes, especially since this place is supposed to be frequented by researchers. Knowing biases is important, that's interesting question.
In other words, do the answers here necessarily reflect the accepted
answers to questions or problems of whole academic community?
No. There's no reason or evidence to believe that this community is a representative sample of academia as a whole. And, as you note, a number of reasons to believe that this isn't the case - namely, that many of the natural "feeder" sites to introduce someone to Academia.SE are computational in nature.
To be frank, there's not even a guarantee that the answers to the questions reflect the whole community of this site. For example, if you ask a question about a field without particularly high coverage (my own, for example) and I'm not on the site for whatever reason, it's possible that that absence will skew the answers. We're not, when it comes down to it, a very large site.
That being said, there is a reason so many of the answers on this site boil down to: "It depends." and "Have you asked your supervisor?" Academia as a field is hugely diverse, and even among fairly homogeneous groups the answers to questions will vary considerably.
First of all and just to clarify, the goal of this site is not to collect personal opinions, but facts and best approaches to certain problems.
Given the nature of our subject (academia), this is only an ideal and often the best we can offer are educated opinions.
However, you will not find questions like “Should pay-to-view journals be outlawed?” or similar on this site (if you do, please flag to close as primarily opinion-based).
do the answers here necessarily reflect the accepted answers to questions or problems of whole academic community?
Of course there is a certain bias to the answers and votes given by this community due to its tendency towards computer-heavy fields and people who become active on such websites in the first place.
Here is an example, where a custom or rule completely differs between fields and this wasn’t reflected in the answers for about four years (still, all the previous answers did make appropriate disclaimers, so nobody can complain that we spread false information).
However, quantifying this bias would be largely infeasible:
You would have to make a large-scale survey soliciting the stance of a representative selection of persons from the academic community on a representative selection of questions on Stack Exchange – and ensure that you do not get a bias due to who will participate in such a survey.
That being said, we do not exist in a vacuum.
If there is a huge amount of people with differing opinions, some of them are bound to eventually stumble upon our site, and some of them in turn are bound to tell us that we are wrong on the Internet.
(And just in case we are censoring any dissent, somebody is bound to start a website informing the Internet about this – which hasn’t happened yet as far as I know.)
Now, for most of our questions, the general directions of answers align and votes merely indicate which answer presents the best reasoning or simply was first.
Cases with strongly dissenting answers are rare, and it rarely happens that somebody joins our site just to tell us how wrong we are.
I would consider this a good indicator that the aforementioned bias is not a huge issue when it comes to the correctness of answers.
All sub-samples contain bias unless inclusion is random - and inclusion to academia.stackexchange is anything but random. Certainly there is observer bias.
academia.stackexchange also contains feedback mechanisms like up/down voting, which like many online communities reinforces founder-behaviour: ideas, viewpoints, theories, etc that are majority-held views are promoted, while minority opinions are generally not. This is kind of the point of up/down voting, to rank answers by popularity as a proxy for validity.
Having said all that, the mods at academia.stackexchange try really hard to allow opinions from all sides of the discussion. Even if no one likes an argument, it will be allowed to remain up on the website. In other words, you will at least be exposed to a wide variety of opinions on SE, even if the results of voting are somewhat biased. It's not quite as wide as i personally would like, but I also think it's pretty ahead of the curve in general.
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4197 | Why was “Funding in mathematics from large companies as undergraduate” closed?
When I browse the questions on the issue of research funding, I found that this question was closed (I am not the author). Since I want to be more familiar with the norms of Academia Stack Exchange, I want to know why this question which ask for the funding sources was deemed off-topic.
I don't remember much, but, I think I had voted to close at that time due to following reasons: (a) it is somewhat a shopping question, (b) it is more like stated in an undergraduate situation -which I believe is not suitable for academiaSE.
@Coder: regarding b: Only very specific undergraduate situations are off-topic here; this is not one of them.
I believe the reaction is to the request for a list of funding sources. However, the question about whether or not it's appropriate to cold call companies and corporations could be a valid and appropriate question for Stack Exchange, particularly since it's funding undergraduate research (which is on-topic, even if many other UG issues are not!).
I found that the reasons people used to close or hold a question are quite subjective.
The reason given on the question page* is
This question is not within the scope of this site as defined in the help center. Our scope particularly excludes the content of research, education outside of a university setting, and undergraduate admissions, life, and culture.
I suspect this may have been a knee-jerk "it's about undergrads so it's off-topic!" reaction. Unfortunately, if people vote to close for multiple reasons, the site only displays the most common one.
Obviously, I don't remember my reasoning from six months ago but, looking at the question today, I believe my close vote would have been because:
“Shopping” questions, which seek recommendations or lists of individual universities, academic programs, publishers, journals, research topics, or similar as an answer or seek an assessment or comparison of such, are off-topic here.
I think sources of funding fall within "or similar". The question is just soliciting a big list of funding sources, and lists are generally discouraged on Stack Exchange.
* Quoted for context, in case the question is reopened.
This is my evaluation of the situation and how I think I would have voted, as well.
Note that I edited the question to specifically not ask for individual funding sources (which I guess was not the original intention anyway).
@Wrzlprmft "Are there any other kinds of funding sources I have not mentioned above?" still seems pretty listy.
Yes, but it’s a small finite, non-shopping list.
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5233 | Can a controversial post become an HNQ later?
There is a post on "Possible Grading Discrimination" on the main site which has been marked "Controversial Post"
Controversial Post — You may use comments ONLY to suggest improvements. You may use answers ONLY to provide a solution to the specific question asked above. Moderators will remove debates, arguments or opinions without notice.
This post has attracted about 200 views, but it's not in Hot Network Questions (HNQs). If a post is marked "Controversial", does it mean that it can no longer become an HNQ later? (probably, for a good reason)
Unless the algorithm has changed recently, questions that are flagged as controversial can still become hot network questions. Both of those states are generally caused by high traffic and the presence of multiple answers. However, moderators have the ability to remove a post from the HNQs. On Physics (where I am a mod), I usually remove controversial posts from the HNQs, because being listed as a HNQ tends to attract a lot of comments and answers from users who are not the most knowledgeable or thoughtful—which is exactly what a controversial post doesn't need. I don't know how the Academia moderators approach this, but see Moderators can now exclude questions from the HNQ list – when should we use this?
Exactly this. I think the post score matters too -- the linked post has a score of -3 as I write this (likely due to a very confusing exposition that has required many rounds of clarifications in comments), so an unlikely candidate for HNQ. In any case, I'd be surprised if post notices were triggers for other events, since each community can modify its post notices.
@cag51 The core formula does indeed take question score into account. As far as I'm aware, the gist of the formula is still applicable, though one should keep in mind it doesn't make explicit several factors. One factor that may be at play in the current case is that questions gets penalized if there are other questions from the same site on the HNQ list.
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5326 | Should we create a tag for ChatGPT-related questions?
At the moment, there are 81 posts with the phrase "chatGPT". Although it is generally not a favourite topic around here (but still will probably only become more relevant), I would say it is enough traffic about the topic that it would merit the creation of a chatgpt tag (or a more general tag that can be used for questions about the use of AI tools in the context of academia). Especially since artificial-inteligence is explicitly not for such questions, but only for questions concerning the study of or a career in AI.
To be clear, would this be a main site tag (about using such tools in real life), a meta tag (about using such tools here), or both?
A main site tag only for now. And just for clarification: creating such a tag is not meant as an encouragment to use ChatGPT or other AI tools, but simply as a folder to put such questions in (as they will very likely keep on coming) and we have tags with far fewer posts that exist.
Generative AI might be more inclusive.
As there have been some edit wars over this tag, I will feature this post to gain a consensus from the community. For now, please do not re-create the tag until there is a more clear consensus.
I agree that we should have a tag for this, being named generative-ai with genai and chatgpt as synonyms. The tag description should make clear that this is about the usage of generative AI in an academic setting, not about researching, understanding, or operating it.
This tag is useful, since:
Users can have a particular expertise on the legal, ethical, and other professional aspects of using generative AI in an academic context. Thus there are conceivably people who subscribe to this tag.
Questions on the subject are not necessarily easily searchable since there is no keyword that is certain to be used in such questions. A tag addresses this problem.
The only argument against it I heard so far is from Buffy in chat:
the questions aren't about generative ai, per se, but about its use as a writing tool.
I don’t see why this is a problem. As evidenced by the questions on it, using this tool raises ethical questions and this is some of the things this site is about. Understanding generative AI per se would be off-topic here, as would be questions on how to exactly operate it.
Unless there is a simplified UI that I am not aware of, there is no need for genai as a synonym to generative-ai. On both my computer and phone, if I type either "gen" or "ai" the longer form will pop up.
@Buffy: My thought was that the synonym shouldn’t cause any harm while it’s hard to capture all UI and usage cases. For example, somebody who quickly types genai into the tag field may not be offered [tag:generative-ai], as it is not a substring (to test this, you can use gradschool).
Should we forgo all abbreviations and go for [tag:generative-artificial-intelligence] as the main name instead?
@FedericoPoloni: In that particular case, I would argue that AI is already more common than artificial intelligence and will increasingly become even more so. Spelling it out would be as useful as spelling out JPEG or laser.
@Wrzlprmft As this is the answer with the most upvotes, should we create the tag [tag:generative-ai] now (including a tag wiki) and start (slowly, as per the suggestion of Buffy to not flood the active questions queue) migrating old questions that fit it?
@Sursula: Yes. Feel free to go ahead.
@Wrzlprmft I have created a tag with a short description, the wiki still needs to be created but that can happen later. I will retag the existing questions over the next few days with enough time between the questions to prevent spamming the active questions list with it.
@Wrzlprmft maybe you could add the "status completed" tag to the question?
@Sursula: I edited the tag wiki, created synonyms, and status-completed this.
I believe it makes sense to have a tag for generative AI related questions as there are quite a lot of them. There are tags for much less frequented topics and just the fact we might not like the topic itself (I'm with Buffy there) is IMO no justification to not create a tag and not make site navigation easier.
The creation of a tag also makes finding previous questions easier and might thus prevent duplicates.
But I completely agree that genai is a terrible tag name and that a description is needed.
Please don't add the new tag to too many old posts in a single day. Flooding the active questions page makes site usage harder, especially for those seeking help.
I believe genai is a terrible name (sorry), especially for those who don't speak English as a main language. Even gen-ai would be better, but if a tag is needed, then (strong opinion) spell it out: generative-ai, and hyphenate it. There is no downside to this with the current UI. A chatgpt tag is (IMO) too specialized. It is only an example.
Another strong opinion: If you want to add a new tag, and aren't a novice here, then, at least give it tag wiki. Had that been done then I might not have immediately started deleting it. Both the name (genai) and the lack of wiki led me to think it was a misspelling of something else.
I don't personally think a new tag is needed but won't object if it is clearer, both in name and intent (as stated in the wiki).
I do, however, have serious reservations about chatGPT and its ilk. I think it is taking us in a wrong direction. It isn't intelligent. It has no ethical sense. It has no judgement. Worse, it is now recursively getting worse as the "training" data is now too-much the old results that it created itself. I think it is dangerous for all use other than research in such tools, which might have potential, but now seem to present only danger.
Additionally, for this site, retagging 81 old questions with any new tag is a mistake unless done one or two at a time over many days. It floods out all of the new posts on the active questions page. We've faced this problem before in phasing out a poor tag.
"If you want to add a new tag, and aren't a novice here, then, at least give it tag wiki" fair point but sorry I've been avoiding writing wiki tags on SE since the https://money.meta.stackexchange.com/a/3089/5656 debacle.
I do, however, have serious reservations about chatGPT and its ilk. – Many of us do, but that doesn’t mean that people aren’t going to use it in an academic setting and people may have questions on how to handle this ethically, legally, and otherwise. To give an extreme counter-example, I hope that nobody here likes sexual misconduct, but that doesn’t mean it’s bad to have a tag about it.
I went ahead and created a tag following Bryan Krause's suggestion: genai.
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5359 | Can we hint to OPs that their question might be overly long?
Maybe it's just me, but I have the feeling that there is an increase in very long, very, very detailed posts, often not even formatted but wall-of-text style. I often stop reading midway through because it is very difficult to find the actual issue OP is inquiring about within the convoluted heaps of texts. And more often than not, those overly long posts tend to be unanswerable because they are dependent on individual factors. It often feels like people just need a place to tell their story.
Is there any way to add a pop-up that tells askers that their question might be too long and that they should try to shorten their question? I do not think a word limit is useful, as in some cases people might really do need such long questions. Just a short message popping up along the lines of
Your post is very long. If possible, try to keep it short and concise to increase the chance of good answers.
This answer on the StackOverflow meta mentions that a warning shows up when a user submits a post containing over 25 000 characters. It is unclear to me whether it applies to all sites or just to SO. If it is generic, perhaps the number could be customized on a per-site basis.
While it might be technically possible to install such a warning (I would have to ask staff), I am afraid it won’t be worth the effort.
By experience, most users who post overly detailed question cannot filter them down to what’s actually important to the question, either because they cannot do so in general or they don’t know what’s relevant in their particular case (after all, they are asking a question about it). This becomes most evident when authors of such questions are asked to shorten their question by commentors: Even when the authors honestly try, they are most often unable to properly shorten their question. Only when the commentors give explicit instructions related to the question, this has a good chance of working, but then it’s often easier if experienced users edit the question themselves.
Do you think popping up a message to ask the user to provide a TL;DR will be useful/helpful ?
@Nobody: Not really. Summarising is an even higher art form than sticking to what’s relevant.
You can warn them before they even start typing, but not after. Even if there was something that would pop up after there's a lot of text in the question, it wouldn't be effective since nobody is going to want to trash what they've already written to make it shorter—it's a lot of effort.
For what it's worth, I usually just pass on very long questions unless the headline is a real stunner or I have a special interest in the topic. A popup after a certain number of characters might help the OP. Adding something to help might help a bit.
Usually, the problem with walls of texts doesn't come from the fact that it is too thorough, but the lack of formatting. At least for me. A few line breaks there and there can make a difference.
@Clockwork: While those cases also exist, I don’t think this question is about them, but about questions that spread across several screens (let’s say five thousand chars upwards). Paragraphs alone won’t save these and many are also properly paragraphed from the start.
I think this is a good idea. I suspect that many new users assume that longer is better -- the more details they give, the more helpful we can be. And after they take the time to write a very long, detailed post, it can seem counter-intuitive when (seemingly) random people start commenting that the post needs to be shortened. While I agree with Wrzlprmft that users might not be able to fix up their posts without help, having the automated message will at least "plant the seed" that the post will need edited. This may make them more receptive to suggestions in the comments and suggested edits.
I would suggest something like:
Your post is very long. Concise, well-defined questions tend to get better answers. Remember, good questions are such that others in the future could potentially have the same question.
Unfortunately, we would have to ask staff to implement this for us. This is likely to take a long time to happen, if it happens at all.
If the question is not focused, vote to close with the "not focused" reason.
If the question is not useful, use the downvote button.
I think the proposal was targeted at what can be done before someone hits "post", trying to both prevent extra effort by the community on these posts and also perhaps improve the level of onboarding without making posting here feel unfriendly, where people start pointing out all the problems with your post as soon as it appears. I don't think there is disagreement about the range of options available to everyone else after a post like this appears.
@BryanKrause That makes sense, but the original question was not as specific as your comment.
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4380 | What makes this question about time spent on writing reviews primarily opinion-based?
This question was closed as being primarily opinion-based. The question originally asked "how much time do you spend on reviewing a paper?". Put this way, the question was a bad fit for the Q&A, because it amounted to a poll (although, strictly speaking, it wasn't opinion-based).
I've edited the question to focus on the aspect that is of more general relevance, and which arguably was also what OP intended to ask: "How much time should you spend on reviewing a paper?". I gave an answer based on an objective criterion, namely that the time should be appropriate to the task. This clearly is not primarily opinion based. Moreover, we have several open questions asking whether this or that is "ethical". I feel, if these questions are not primarily opinion-based, neither is the present question.
I had hoped to read other answers to this obviously relevant and important question. It should be reopened.
I was one of the initial close-voters, but after your edits I've already voted to reopen.
We already have existing questions How much time should I spend on reviewing a paper? and How much time should one spend refereeing a paper?, if these are distinct enough to remain separate then maybe we should edit the titles to clarify the distinctions.
@ff524 I didn't catch these questions. They indeed look like dupes to me. So I guess the question should remain closed, but with a link to the duplicates.
I concur that the question should be closed as a duplicate of one of those others, rather than either remaining closed as opinion-based or being reopened.
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5079 | Request to re-open a legitimate answer that was closed with no justification given
Please vote for reopening my answer to: What is a nice phrase to use instead of "ladies and gentlemen" to be more inclusive?
My answer claims that the traditional term "ladies and gentlemen" is inclusive and non-offensive, and should not be eradicated from the public sphere. It garnered 27 up votes (with a total score of 14 votes when deleted).
The OP agrees that the term is non-offensive. They also express their fondness of the "Ladies and Gentlemen" phrase, only that they are concerned it is not-inclusive enough. My answer simply expresses the common belief of many, that this phrase is inclusive enough, and thus provides a legitimate solution to the problem faced by the OP. Indeed, since it is accepted now that "ladies and gentlemen" is a non-offending and not to be eradicated from the public sphere term, the provided solution is certainly a legitimate answer in this sense.
Overall, deleting such answers cause acute harm to the neutrality of the website and to its reputation as providing diversity of viewpoint. It also alienates large portions of the public who support free respectful discussion.
You seem to be complaining that a moderator deleted your answer even though you voted to close the question.
Yes, definitely. By the written guidelines my brief answer was completely legit and to the point, given that the question is out of scope. See here: https://academia.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/4976/how-to-deal-with-a-question-that-contains-a-false-premise-how-do-i-make-a-frame
Specifically: ""For example, you can write in response to the above assertion [appearing in an off-topic question]: It does not matter for this question, but as I understand it, you misassess the impact of your method. I strongly suggest that you ask on Cryptography SE about this. I think there is a crucial flaw in the your cryptographic reasoning. I would like to discuss it with you in this chatroom.""
OP asked for a more inclusive address than "ladies and gentleman".
"Ladies and gentleman" is not a more inclusive version of "ladies and gentleman"; it is the same exact phrase so it is exactly as inclusive as "ladies and gentleman". Therefore, it is not an answer to the question asked.
It is not necessary for OP or anyone else to establish that "ladies and gentleman" is offensive to ask for something more inclusive. Asking for a more inclusive version of the phrase does not suggest that it should be "eradicated from the public sphere", as your answer implied. We've recently established a policy governing "frame challenge" answers here: How to deal with a question that contains a false premise? How do I make a frame challenge?
When considering the voting, please recognize that the question has been on the "Hot Network Questions" (HNQ) list. That means it has high visibility across the network. The privilege for voting up is far easier to access than the privilege to vote down; everyone on the network with enough rep for the 100 rep bonus can up vote, which includes many people who have no other activity on Academia.SE. Only people with substantial additional reputation here, a minority of people viewing the question, can downvote.
Other answers have upvotes per 1 downvote as of writing this post equaling: 21.5, 9, 16.5, 4.6, 6. Yours had only 2.1 upvotes per downvote.
Thank you for your opinion. Let me explain why I believe you are mistaken. The OP himself/herself, claimed that he/she likes the "ladies and gentlemen" phrase, only that he/she deems it as not inclusive enough, or at least they feel or think it is not inclusive enough. My answer explains that in my opinion it is inclusive of everyone to a sufficient degree. This is not a re-framing of the question. It goes right at the heart of the question: I provide a solution to the problem at hand.
My answer also claims explicitly that "ladies and gentlemen" IS inclusive enough. So your mention that it is not sufficient to establish that it is non-offensive, is inaccuate in this case.
Also, when considering deletion of answers, please recognize that this is a question of a clear political and social implication, that is part of a much larger contemporary debate about "inclusivity", "equity", and "diversity" in society and academia. It is evident that deleting solid answers like the one I provided would be perceived as a politically-motivated action by many (whether justified or not), and may harm the perceived neutrality of this website as a whole.
@Dilworth I think it's important to see the context in which the frame challenge policy was enacted, which is that people with a certain form of question are constantly questioned and asked to defend the existence of their problem by both answers and comments. It's...not very friendly, and it's a really old, exhausting pattern. OP didn't ask to participate in a debate about inclusivity and equity, they asked for a solution to a problem. It's not your place to decide if their problem is a "real problem" or not.
I think you are underestimating the OP in this specific case. They said explicitly that they like the original phrase, and I provided re-assurance to them that they can still use it. I also think that you are ignoring the problem that people can use this "frame challenge policy" to establish any normative statement they wish to, while other users being unable to even challenge it. In the case of a highly debated political subject such as EDI this is quite dangerous and harm the neutrality of this website.
See for instance a clear frame-challenge here, which is much more relevant to academia. This frame-challenge seems to be accepted at the moment. Should we close this answer base on the policy for "frame-challenge"? https://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/180379/is-there-a-point-in-pursuing-a-phd-outside-of-top-universities It explicitly challenge the premise of the question.
@Dilworth I encourage you to read the policy, as you'll find it does not bar all frame challenges.
@Dilworth "They said explicitly that they like the original phrase, and I provided re-assurance to them that they can still use it": The OP didn't want to be reassured that they can still use it, they want an alternative which your answer didn't provide. And as a challenge of the premise of the question, your answer was too weak to be considered a valid frame challenge.
@Bryan, thanks. I have now read it quickly, and it seems I was in the acceptable zone of answers (note that the question was closed): *"For example, you can write in response to the above assertion:
In does not matter for this question, but as I understand it, you misassess the impact of your method. I strongly suggest that you ask on Cryptography SE about this.
I think there is a crucial flaw in the your cryptographic reasoning. I would like to discuss it with you in this chatroom."*
@Massimo, I don't deem my frame-challenge as "too weak". E.g., it is a mainstream challenge, and should be respected as a legitimate alternative I believe if we wish to maintain neutrality on political and social contemporary debates.
@Dilworth "Are you confident that the asker did not already consider your frame challenge?" "Does your frame challenge actually help the asker?" To me, that OP says they like the phrase yet want to find another makes it clear that they have already considered this alternative, and your assertion that they need not find another does not actually help them and does not answer the question they asked. Again, OP is not asking to participate in a "political and social contemporary debate" - they've asked for a more inclusive replacement for a phrase they use.
@MassimoOrtolano, "The OP didn't want to be reassured that they can still use it, they want an alternative which your answer didn't provide." --- Since the question was closed as irrelevant to this website, my frame-challenge is acceptable per the policy I believe. I am not in need to provide answers to the closed question.
@BryanKrause, This part of the policy is less relevant to our case I believe, because the question was closed as irrelevant eventually. The relevant part is what I cited.
@BryanKrause, "Again, OP is not asking to participate in a "political and social contemporary debate" - they've asked for a more inclusive replacement for a phrase they use." -- By establishing the premise that "ladies and gentlemen" is non-inclusive they certainly engage actively in a contemporary social/political debate.
@Dilworth The question wasn't "closed as irrelevant", my assumption is the close voters primarily saw this as a "boat programming"/not about academia strictly type of question. That it is closed is not particularly relevant to the answer you've posted, as a closed question does not accept answers and would not have accepted yours had it been closed by the community earlier.
@BryanKrause, the question was indeed voted as not strictly about Academia, namely, not-suitable, or not in the remit of this site. The fact it was closed is relevant to the clause of the Policy we should be looking at. Closed questions that make a "false premise" (my opinion is that the premise is false) could be answered as I did, per the policy.
Your current line of argument about the question being closed somehow making your answer valid is...well, it's convincing me very quickly that your intent here is primarily to cause trouble and while I've done my best to see your side it is rapidly tiring me of that effort.
@Dilworth The question was closed because it was considered a question about language, and the closure has nothing to do with the premise. And your answer is totally irrelevant for keeping it open or closed.
@MassimoOrtolano, Please follow my discussion with Bryan here. Indeed, the question was deemed not suitable for this site. Hence, my answer is legit per the frame-challenge Policy mentioned by Bryan.
@BryanKrause, I am sorry you see this that way. This is not my line of argument. You brought the Policy of frame-challenge, and I now see that indeed based on this Policy, I was providing a legit answer. Of course, my intent is simply to re-open my answer, not to "cause troubles" of course.
@Dilworth I do not see a place in the policy where "questions deemed not suitable" somehow become acceptable targets for frame-challenge answers. Rather, "questions deemed not suitable" are not to be answered at all. Typically, if you think a question is not suitable, you should vote to close it rather than answer, though there is no ban on doing both.
@BryanKrause, it does not say this. It provides an example of answers for off-topic questions. And my answer seems to fall within the acceptable range of answers for this category, per the example.
I wasn't involved in moderating this question, but looking at it now, I would emphasize two points.
deleting such answers cause acute harm to the neutrality of the website and to its reputation as providing diversity of viewpoint
You raise a valid concern here. On balance, we try to delete answers only for procedural reasons (most often, "not an answer") rather than substantive reasons. But in some cases, we do have to make difficult calls, as we are bound to enforce the CoC.
they are concerned it is not-inclusive enough. My answer simply expresses ...that this phrase is inclusive enough, and thus provides a legitimate solution
Yes, this is a frame challenge. However, this is a frame challenge about "a (possible) misconception about an off-topic aspect." Our policy therefore states:
Whether such statements are correct is off-topic here. If such an off-topic aspect is central to a question, the question should likely be closed or migrated...If you want to discuss this off-topic material, do it in chat; discussion in the comments or answers will likely be deleted.
So, it seems like our policy was correctly applied.
But beyond the legalism, what are we trying to accomplish with such policies? Mostly, we want to avoid a facile and useless debate. If there is an academic question that launches controversy, then that's great, we are the experts and can handle that controversy, even if many contradictory answers are generated. But if there is a question about language/culture (or any other subject) that launches controversy, then we must have the humility to recognize that (1) such subjects are more complicated than they appear at first glance, and (2) our expertise in certain domains does not make us experts in other domains (see here), and so a debate based on our opinions or first impressions is unlikely to be fruitful.
Thanks for the thoughtful answer. However, the examples given in the policy clause you mentioned explicitly allow to briefly reframe the question, precisely as I did. Here: "For example, you can write in response to the above assertion: In does not matter for this question, but as I understand it, you misassess the impact of your method. I strongly suggest that you ask on Cryptography SE about this. I think there is a crucial flaw in the your cryptographic reasoning. I would like to discuss it with you in this chatroom."
The very next sentence in the policy you quote states: "please do not write why you think that the asker’s statement is wrong as this will start a discussion." The second sentence in your answer does exactly this, and indeed started a 24-comment-long discussion. In any case, I think we've both made our positions clear; I don't have much more to add to this discussion.
the examples cited show precisely the opposite though; hence the policy seems to contain contradictory guidance. In any case, I don't have anything else to add myself at the moment.
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1601 | Updates to the site
My name is Stéphane and I'm the designer at Stack Exchange who made the design of this site. You may have noticed some updates to the design lately.
The updates are part of a SE network-wide update to a new base css framework (the code which display the design).
The updates allow us to:
Have sharper / more beautiful design on retina displays
Fix layout bugs
More easily add new features to all of our sites in the future
If you see any bugs please let us know.
Thanks!
Y U TURN OF SUBPIXEL ANTIALIAS?! Also, body font looks weird, georgia looks better to me for this site.
Hi. May I ask you to take a look at this chat room message? It is a request about designing an advertisement image for community promotions ads of TeX.SX. http://chat.stackexchange.com/transcript/message/21041063#21041063
status-completed
There is no longer a downvoted-answer class, and downvoted answers are no longer greyed out. (As mentioned in chat).
Is this intentional?
Thanks for the updates!
I have a singular concern.
I don't know if it's just me, but it appears that question titles now have serif font that is somewhat harder to read, because the characters seem to be wider than those of other StackExchange sites. It's also slightly disorienting as the rest of the page is in a sans serif font.
Probably need other people's opinions on this to verify.
Here's a site that hasn't got its changes yet from what I can tell, for comparison:
https://codegolf.stackexchange.com/
Academia originally had a specific font for the question titles, nothing changed here. Unless you were not able to view them and now you're able to. Could you tell me your browser/os version ?
FireFox 35, Windows 7 Latest Update. I can just swap my font out for Arial if that's the case. Something feels different about it, though. I remember looking at Academia last night and then today the changes are a bit weird for me.
The question titles color changed, it was a dark grey and it's now blue. That's the main difference.
You're right! I'm just crazy then @_@
I also have the feeling that the font of the site is changed...
Same opinion - the fonts for front page question titles and votes/answers/views look a bit weird, and a tad too small for my taste. Screenshot: http://i.imgur.com/4MwU3sh.png. Latest Ubuntu, Firefox 35.0.1. Could just be habit, though.
Like they're wider, right? I feel like they're wider. @FedericoPoloni The font itself just feels like the Os are super-round compared to Arial.
I feel that the font is smaller and the background is whiter. I hope this is a good switching, cause I feel unfamiliar with it.
I don't have a bug so much as an inconsistency. The answer windows use a fixed-width font, but the box to enter comments uses a proportional font. This is jarring to the user.
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937 | There was a way to flag questions as 'difficult to be generalized'
This applies to a few questions out there, especially the ones asking for personal career advice.
Was this function removed during graduation of the site? Or is it just me who can't access it anymore?
Edit My guess is that when the site graduated I lost the moderation privilege due to my low reputation. This option used to show up immediately upon hitting the 'close' link, and now I don't see it anymore but buried 4 layers down the flagging dialog.
"Difficult to generalize" is now found under the Flag option by selecting "another reason," then "off-topic." It's a bit buried, but now you have more options to choose from.
Great, more options is good. I was actually referring to questions that are too specific, rather than too generalized, but your answer point out the right thing.
@aeismail "Too generalized" is not what my problem is, at least. There's a lot of questions here that are very specific to someone's situation, and unlikely to be helpful to anyone but the OP. It would be nice to have a means of flagging those.
@Fomite I think it's just a typo. The option can be found in: Flagging>Closing>Off-Topic 'Questions that cannot be generalized to apply to others in similar situations are off-topic. For assistance […] see: What kinds of questions are too localized?'
@Jigg I think my problem is I see Flagging and voting to Close to be separate processes. It is indeed in the Close options.
Yeah, I got the title wrong. It should have said "too specialized" or "difficult to be generalized."
I don't have that option either - the closest thing I can see to it is just "It needs moderator attention".
It would be nice to have either a close vote or flagging option for that. I personally find "this is too hard to render into a non-single use question" much more common than "Too Broad" as a reason I want to see things closed or edited.
While @aeismail's approach is better, this is definitely acceptable as well.
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3401 | Is my question about which degree best fits my non-academic career goal appropriate for this site?
I have a question about the software development job market.
I am interested in knowing whether (in particular) a big company would value a software developer with a degree in a development-related field more than a software developer with an unrelated degree (such as economics), if we were to consider that both developers are equally capable of doing their job.
I am uncertain as to whether I should ask this question on academia.stackexchange.com or elsewhere.
It looks off-topic here, because it's not related to the academic world but to the job market.
Thanks for the comment, where would you suggest I post my question? Is there any appropriate site on the stackexchange network?
Workplace.SE could be a better fit, but I'm not a user of that site.
Thank you I'll try that!
No, this question would not be on topic here, because it is asking about preparation for a non-academic, non-research career.
As stated in the help center:
However, please do not ask questions about
...
Preparation for a non-academic career ("What graduate degree will help me get a job as X?")
Thanks for checking with us first :)
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3994 | Why is this question about discrimination still open?
I ran across this questions in the Hot Network Questions: Is it discrimination to hold someone from a minority or underprivileged background to the same academic standard as regular students?
It seems to be an obvious candidate for closure to me:
Extremely Broad: The top answer is pretty much spot on. The debate surrounding discrimination is a subject that really can't be adequately covered in a Stack Exchange answer.
Opinion Based: Obviously, the issue of how to address minority disadvantages (or whether to address them at all) is not a settled matter. Even expert researchers (economists, sociologists, psychologists) hold widely differing views on the effects of different approaches to the problems.
Unclear: One could even make a case it's not clear what the asker is hoping to achieve by asking this question (though this is weaker than the other two reasons). Even if we could come to a definitive answer to the question as written, it is not at all clear how this would be of practical use to the OP in an academic setting. If the question is looking to resolve some legal or policy point, then clearly, they need to consult local laws and institutional policies, as these would define what is and is not allowed. If the OP is struggling with the ethics of a decision, it would be much better to simply ask about their decision directly, instead of framing it within the affirmative actions debate (although I suspect a specific, opinion based decision like that would also be off-topic). I cannot think of any other way an answer to this question could be applied to a real world academic situation. Given that the OP is relatively articulate about the issue at hand, it's difficult for me to believe there's no underlying problem left unspoken, and the underlying problem would be extremely relevant to how the question should be handled (answered or closed).
On top of these problems, the topic carries risk of being inflammatory, especially since it has hit Hot Network Questions. It's a very controversial issue which affects many people personally (both positively and negatively), so emotions tend to be high around a subject like this. (Note that this explains why it's so highly upvoted.) A moderator (wisely) protected it; I'd be unsurprising if a number of comments or perhaps even answers already had to be deleted.
As such, this question is very poor and very clearly so, at least in my estimation. I'm not the only one to hold this view; two comments mention that they voted to close it. Yet a moderator has seen it and even chose to protect it and answer it, rather than close it. In my opinion, this is the wrong action to take on the post; it's much better to close down off-topic questions as soon as possible, before they become a problem and to discourage the asking of similarly problematic questions in the future. But I'm open to the possibility that I'm missing something. Is there something about how this SE evaluates questions that I'm not aware of? Is my analysis above incorrect in some way?
Questions on Academia.SE tend to be much more opinion- and experience-based, as well as philosophical, than on other SE sites. There is often not a single "right" answer, and sometimes the answer to the question has to address the fact that the question might not be well-posed.
Therefore, there tends to be much more latitude given to questions that fit the general classes of categories covered on the site than might traditionally be the case. In this particular case, there are no deleted or hidden answers, and there are some important points to be raised (hence why I contributed an answer). But because the question is somewhat controversial, as you suggested, the question has been protected to prevent unhelpful contributions.
People may disagree, and vote to close. It's a community-driven site.
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744 | Quick mod mcgraw
I am worried that the rep system is leading to careless moderators coming into power. Part of my answer was:"What is unclear to me is whether someone like you who feels somewhat unsure is even less likely at all to graduate with a PhD than someone who goes in thinking R1 Tenure or death. Your waffling MIGHT even be a sign of mental health is what I'm getting at." The deleting mod's comment concerning this passage shows a lack of reading comprehension, which is almost assuredly due to carelessness rather than lack of intelligence: "Suggesting that someone who is not sure if they want to do what it takes to get a PhD might have mental health issues is over the top." I clearly said mental health, a positive attribute, but he deleted my answer from a careless reading, perhaps done due to the dissenting nature of my answer. What can we do to encourage mods not to delete things they haven't really read, and to encourage the promotion of people to power based on quality, not quantity?
One minute of a careless moderator's time could dissuade a new user completely. I find this very concerning.
While a diamond mod cast the final vote, I cast the first delete vote and threw the flag. As soon as I saw your edit, I threw another flag saying I was wrong. I also left a comment so it would be clear why I was voting the way I was. I would have voted to undelete, but I am not allowed to vote to undelete diamond mod deleted answers. I checked back soon there after and the answer was restored. If it hadn't been I would have followed up in chat/meta to make sure it got taken care of. Once the answer was undeleted, I added a comment apologizing for the mix up.
Having an answer downvoted/deleted can clearly be off putting to a new user. Having an offensive answer (or even one that can be easily misread as offensive) is also offensive to new users. The nice thing about the SE system is that we can fix screwups. The voting and flagging systems can fix most problems and the chat and meta systems can help with the difficult issues.
Let me preface these comments by saying that they are an attempt at explanation, not excusing behavior. Your answer was fine, but I could also see how it could be misconstrued, because I did the same thing as the other voters.
Looking back at the history of the question, the issue is that you went back and added the section about "a sign of mental health." It might be a minor thing, but I read that question and had a similar reaction to the users who voted to delete the question. (Note: a mod cast the last vote, not the only vote. Multiple votes were cast to delete the question, so more than one person had the same issue.)
While your sentence is perfectly reasonable, writing "a sign of mental health," the almost-Pavlovian instinct is to mentally tack on "problems" or "issues." The votes to close came following the change (obviously), and I can see how they came about. But, as eykanal mentions, what you've done is the right way to do this.
I think this shows that an academic precision and brevity is probably not how we should respond on this site! Although moderators should be more careful too.
We try to be as careful as we can, but no person or system is 100% foolproof.
Using my Super Sekrit Mod Tools, I can assure you that this is something that happens to everyone; old mods, new mods, red mods, blue mods. While I wasn't involved in this particular questions, there have been questions I closed due to my skimming the question and not getting the nuances. If I would ask about this in the mod chat room, I doubt there would be a person there who hasn't done this themselves, probably more than once. Your response—posting a well thought-out, not too accusatory post on meta—is the appropriate way to deal with this, and I really commend you for it.
To that extent, after reviewing the flags and the discussion, I've undeleted your answer; I can't see any reason why it should have been deleted. For what it's worth, the answer doesn't really directly address the question, so you may want to consider either revising to make it more directed to taking a different direction with the answer. However, your point about the unfairness in deletion makes sense to me.
If anyone has issue with this undeletion, please post in the comments below this answer so I will receive notification of your comment.
Thank you. I hope your answer makes this not personal against the moderator's mistake. I don't want to delete this question, because I think it is an important discussion to have.
@anon - From my experience, the mods on this site are great to work with because they realize it's never personal. If that mod wants to challenge my reversal, he's welcome to do so, and we can discuss it until we're all cool with the result.
As you say, the answer doesn't directly address the question. So the deletion was appropriate (even if done for the wrong reason), and undeletion was not.
@EnergyNumbers I don't particularly like the answer either, but now that I have read it correctly, I don't think it needs a diamond delete vote. I think we should just let the community vote and leave the mods out of it.
@EnergyNumbers - bad answers do not deserve deletion, they deserve downvotes. Deletion is reserved for stuff which is blatantly off-topic, offensive, or spam.
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3980 | How should we deal with good answers given just as comments?
Recently I was browsing through the "unanswered questions" section, and I found many questions which had good answeres - but those were given as comments.
Some of them are very short, but still a valid and sometimes satisfying answer, so maybe the original commenter did not want to post a one-liner as answer.
Unfortunately, the question remains "open" and is more or less a click bait since people read the question, read the comments ant feel like there is no more to say without repeating the comments.
I see two options:
ask the commentators to write their comment as answer - I'm unsure whether they would do it.
Compile an answer from the comments given. This feels a bit like plagiarism (of course you should cite them)
What's your thoughts about this issue?
Your options consider only what is possible from the current platform, going beyond the current platform, promoting a comment to an answer is a further option.
@user2768 this would be a nice feature!
Do (1.), and if that doesn't work do (2.) and mention the comment. I don't see the issue here.
My approach is generally to prod people who leave good comments into making them into answers, with sentences like "@username, if you posted that as an answer I would definitely upvote it!" That seems to work pretty well. If a few days later the answer still hasn't been posted, I'll post an answer of my own, using the comment as the core but also making a point of elaborating, extending, or providing evidence.
I very like Stella Biderman's approach, which is also probably the more common here. I don't like when someone copies a comment into an answer, without adding anything, just to avoid leaving a question unanswered.
However, I'd like to add a remark. I very frequently access SE from the Android app, especially during dead times (while waiting in a line, at the – ehm – restrooms, etc.). Unfortunately, the Android app makes far easier to comment than to answer, because when commenting I can read the question's text too, which is instead removed when answering. Thus, I tend to write a lot of comments, but later I might not have the time to expand a certain comment into an answer (or I simply forget about it). Maybe it's the same for some other people too.
This is definitely a point. And for an answer, one usually invests a bit more time for finding evidence, adding links to other questions etc. ...
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3367 | I have just discovered that I can edit other users' posts! Is there anything I should know before I start some serious editing?
What advice do you have for users who have just discovered the edit capability? What makes a "good edit" on Academia.SE?
Note: I have made one suggestion per answer, so that people can vote on them individually. This way we can measure (to some degree) how strongly the community feels about each of these.
That is a deviously clickbaity title!
@cat I clicked it and you won't believe what happened next...
@TobiasKienzler I clicked it and ended up here!
Make posts better, but don't impose your personal style
Usually we try to leave style up to the author of the post, and edit mainly for spelling/grammar, clarity, and readability (e.g. break up walls of text).
If you have a preferred style for your own posts, that's great, but it's not necessary to impose that on other users' posts.
Avoid edits to "on hold" questions that will never be reopened
Editing a post that is "on hold" pushes it into a review queue for reopening.
If you make cosmetic edits to a post that is "on hold" and is irredeemable (is inherently off topic for the site and won't be reopened), then it just wastes reviewer time: people have to review your edits if you have less than 2k rep, and people have to review the post for reopening even though the edits don't fix the reason that the post was closed.
(See this meta post for more details.)
Edits bump posts
Keep in mind that edits bump posts back to the front page. It's not a big deal to bump recent posts, and also not a big deal to bump old posts if it's only a few.
But if you ever have the urge to edit 100 old posts all at once, it's probably a good idea to ask about it on meta first. Many users don't like when the front page is full of old questions that were bumped for some minor edits.
Add Missing Body Questions
Sometimes, an asker will put a question in a title, but never actually put the question in the body, treating the two as though they were a single piece of prose.
For readability, it is best that both the title and the body be able to stand alone. Thus, it is good practice to add such a "missing body question" into the beginning of the body.
So, where did you hide the body?
On a more serious note, I've always hated these questions, or any other writings anywhere, that force you to read the title (again). And my teachers have told me not to do such things. But I've never found a good reference to a style guide or a research that I can refer to, as simply saying "I don't like it" doesn't quite work if someone is claiming it doesn't matter. Do you happen to have one?
@JiK Well, a verbatim repetition of the title at the head of the question is unhelpful, certainly. But inclusion of a rephrased/expanded version of the title in the main body absolutely is important IMO for a well-written question.
@hBy2Py For me, a verbatim repetition of the title is not unhelpful at all.
@JiK Interesting ... do you mainly interact through the mobile interface? On the web, the text and title are so close to one another that the duplication seems awkward, at least to me.
@hBy2Py In the browser version of SE, I often don't spot the title at all. Maybe the reason is that as an element of the web page design, it seems completely separate to the text: For example, the title and the line below it extend to the right, above the irrelevant metadata boxes in the right hand side, so it looks like the title of the whole page, not the question. And I didn't open the page to read the stuff in the right column, I only want to read the question and the answers, so my eyes hit the beginning of the question first.
@JiK Huh. I can see how that'd work; not how my brain works, I guess. Highlights the importance of UX.SE!
Leave the problems you're not certain how to fix alone.
If a post has multiple things wrong with it, some may be easier to fix than others. Fix only the problems that you are certain that you have a good solution to, and leave the others for later.
Doing this makes an incremental improvement and easy approval. If your edits stretch too far, however, it can make a mess of good and bad improvements that is difficult for reviewers to sort out and your entire edit may be rejected.
I disagree. If a posts has some problems you don't know how to fix - ask for help on chat or on meta and get someone who can fix them. Partial fixes of posts that still need to be edited only put drudgework on the front page (cf. Edits bump posts).
Don't engage in edit wars
If your edit is rolled back (either by the original author of the post or another user), don't get in an edit war.
If the edit is minor, let it go.
If the edit is substantial and you think the user may have reverted your edit accidentally, or without understanding why you have made it, you can leave a comment explaining your position and asking for clarification.
If the edit is important, you have left a comment, and the issue still has not been resolved, you can raise a flag asking for a moderator to take a look.
Fix all the problems in the post
Try to fix everything that is wrong with the question all at once. For example, if you are editing a question to fix a grammar error, also check if maybe some tags are not applied correctly and remove those, remove thanks and greetings, etc. (See the help center). If the author of the post has provided new information in the comments that is necessary to answer the question, incorporate that information into the post with your edits.
If you notice that people are making further edits to posts you have edited, try to learn from them for the future to see what else you could have done. Definitely be careful not to introduce new errors!
Personally, I prefer if somebody fixes only those problems that they are certain they have a good solution to. That makes an incremental improvement and easy approval. When somebody stretches too far, one ends up with a mess of good and bad improvements that I dislike having to sort out.
@jakebeal Good point. Perhaps you could write another answer about leaving things alone that you're not sure about?
This is now done below.
Be aware of culturally different spellings and word usages
It is well known that there are different, but correct, spellings for certain words. Examples are color and colour, behaviour and behavior, analyse and analyze. An editor should not change the author's version of the spellings to their own.
However, it may be acceptable to make the spellings consistent with one form if it is clear the author can't spell; but you should be confident with spelling in American, British or Canadian etc.
Culturally variant vocabulary is more difficult, and to avoid the semantic differences in words between readers it can be helpful to stick to a more academic style of writing. As this is Academia.SE we should be able to use language forms that might be acceptable in a disertation or journal paper. This often avoids those semantic variations that occur in more casual language.
If an article already contains typos and other errors, formalising the language may improve its universal readability.
What about if the spelling variation is a word choice that is quite regional, and a simple wording can make the question much more widely applicable? I am thinking of "Holidays" vs "vacation" or "Queries" Vs "Question"
@J.Roibal While they may be regional in usage, I find that your examples aren't very regional in intelligibility and would thus recommend they be left as is. Furthermore, regionalisms are actually quite valuable in inferring missing information about a question (e.g., are they in the UK vs. USA).
the question about 'holidays' has a very different meaning in UK compared to USA. there was a question about going on 'holidays' which lasted many weeks, whereas a 'holiday' in the US is generally 1-2 days off from work, or at maximum 1 week for Christmas to New Years.
@J.Roibal If you're referring to this, the question is perfectly understandable even to those more familiar with the US usage of the word "holidays". Even without reading the body of the post (which explicitly gives the duration) it's obvious from the title which usage is intended because you don't say "going on holidays" in the US usage.
Suggested edits by editors with <2k rep
If you have less than 2k rep, all of your edits have to be reviewed by multiple reviewers. Also, further edits to the post are blocked until your edit has been reviewed and either applied or rejected.
That is another reason not to suggest a huge number of edits all at once, and to make an effort to fix everything that is wrong with the post in one edit, since we have a limited number of active reviewers. If you're suggesting lots of edits to old posts and the review queue backs up as a result, that might mean that more urgent edits to new posts aren't being reviewed.
Leave a comment about your significant (particularly uncertain) edits
If you made a significant edit, particularly if you're not sure if you've preserved the author's meaning, leave a comment for the author saying what you did, possibly asking if it's what they meant. This may make the author more appreciative of your edits and mitigate reactions like this: Why can another user edit my answer to a completely different content without my review or permission?
Don't edit; ask questions or make suggestions
I generally prefer not to edit other people's posts, so as not to inadvertently change their meaning/nuances and because I have better things to do. If something is unclear, or I have a suggestion, I generally just make it in comments (though the OP does not always address this). This is not a blanket rule--I don't literally mean no one should edit anyone else's posts (I've occasionally edited posts of new users)--it can be more efficient/effective for an experienced/insightful user to edit rather than the original author. But if you're not sure of what you're doing, use comments and let the OP or someone more experienced edit if they think it's necessary.
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1860 | How to make users of other SE sites more aware of what Academia.SE is about?
I have observed the following on several occasions:
New user posts a very broad, subjective, and/or open-ended question (and not the "good subjective" type, either).
When the question is closed, the user says something like, "But they told me on X.SE that X.SE is only for questions about X, that Academia.SE is for soft questions, and I should post it here."
Obviously, it's very frustrating for a new user to be told to post here, only to have the question downvoted and closed.
What can we do to help avoid this situation?
To clarify: I was thinking about how to educate the High-Rep User of Other SE who says to Brand New SE User there, "Hey, you should post this soft question on Academia instead."
(Brand New SE User, even if he reads our help center, is likely to trust High-Rep User of Other SE more than his own understanding of our somewhat confusing help center. And High-Rep User of Other SE is already familiar with the SE way, and may be more capable of understanding our policies than Brand New SE User.)
I'm not sure what to search for to find a generalisation of this problem on meta.stackexchange, but users on one stack telling people to post an off-topic question on another stack without themselves knowing what's considered on- and off-topic on that other stack is a general problem rather than one specific to academia.stackexchange.
What about advertising it at Math.SE - it may be submitted here
Programmers SE have a bot in their chatroom which scans Stack Overflow for references to Programmers. If they see someone inappropriately recommend Programmers to a user, they step in.
Actually, the same bot works for Code Review SE. Either the remit of the bot could be expanded (address a query to the current owners & operators), or its code could be forked to create a new bot for Academia SE.
What would it take to get such a bot for our chatroom?
@Wrzlprmft. Someone could fork Duga.
If someone makes the bot, I would have no problem with hanging around in the Academia chatroom and monitor what I get (it shouldn’t be that much, I hope).
This sounds like a good idea; the chat room isn't too crowded and busy for the messages to get lost, nor too abandoned for the messages to get unseen. It may work as an active prevention. I really like the idea.
Related to TRiG’s answer, something that we could do very easily is linking the feeds of tags on other sites that are prone to this phenomenon into our chat. In a quick search, I could find:
career-development on Math
career on MathOverflow
career on Theoretical Computer Science
physics-careers on Physics
careers and academia on Cross Validated
university on Programmers
If you know of other such tags, please let me know.
This may be a good thing for other reasons as well, as we may offer another perspective on such questions or link to relevant questions on Academia.
If you can find the original comment made by the high-rep user where this was suggested, post a comment replying to that high-rep user educating them about Academia.SE. At least that one user might know for the future. No, it doesn't scale, but it's basically the best mechanism we have right now. I don't know of any better way.
This problem is not unique to Academia.SE; it pops up on other sites, too, and as far as I know, they don't have any better solution, either.
And as far as the new user, about all we can do is be sympathetic but firm and informative when letting them know about why their question must be closed.
I get the sense that a lot of the problem comes from people having never read the "What can I ask?" page in the help center. There's nothing we can do to improve our educational material for those people who never think to read it in the first place.
So, how about we try to make it really easy for them to encounter the educational material at the right time. A simple way would be to force new user accounts to get put through the tour page upon signup.
Better, though, would be to put the review of the rules right at the point of question submission. Maybe before the submission of the first question there could be a "review your own question" prompt that puts the key bullet points from the help page up for somebody to click on saying that they think it passes them all? This would require implementation by SE staff, but might help a lot.
At a minimum we could post a link to the help center when we vote to close.
there could be a "review your own question" prompt – Actually there is something already like this already implemented. It’s called tag alerts.
Actually, I was thinking about how to educate the e.g. High-Rep Physics.SE User who says to Brand New User there, "Hey, you should post this soft question on Academia instead." (Brand New User, even if he reads our help center, is likely to trust High-Rep User of Other SE Site more than his own understanding of our somewhat confusing help center.)
@ff524 Oy, that's a much harder problem...
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2114 | Should statement-of-purpose tag be synonyms with personal-statement?
Currently there are two tags that have the same function, however they are not set as synonyms:
statement-of-purpose
personal-statement
Should we re-tag the "personal-statement" questions (only 7 questions) with the "statement-of-purpose" tag (177 questions). Or should someone with a higher reputation than myself, set these tags as synonyms to each other?
It seems that everyone who wants to weigh in has at this point, so I've synonymized the tags.
TL;DR: The personal-statement tag was created to represent a non-standard meaning of the phrase. Tags should be unambiguous words or phrases used according to their most common usage in an academic context. So let's synonymize personal-statement to statement-of-purpose, its most common usage.
The personal-statement tag was created by a user to distinguish questions about a "personal statement" required for graduate school admissions that was distinct from the "statement of purpose."
The problem, of course, is that "personal statement" is used more often as another term for "statement of purpose" than to refer to a different kind of statement. So the likely result of having two tags is that users will be confused as to how to tag questions, and we'll end up "splitting" questions about the same document into two tags - which is a bad thing.
For the reason stated above, I personally am in favor of making personal-statement a tag synonym of statement-of-purpose, and using statement-of-purpose for:
questions about a statement of purpose
questions about a personal statement AKA statement of purpose
questions about a personal statement that is not the same as a statement of purpose, just because we don't have any good way to distinguish this case from the previous one (and the previous one is much more common). We can edit the tag wiki excerpt to specify that statement-of-purpose also includes questions about personal statements.
But that's just my opinion, we'll see what others think.
I think you can go forward with synonymizing the two tags
@TheHiary we usually wait for more than one person to vote on something in meta before acting on it :)
If someone is specifically asking about one or the other, will there be a good way of distinguishing between the two moving forward (if they are synonymized)?
@tonysdg not in a tag, just in the text of the question. But as things are currently (with them not being synonymized), we still don't have a good way to distinguish the tags, and it's also confusing this way.
As someone who create the tag, I of course think it necessary to have a distinguished tag (in fact, 3 of 7 questions in personal-statement are mine). You can read the whole difference between these two statements in How to structure the personal statement?, but in short, in universities that require both, the SOP/research statement focuses only to your research, while the personal statement is only to tell about anything else that reveals you as a person.
If we synonymize them, we need to make sure that for questions that ask about this specific case, the answerers should be aware of this unusual. If we synonymize them, and when the asker has specifically told what meaning they are mentioning, the answerers find no problem with that, then I happy to have them synonymized.
Unfortunately, this is not the case. In the linked question in paragraph 1, you can see that the top voted answer (not the accepted one) had mistaken the concept, even when I had told what meaning I used (to be fair, I didn't add the note line at first). The number of vote indicates that not only that answerer, but also the voters mistook that too. Answers are pearl, so an off-topic answer is badly wasteful.
>> That's not the fault of them, after all there is no agreement among the schools. Some separate the two, some don't. For who lives in the latter, we need to educate them that there exists the former. And there is no way to teach about something better than creating a noun, a name, a concept, a category for it. We cannot see the blue color, unless we have a name for it. We also don't have any bias for people who have pendulous earlobes, because we don't have a name for them.
So this case, I propose to keep the tag. All it needs is the detailed description below.
I think the misunderstanding you describe is exactly why it isn't a good name for a tag. A tag should be a word or phrase that is easily understood and means something consistent, not a phrase that means X most of the time and Y sometimes for a few schools.
That's why I say that it needs a detailed description
I don't think it's fair to require users to read a detailed description before applying a tag. If a tag is going to be misunderstood most of the time by users who haven't read the description, it's not a good tag.
I agree. But as I said above, I had already told the meaning that I wanted to use in the question, yet Anonymous Mathematician still misunderstood it. If we keep the tag, we still need to edit a lot of time for newcomers. But I think that's the only way to let them aware of the problem. My argument is that a bad-tagging question can be fixed much easier and required less energy than a thoughtful but off-topic answer.
I don't see how not having the tag causes the answers to be off-topic, either. If a user who writes an answer doesn't read the explanation in the body of the question, they're definitely not going to read the explanation in the tag wiki! Tags are not the right place to explain unusual circumstances, and this usage of the phrase "personal statement" is definitely unusual.
Yes, if they don't read the question carefully, they won't read the tag either. I'm not saying that having the tag will solve this problem immediately. Off-topic answers would still come, unless the schools have a consensus about the terms, which I highly doubt they will. I just hope that by giving the new tag, there will be less off-topic answers. For those who fall into the situation like me, the feeling of having a distinction is very clear. It's also a big plus for future visitors who only want to read questions about this.
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2127 | Should europe tag be synonyms with eu?
Currently there are two tags that have the same function, however they are not set as synonyms:
europe
eu
Should we re-tag the eu questions (only 5 questions) with the europe tag (81 questions). Or should someone with a higher reputation than myself, set these tags as synonyms to each other?
I see the following:
Significant parts of Europe, such as Norway and Switzerland, are not part of the EU
Europe is likely to remain coherent for a long time, whereas it is possible that near-future political events might significantly change the definition of the EU.
All of the questions that I see tagged with EU appear to be fine to tag with Europe.
I would thus recommend re-tagging, and not creating a synonym.
I think it is odd to lump questions about EU specific funding into a general Europe tag.
If I follow, it sounds like you are suggesting that [tag:eu] questions are a subset of the [tag:europe] category, and that the broader tag ([tag:europe]) is a good enough classification and the [tag:eu] sub-classification is not necessary. Is that accurate? If so, why not create a synonym? That's what we usually do for "subclasses" for which we don't want to maintain a separate tag, because otherwise the separate tag will probably just be recreated soon.
@ff524 If that's the usual treatment for sub-classes, then it seems reasonable to do here as well.
I strongly disagree with the third point. The five questions currently tagged [tag:eu] are pretty sterling examples of why the tags are different. Four of them are about EU-specific funding streams, so they do not make sense for non-EU countries, and in this one the OP could well be motivated by e.g. EU freedom of movement laws to look specifically in EU countries (admittedly it's a bit vague, but the OP does specifically ask about the EU).
The EU and Europe are not the same. The tag usage, in my opinion, is pretty good and demonstrates a need for two separate tags (and possibly a third tag).
There are questions which apply only to the EU. All the questions currently tagged EU seem correctly tagged. There are few EU specific questions tagged Europe.
There are questions that apply to all of Europe. This seems to be the vast majority of the questions tagged Europe.
There are a few questions that apply to non-EU countries in Europe.
I propose three tags: europe, europe-eu, and europe-non-eu (I don't really like that name/hyphenation). Then we could make eu a synonym of europe-eu.
"europe-non-eu" defines a set of countries that have very little in common. I don't think that is a particularly useful tag.
The current situation is fine. eu is specific to grants and administrative aspects relating to the political entity of the European Union, and europe, although a very vague tag since academia varies vastly between European countries, describes the geographic entity. europe can be used to exclude the American or Asian context. They are not synonyms
I am for creating a synonym, for the reasons already perfectly stated in @ff524's comment:
you are suggesting that eu questions are a subset of the europe category, and that the broader tag (europe) is a good enough classification and the eu sub-classification is not necessary. Is that accurate? If so, why not create a synonym? That's what we usually do for "subclasses" for which we don't want to maintain a separate tag, because otherwise the separate tag will probably just be recreated soon.
I realize that EU does not coincide with Europe. Still, keeping track of the full hierarchy between the various European supernational entities is quite complicated, and in my opinion the advantages do not offset the inconvenience of having multiple tags, especially if they are used only for five questions or so.
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1263 | Should we have both a "teaching" and "pedagogy" tag?
We currently have a teaching tag used on 265 questions, with the following wiki excerpt:
This tag is related to the role and duties of a teacher, an academic instructor, tutor or a teaching assistant.
and is also has teachers as a synonym.
Now, a pedagogy tag has been created and applied to 1 question. Its wiki excerpt is:
Relates to the method and practice of teaching, especially as an academic subject or theoretical concept.
Should we have both tags, as they are currently defined?
Note: there is a brief discussion about this tag in chat
One definition for pedagogy that I found differs from teaching is "The strategies of instruction.", which implies to me that methodology may be what the creator was aiming for.
The 'pedagogy' tag is needed because 'teaching' doesn't display the level of pretension appropriate for academia. :)
I don't think that the pedagogy tag, as currently defined, will be useful.
"Relates to the method and practice of teaching" seems liable to confusion with teaching to me.
I don't think I could reliably determine which questions should be tagged pedagogy instead of/in addition to teaching, and I suspect I'm not the only one. (And the upvotes on this comment suggest that others agree.)
This is not to say that I think "teaching" and "pedagogy" mean exactly identical things. But, I'm concerned that in practice, the distinction is too fine for many users (and the excerpt is not very helpful in clarifying the distinction).
I don't think it's productive to have a pair of tags that only a small portion of users on the site can actually distinguish between. Tags that are subject to misinterpretation or misuse are bad for the site.
Based on the current vote count of this answer (+6 vs +3 for answers in favor of an extra tag), I have made [tag:pedagogy] a synonym of [tag:teaching]
I created the pedagogy tag yesterday so there is currently only one question with the tag, but I would imagine that all, or nearly all, questions that are suitable for the pedagogy tag would also be suitable for the teaching tag. While most of the questions with the teaching tag are also about pedagogy, there are some that seem clearly not about pedagogy. Looking at the first 50 questions with the teaching tag sorted by votes, the following 7 questions do not seem to be about pedagogy in even the widest possible sense.
Is it ethical to profit by having my students buy my textbook?
Do student reviews of teachers matter?
Do teaching evaluations lead to lower standards in class?
Is it ethical to share the knowledge for free that I've learned at the university?
How did modern western post-secondary education become tied up with research and publications?
Is there a correlation between being a good teacher and being a good researcher?
Is it okay to use students as a reference when applying for a teaching position?
That to me suggests that we needed a narrow tag on teaching to alert users to the fact that it is addressing pedagogical issues of teaching. I think we have a number of umbrella tags that fully encompass other tags. For example I cannot see any questions with the journals tag that should not also be tagged publications. Similarly job-search seems to include everything in faculty-application, but also many other questions.
I would propose that the above question be tagged teaching and the vast majority of the questions currently tagged teaching be retagged to include both teaching and pedagogy (although from a technical standpoint it might be easier to retag everything and then remove the pedagogy tag where needed).
How would you tag the above questions? I could see how "teaching" is appropriate to all of them, but pedagogy is not.
@aeismail I would tag them [tag:teaching] while I would dual tag questions that are about pedagogy. I will edit to try and clarify.
I would imagine that all, or nearly all, questions that are suitable for the pedagogy tag would also be suitable for the teaching tag - it seems like the mostly likely outcome of this is that some questions will be tagged 'pedagogy', some will be tagged 'teaching', some will be tagged with both, and we'll have a big mess (like we currently have with 'journals' and 'publications', and 'job-search' and 'faculty-application')
These seem different to me.
Questions with the "teaching" tag will just refer to questions involving situations relating to the teacher's role in courses they teach. This might include classroom management, assessment, etc. For example, a question written by a TA who wants to know how to discipline some cheating students would use "teaching".
Questions with "pedagogy" should refer to questions relating to the teaching methodology. Perhaps "pedagogics" or "teaching-methods" is a more precise term, and more relates to the details of how one frames the content or skills for effective delivery to students. I can find no examples of this on Academics, but that maybe is not a big surprise, because most tertiary instructors just lecture and transfer the learning responsibility onto students.
Most questions tagged "pedagogy" are going to also have the "teaching" tag, but the reverse will not always be true.
A tag the specifically denotes questions that ask "how do I present X in the best way?" (which is a proper subset of teaching) would be useful.
I propose to use didactics which is, imho and afaik, a better term for what happens at universities.
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1203 | Welcome to Academia.SE!
Welcome to Academia.SE, the free, community-driven Questions and Answers site 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
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Much like academia itself, Academia.SE has some conventions and standards of behavior that can be unfamiliar to new members of the community. Below, you'll find some information to help you get acclimated and to make your interactions with this site a pleasant experience for you and all other users.
If you're adding an answer to this post: Please answer with one single piece of advice per answer. If you have multiple pieces of advice, post multiple answers. This is so that the community can vote separately on each item, and the most important advice will rise to the top.
Should this be the information spot, or should we create a clean CW question with a clean all encompassing answer? If this is the spot, should it be CW?
@StrongBad I kind of like the current structure, where people can continue to vote to show what they think is important. And I'm not sure what we'd gain from making it CW, since there's no rep gain on meta (and anyone can suggest edits)
I think many of the current answers could be integrated into our "on-topic" page about how to ask questions. We would lose the voting and open editing ability, but it might be easier for new users to find.
@StrongBad I was thinking about that, but I'm a little nervous about making that page so long that nobody reads it (especially given this addition). Maybe a link from there to this post would be better? I don't know
@ff524 What about providing a link to this question on the help center with a different color, so users can easier find these posts when they read the help center? It would be even better to provide such link in the Tour page too.
Academia varies more than you think it does
Academic customs and procedures vary greatly across countries, universities, fields, subfields, workgroups and so on. Therefore always consider that what you assume to be general in your question or answer is not. It is very helpful if your question includes at least your field and your country.
Some examples:
In some fields, publishing papers at conferences is the default; in other fields, it is unheard of.
In some fields, a peer-review process of one year is quick; in others it is outrageously long.
How the order of authors of a paper is determined varies greatly across fields.
The role and relevance of the corresponding author differs between journals, fields and countries. [1], [2].
The rate of papers per author and citations per paper vary strongly over fields and subfields.
The distinction between undergraduate and graduate students doesn’t exist in some countries. For example, it isn’t even possible to accurately translate the corresponding words into the German language.
In some countries, PhD students are typically university employees; in others they are not and live on a stipend, which they need to apply for and may not get.
In some countries, prospective PhD students apply directly to potential supervisors; in others, they apply to a department.
In some countries and fields, getting a PHD involves coursework; in others, it doesn’t.
Please consider having a look at Academia varies more than you think it does – The Movie for a more extensive list.
+1. This is maybe the most important thing I've learned from this site.
"Here's my situation, any suggestions?" is not an answerable question
Sometimes questions on Academia.SE involve a user describing the situation they find themselves in, and asking a very general question (e.g., "any suggestions or advice?"). Instead of asking questions like this, you should highlight the specific question you want answered.
For example, suppose your question is "My advisor does X, what should I do?"
Without further clarification, we can't tell whether you want to know:
How to gracefully switch to another advisor?
Whether your advisor's behavior is normal?
How to talk to your advisor about changing this behavior?
How to mitigate the effect this behavior has on you?
So, please make sure you specify the question you want an answer to in your post, and not just the situation.
If you don't describe your specific question, you won't necessarily get answers to that question. It's also highly likely that your post will be closed as "unclear what you're asking."
I feel like this should be edited into our on-topic page.
Give yourself time to proofread before submitting
Even if what you want to ask weighs heavy on your heart, don't just get your feelings out there. Collect your thoughts, consider what we need to know about your situation (and, more importantly, what we should not know, for instance specifics that could identify you), and ask a nicely formulated question in grammatically correct english, with paragraphs, and a single, explicit question item. If your question is overly long, this is an indicator that you are likely including too much personal backstory into your question.
Remember, in order to answer your question, people here first need to read it. The chance that your question is read carefully is strongly correlated with how clear and well-presented it is.
+1 for ask a nicely formulated question [...].
Please roll back if you don't like the new first line.
Write one question per post
If you have several questions about a problem or situation, but the questions can be asked independently, please split them up into multiple posts.
There are several reasons for this:
From Meta.SE: "That way it's easy to select a correct answer. If you ask several questions in one question you risk having answers that are both correct and wrong at the same time."
If your question has many parts, it is likely to be closed for being too broad in scope.
If a user only knows the answer to some of your questions but not others, they may refrain from answering entirely. Asking one question per post makes it more likely that each of your questions will get answered.
Writing one question per post makes it much easier for future visitors to find existing questions like their own. Imagine you're a future visitor and you'd like to know whether a publication in an unrelated field will be helpful in graduate admissions. Would an existing question be easier to find if
It's a sub-question of a very, very long post titled "Advice for admissions to graduate school?" along with four other sub-questions, or
It's in dedicated post with only one question, titled "How does a publication in an unrelated field affect graduate admissions?"
Don't take constructive feedback personally; see if your post can be improved with some editing
Stack Exchange is designed around being helpful, and the people here who are volunteering their time to answer questions are doing it because they want to answer them, and be helpful.
Close votes or other suggestions are not judgements on you, your character, or your situation. They are an attempt to make a question capable of being answered, or steer the question into a place where it can reasonably be answered. A question being closed means we're not sure it can be answered as it is currently written - not that your situation doesn't deserve our attention.
While this is true, it isn't really something specific to this SE site. Not sure if this is the right place for such an advice.
@xLeitix I'll note the original question didn't actually suggest it needed to be advice that applies exclusively to Academia. And given Academia often faces questions of a very personal life-important nature, and have had several back and forth exchanges between mods and users over closings, it's probably worth saying.
@xLeitix Although the advice given isn't specific to this SE site, some people may not have used other SE sites before (I am relatively new to using this type of site, and still not 100% sure how everything works).
Please roll back if you don't like the new first line.
Think about how to make your question a useful ongoing resource for the internet
This generally means thinking about what is general about your question. You may have a problem that is highly specific to your situation but think about how can it be generalised so that the answers will be helpful to others.
Basically, stack exchange is here to make the life of the Googling masses so much better. The answers you receive will hopefully help you, but more importantly a good general question will help hundreds or often thousands of future people who google the question. The more that you can frame your question in a slightly general way, the more likely a question is to help the Googling masses.
"I couldn't find a better SE site for this question" is not necessarily a reason to ask it here
The help center describes what kinds of questions are considered on-topic here, as well as some kinds of questions that are outside the scope of this site (as defined by the community).
We welcome your on-topic contributions. But, if you ask a question that is not within one of the on-topic areas, or that falls within one of the out-of-scope areas, it will be closed.
This is true even if there is currently no StackExchange site (or other site) at which you may ask the question. Off-topic-ness everywhere else does not imply on-topic-ness here.
Furthermore, while some users may suggest a better site1 to ask your question if they know of one, we aren't necessarily experts on all the websites out there. So if you ask in a comment
well, what site can I ask this question at, then????
you may or may not get a response - because we don't necessarily know the answer. But it definitely won't get the question reopened.
If you think you've identified a gap in the coverage of current StackExchange sites, you can visit Area51 to propose a new site, or support an existing proposal.
1 Cross-posting is against StackExchange policy and is liable to get your question closed and deleted. If you think your own question would be more appropriate on a different site, use the "flag" link and ask a moderator to migrate it from Academia to your preferred site. If you think someone else's question would be more appropriate on another site, write a comment suggesting that the OP use the "flag" link to ask a moderator to migrate it (and, also vote to close if it's also off-topic at Academia).
Don't run, Walk!
Gaining reputation may be something really interesting for the low-experienced users. They may try to add to their reputation by posting numerous questions or answers which do not have any meaningful content. This may probably reduce their reputation or cause down-votes to their posts. If you take a look at users with higher reputation, you can see that they have posts which have gained many up-votes just because the content is of good quality. They just don't post something; they answer the questions indeed.
As a newly registered user, I recommend you to:
Visit the Academia's tour;
Read the content provided in the Academia's Help Center; Specially the following topics:
What topics can I ask about here?
How do I write a good answer?
What types of questions should I avoid asking?
Take a look at tags list and read some questions and answers which attract you more.
Do not go instantly to use your moderation privileges such as edit features.
Understanding what's wrong or right, what's the website's policy about on-topic or off-topic content and how this website works need time. So be patient.
and one last advice;
If your post which may be a question or an answer, is put on hold or even deleted, or your suggested edits are rejected; do not become angry. Ask your questions about the website's policies on Academia's Meta and do your discussions on the website's chat room, not in the comments or answers.
Try to ask the users with higher reputation, why your content is down-voted, put on hold or deleted and try to learn from your mistakes. So, in future, you will post questions and answers which meet the site's policies and this way, you will not only learn things, but also you will enjoy being on a site in which many graduate students and faculty members collaborate.
+1 There's some pretty good advice in there (although I think the ironic hint at JeffE's trademark will be more appreciated by the longterm user :) )
Could you separate things out more, as the OP requested? Pull out the specific suggestions that don't appear in any other answers, and write a separate answer for each?
Look before you leap.
The best way to avoid having your questions placed on hold is to know what a good question looks like. And the best way to find out is to look at good questions. Click on a tag related to what you want to ask, and see what's already there—and what's been highly upvoted.
Interestingly, I am not sure highly upvoted are typically what I would consider good questions here. Most of our really highly upvoted questions are just very opinionated and/or on highly controversial topics. Better leave this sentence out.
How about adding a handful of links to questions you think would be particularly useful as illustrations of well posed questions?
Use tags that are relevant to your question
When tagging your question, go by what the question is actually about, not by what it is only related to. This way, you can help future users to find questions addressing their problems.
For example, almost every question on this site is somewhat related to research, because that’s what academians do. If you are asking about, e.g., how to best cite something, you are probably doing so because you are publishing your research. Such a question would only be related to research, but not about it, and should thus not be tagged research. If you are however asking on how to best organise your research, the question is actually about research and thus deserves the tag.
In another example, when you have a question about how to cite something that came up when writing a thesis, the same question might as well have arisen when writing a paper. In this case the question is not about theses and should thus should not be tagged thesis.
The following tags are often used spuriously: phd, masters, thesis, research, publications, university, students, professors, conference, graduate-school.
Useful tips for more interested users who want to be an asset to the site
If you are a new user, and after asking some questions and answering some others, want to stay on this site and collaborate more, I encourage you to read the Stack Exchange network-wide Meta content to become more aware of the functionality and usefulness of some features existing on the website.
Especially the questions listed under FAQ tag will help you act more wisely and efficiently. Mostly when you gain reputation and have access to some moderation tools, these questions and answers will help you indeed.
I'll link to some of these questions here and will be thankful to other users if they also add some more valuable questions to read.
FAQ for Stack Exchange sites
What are the guidelines for reviewing?
Can we please have the [foo] tag on our site?
There's an election going on. What's happening and how does it work?
What is serial voting and how does it affect me?
When should I vote?
Is it acceptable to write a thank you in a comment?
How do I contact other users?
How do I write a good title?
What is a 'rollback'?
What can cause a question to be bumped?
Is cross-posting a question on multiple Stack Exchange sites permitted if the question is on-topic for each site?
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1242 | Proposal to merge 'cheating', 'fraud', and maybe 'plagiarism' into 'academic-dishonesty'?
Currently, the tag wiki excerpt for cheating reads:
Pertaining to preventing, punishing, or handling the consequences of academic dishonesty. Also, defining what constitutes academic dishonesty.
The tag wiki excerpt for fraud does not exist, but its wiki is:
Academic fraud can include: Plagiarism, Fabrication, Deception, Cheating, and Bribery etc.
The tag wiki excerpt for plagiarism is:
Plagiarism is the practice of taking credit for someone else’s work. Also included in this tag are questions on self-plagiarism, which involves redundant publication or reuse of one's own work in an unethical manner
There seems to be a lot of overlap here. I'm also concerned with the word 'cheating', which doesn't always seem appropriate and can be ambiguous and used inconsistently. I therefore would like the community to consider three closely related proposals:
Rename 'cheating' to one of the following: 'academic-misconduct', 'academic-dishonesty', or 'dishonesty misconduct'. (Moderators can silently rename the entire tag without bumping all the questions)
Merge 'fraud' into this new tag, whatever it's called. (Again, mods can do silently).
Also merge 'plagiarism' into this new tag? There is a lot of overlap with 'cheating', I'm not sure whether it's worth losing the added specificity of 'plagiarism'.
I'm asking here rather than just proposing a tag synonym because I'm interested in hearing the rationale for approving or disapproving of these proposals.
Thoughts?
Update: in response to the objection raised by Wrzlprmft, how do we feel about renaming "fraud" to "research-misconduct"? That way it preserves the context and makes it explicit in the tag name, and will also include things like theft of intellectual property and espionage.
Second update: per the response to this question, I've renamed fraud to research-misconduct, with the following tag wiki excerpt:
On distortion of the research and/or research publication process through dishonest or otherwise unethical behavior. Includes (but is not limited to) issues such as fabrication, falsification, plagiarism, violation of ethical standards related to human subjects research, and theft of intellectual property.
and updated the cheating tag wiki excerpt to clarify the context in which it should be used:
Pertaining to preventing, punishing, or handling the consequences of academic dishonesty in coursework or examinations. Also, defining what constitutes academic dishonesty. (For questions on dishonesty in the research and/or research publication process, use 'research-misconduct' instead.)
This makes the essence of Wrzlprmft's answer - that these tags differ in the context of the misconduct - explicit in the tag excerpt.
From the ten questions tagged cheating, nine are about students cheating at courseworks, exams and similar and one is about diploma mill (and thus mistagged anyway in my opinion, as using diploma mills serves rather to deceive outside of academia).
The questions tagged fraud on the other hand are all about academic misconduct at the “research level”.
I would thus suggest to keep cheating unchanged and edit the tag wikis to reflect the following categorisation paradigm (maybe renaming fraud):
cheating and fraud classify the level at which misconduct happens. The former is about exams, coursework and similar; the latter is about publications, research and similar.
plagiarism classifies a certain type of misconduct, which can happen at both levels. Other types would be faked data, etc., which do not seem to deserve their own tag yet.
I don't know why we would have two tags for dishonesty depending on the context; isn't that what the other tags are for? (And, I think it's problematic to have tags that are indistinguishable to potential users except by reading their excerpts)
@ff524: Well there are some basic differences in the way “cheating” and “fraud” (according to the proposed paradigm) are handled and regarded. Also I do not think you need to read the excerpts, as for example cheating is arguably the first thing that comes to mind when describing, well, “cheating”, though it is technically also fraud. The fact that nine from the ten questions tagged cheating are already correctly tagged according to the proposed paradigm supports this.
I agree that they are handled differently, I just don't know whether we get enough volume of these questions to need two separate tags. And I think the only reason those tags are so clearly separated now is because they're so underused. 'plagiarism', which has been applied more widely, is sometimes used on questions about theft of ideas - probably because we have no general 'misconduct' tag
I think it may be too much to expect those asking questions to determine if the behavior they're asking about is 'cheating', 'fraud', 'plagiarism', 'theft', or something else (i.e. sharing past exams from a course). I wouldn't be opposed to 'dishonesty-coursework' and 'dishonesty-research', but I'm not totally convinced we need that distinction.
I agree on keeping [tag:cheating]. Nine question is not a small number, it's reasonable. As well, I believe that the tags should be intuitive to people not quite familiar with the site, and then [tag:cheating] is the first thing you think of for students cheating, while [tag:plagiarism], [tag:fraud] or possibly even [tag:espionage] come to mind with the scientific side or academia. I would keep this distinction focused on the context rather than on the crime.
@tohecz How do we feel about renaming "fraud" to "research-misconduct"? That way it preserves the context and makes it explicit in the tag name, and will also include things like theft of intellectual property and espionage.
@ff524 That sounds really good to me.
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1557 | When should we ask questions on Reddit?
I recently involve more in Reddit, and surprisingly find out a subreddit named AskAcademia. I know that Stack Exchange is not Reddit, and the way Reddit works is different to the way SE works. In SE, people ask and answer. In Reddit, people post a link/thinking and comment. However, in Q&A subreddit like AskAcademia, I see no different to here. Bad questions may never be closed, but they will never be raised. Can you tell me when should I ask questions on Reddit rather than Stack Exchange?
There's also ResearchGate.
@gerrit ResearchGate is where questions go to die.
Reddit
Born for open-ended discussions
After 6 months posts are automatically locked so discussions are "fossilized" to reflect what happened in that time
No way for users to improve others' posts
Downvotes can (and usually?) mean "I don't like this" or "this is uninteresting"
The only way to have links to relevant posts within the subreddit is by having other users provide
More active users in my opinion
Stack Exchange
Born for Q&A
Posts can always be improved until the Sun dies
Contributions from users are encouraged and peer-reviewed
Downvotes mean "This post is wrong/not useful"
Have tag system, related questions to categorize and discover more questions/answers
Posts can have images, HTML. The site overall is nicely designed
Posts can be improved... until the site gets shut down. Which could (theoretically) happen tomorrow.
Theoretically, the Sun could shut down tomorrow too.
You should ask a question on Reddit whenever you feel like it, regardless of whether you ask the question on Academia.SE.
Academia.SE doesn't make any claim to be the only site you should ask a question on. It only asks that you not ask the same question on any other SE site, because that is general SE policy.
I know that Reddit doesn't have so much restrictions. I want to know which questions would be best to ask here, not there. The restrictions of Stack Exchange are born with reason anyway.
Though as a courtesy to potential answerers, it is a good idea to mention the cross-posting both places, to avoid duplication of effort.
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1399 | Community type list for evaluations
It was suggested to me to make a meta post first and see the community response for this type of question.
I would like to know what types of quantitative evaluations exist for researchers. I do not mean how students evaluate, but how departments evaluate the staff/faculty that does research. For example, is there some Impact Factor publication score that is combined with author position to give some number as a way to evaluate all the academics together.
The institute I work with is 'interdiscipline' as in, disciplines from bio,biochem, nano, robotics, UX, etc. are all in the same building and administratively similar. So the institute is looking for ways to evaluate researchers quantitatively, which is supposed to be 'fair' (but I think it is more just transparency).
Currently we have some 'total possible points', then it breaks into categories like research and outreach. Research is broken into journals, grants, books. Then outreach is broken into lectures, invited talks, internal tours, media coverage (if your in newspaper or news).
Some example of the points are, journal is X amount of points, if you are first or last author, it is 70%, if you are the only author it is 100%, and if you are middle it is 30%. Then, if the impact factor places it in the top 10% of journals, the score is multiplied by 3.
One issue we have is computer science and similar fields that publish in conferences, which are much more like 'publications' than some other disciplines.
We also have an issue with the departments like Art (kind of a techno art and research), in which grant funding is usually lower.
I think this type of question would be useful to people, but mostly in a list format where many people can continually add methods. I think it is not too broad, since it is focused on quantitative measures. Thoughts?
With my mod hat on I do what the AC.SE community wants, but personally I don't like lists. I especially don't like lists that are not obviously useful to a large number of people and will have people interested in maintaining the list.
That said, for this particular case, I wonder if there is a relevant non-list question. For example, the UK uses the Research Excellence Framework (REF) to rate groups of researchers and departments then use the REF framework to rate individual researchers. There probably is a less than book length single comprehensive answer that touches on the underlying theory behind things like REF.
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849 | Fixed chat appointments
I have just seen an ad for the writer's chat room, with writing exercise each Tuesday (actually I tried to snoop in but it looked quite unorganized).
Do you think it's feasible to organize something similar here? I'm especially thinking about writing groups (as suggested sometimes in order to overcome writers blocks).
Some considerations:
the appointment should be quite defined, not just "on tuesday", but at least "the 1st and 3rd Tuesday of the month in the late morning" . So, the groups should be grouped by time zone (let's say by continent). This is just for practical purposes, of course if someone wants to work at 4 am is free to join the group of another continent
I am interested in academic writing, but I don't want to write here the details of my project or the draft of my papers. I can't think any better than some paper review, but I see that is too localized. So the rooms would be by time zone, by field and so on...
(this should be another questions) Can chats be deleted afterwards?
So, my original idea is not very practical. Anyway, I find the quality of the answers in the Academia.SE quite good , and I find enjoyable to read them even without having a specific question in mind. Hopefully also a (themed) chat group would have a similar quality. Any interest in this?
I see now a similar question http://meta.academia.stackexchange.com/questions/532/better-use-of-the-chat-room-discussion-groups-proposal?rq=1
The idea is good, it just needs community support. Once it's been decided that we should do it, we can definitely help with the advertising. I had written a whole bit about how we should try themed chats, but after consideration, that seems needlessly specific; the best goal (to me) would be to simply set up a time where the community can ask questions in chat and have an open-ended discussion.
Thoughts?
A once a month open house could be fun. It would have to be advertised well, and we should get some commitments from hi-rep users to show up.
@Suresh that's exactly what I had in mind, when I asked my question (linked above) but the interest appeared to be rather weak. It would be cool to try it out at least
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299 | How do we attract people from all research areas?
I have noticed a lot of computer scientists, physics, and a few more subjects but I think there is a lack of people from a lot of other major fields, for example Biology.
How do we attract people to contribute to the website from less computer-centric areas?
There's always word of mouth. You tell your friends, who tell their friends, who tell their friends...I've already shown two of my friends this site, but I don't know if they've ever posted anything.
Maybe ore or more of the more creative ones among us could contact Jorge Cham (PhD Comics) to see if he is interested/willing to promote Academia Stack Exchange with a nifty, amusing comic. For this we would need to find a shared interest. Our interest is to get attention (particularly in under-represented fields), his aim is to entertain people with funny, thoughtful comics. If he likes the idea of our site it might not be impossible — it never hurts to try.
Great idea! Is there anyone knowing him personally, or being in the same place, or in high standing (I doubt if he can read all messages, save from responding). Moreover, while SE is great and giving a lot of if intellectual value to the world (e.g. think about countless programmers' hours saved) , it's a commercial enterprise and Jorge Cham (or anyone else, not already invloved) may be less inclined to advertise it for free.
Is there any mileage in the idea of one of us writing an article about SE.Academia for publication in a high profile academic magazine? An example of such a publication in the UK would be The Times Higher Education Supplement. This journal doesn't have a particular subject bias - it is read by folk from all disciplines.
Does it work in that way "Hey Times, I am a random PhD student. Please find attached my article for you."? (But if there is anyone who has any info if it is possible - it would be great.)
Is there some way I can help via exposure through Mendeley?
If it makes you feel any better, I don't understand much about how to get people to contribute to Mendeley either ;-)
Well, maybe if there is a Q&A on some aspect of Mendeley, or reference management systems, then it can be linked on Mendeley Blog, or via Mendeley Facebook Page? Is it possible? Do you think that it makes sense?
First of all, Academia SE grew from Stack Exchange (Overflow), Programmers SE, etc. It's no surprise that many of our audience come from computer science.
Compared to other SE sites, I think Academia SE is not that bad. By its nature, academians are minorities in most societies. So, it's no surprise that we have a little less readership than other SEs.
Of course, that's not to say that we don't want to grow. We do.
I live in Taiwan. The population here is 23 million. There are approximately 1 million people here who's got masters/PhDs. But, it seems to me that there are only a few people in Taiwan hanging around on this site. I can tell that by observing the activity of this site during the local time interval 1pm - 3pm.
I do have friends in Taiwan who are academians and have encountered issues. Some of them came to me to ask for help. In some cases, I pass the links on our site to answer their questions. Sometimes, I cannot find the right Q&A for them.
In those cases, I tried to encourage them to ask their questions on Academia SE themselves. So far, my attempts have not been successful. The major reasons I failed are:
1. English.
They know how to write their field-specific papers in English. But, they have problems with stating their academia-specific issues in English. Sometime, it's really hard to do so. If you're a native-English speaker, you can tell that I am not a native-English speaker. The reason I can write in the way most people can understand is because I lived in US over 30 years and I have many years of hard time writing in English after a lot practices. And I still do have hard time with writing in English. For example, it took me an hour to write this answer. I suggested them to use our English Language & Usage SE. Some of them did. I myself looker at that site sometimes. I saw quite a bit down-votes and closed questions, much worse than our site. I am just stating my observation here. No complaint.
2. Anonymity.
Everyone I talked to expressed anonymity concern. One of the reasons is again, English writing. They are so afrid that they are going to be laughed at when their questions get down-voted or closed due to poor writing. I told them don't worry. People will help to edit. Still, no avail. Again, I am simply stating my observation. No complaint.
Most of our participants on this site are fluent English speakers. I can tell that because they write better English than mine. So, I think we can attract more people from everywhere by helping others to encourage them to ask questions when the questions are not so well-written in English. The help can be in many ways. We can help them by editing the questions. We can help them by making comments to ask questions to clarify what they are asking, etc. Just my two-cents here.
I have noticed a lot of computer scientists, physics, and a few more subjects but I think there is a lack of people from a lot of other major fields, for example Biology.
I see it that way too. Take computer science or theoretical physics. Both are mostly concerned with theories and if experimental (e.g., particle physics) than still in a relatively "dry" manner (i.e., experimenting by means of sitting in front of a computer screen mostly). In contrast, biologists and chemists spend a lot of their time in labs getting their hands literally dirty. My point is, that accessibility, as well as opportunity costs might be a part of explanation for the lack of people from "wet" disciplines. Another issue could also be deeper computer literacy (knowledge of what wikis are good for etc.).
How do we attract people to contribute to the website from less computer-centric areas?
My point above was meant to sketch a hypothesis about inherent limits and hurdles for recruiting people from some disciplines, especially those heavily experimental, or field-work requiring ones.
To attract people in specific field, it would be nice if they could track their field questions via a tag and follow such tag. E.g., medicine tag, computer science tag, economics tag.
Why the down vote with no comments?
@earthling the down vote is mine. I down voted because I disagree, not because I think it is a low quality post. I think this is consistent with how voting works on meta http://meta.academia.stackexchange.com/faq#vote-differences.
I do see a lot of people from math and computer science but perhaps that is just the people who are posting. Are there others who come but do not post?
It would help if we could track users by their discipline. I think adding something about their discipline to users' profiles would help us to know who is really here and who is posting. Once we know we don't have any biology people, we can focus on getting some biology people. Then, continue on to the other disciplines.
I, for one, don't see many posts about economics/business (except mine). I would love to see more.
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1330 | Why is font smoothing disabled on academia?
With my current setup: Google Chrome, OS X Yosemite, a 27 inches 2560x1440 monitor, somehow the font used on academia -- and probably other -- is not using sub pixel font smoothing. It is not legible. Is there a justification for this ? I don't feel like diving into CSS and custom style right now, so if there is a quick fix, I would like to know it.
My suspicion is that this is not an Academia issue, but a browser or Yosemite issue. If I examine the same page in Safari or Google, I get a very different appearance than when I try to view the site in Firefox (for instance). I personally find the text in Firefox easier to read, as it is "heavier" and stands out better against the background.
Confirmed. Safari and Chrome on OS X won't smooth fonts. However Linux Chrome and OS X Firefox do smooth fonts.
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532 | Better use of the chat room: Discussion groups proposal?
I noticed that there are quite a few users with questions that are little open-ended, which is not a good fit for the Q/A format that we have on SE sites. I suppose a lot of us, grad students, would like to have a medium of communication where we can discuss matters and questions about previous experiences of the more senior members of AC.SE.
The chat room is a good fit for this purpose, however it appears as there isn't much activity there. For instance just before writing this meta question the last entry on chat room was from 6 days ago. So here comes my suggestion/proposal:
We hold regular discussion groups on the chat; for instance once a week or every second week ...
... where the subject to be discussed is voted here on meta
I am not sure if there has been anything like this before, here on AC.SE. CrossValidated has journal clubs with article discussions on the chat, a concept which I find pretty cool despite my lack of interest in statistics :)
What do you think? Is this a desirable or sustainable
I think this is an interesting idea. However, I'm pretty sure that this is something that would need to be community-organized, rather than something that the mods do, since we just don't have the time to organize what amounts to an online seminar series.
However, if a group of users wants to take the initiative to do this, I (and the other mods?) would be happy to offer logistical support as needed.
Probably worth reminding you that if you (as a moderator) create a scheduled event in a chat-room it'll pop up an event in the bulletin here on the site, encouraging folks to find out about chat. Some sites do weekly events in this fashion, where folks just gather to chat about whatever.
I wasn't suggesting that mods would organize something like this for the members, but merely checking the level of interest for something like this.
This is a great idea, because it would make some users recognize the chat so they might hopefully use it more often in the future. There should be plenty of people around here who can profit from a discussion while we also already have some very talkative and well-informed members as well, so there should be enough potential to make this an event that everyone enjoys.
I also don't believe it has to focus on a single subject, just announcing that there will be an open chat at date x, time y would be enough?
I also don't see any real downsides to this (besides possibly wasted efforts), so why not just give it a try?
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387 | Deleting [advice-request] tag
There is a tag advice-request, which in my opinion is useless, as:
it is a meta-tag,
in general, much content here is in fact an advice request,
I have no idea how should it help.
Any pros or cons for deleting it?
Any tag that doesn't serve a useful and legitimate purpose should be recommended for deletion. I would propose that we use slightly higher standards than deleting or closing posts, since this affects site-wide activities: 7 or 10 net upvotes for a response that proposes deleting a tag should be sufficient to get the tag removed.
I agree with deleting it, it's a meta tag, and most questions on Academia.SE turn out to be a request for advice to some extent…
@aeismail Could you delete it? It seems that I'm not in power...
I think that the tags have to be deleted from the questions that have them. Then the tag is automatically deleted after reaching a "count" of zero. I did it for this one—but we should be sure not to have to delete a tag after it gets lots of "hits."
@aeismail You can upvote this MSO request for mass-untagging and tag deletion. It would be really useful to mods (yesterday, I wondered why you had flooded the home page, now I know)
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99 | Personal advices instead of general questions means low reusability
I note that this question implicitly prefers questions with a general topic but in fact very localized content (one's life story + a question of type 'What should I do?').
For example, one I asked a general question (i.e. if one can use his/her personal e-mail instead of institutional) then it was pointed out that in fact there were such question before (as a side part of a compound/story type question).
AFAIK it is not a good practice for a SE site.
First, it makes things less reusable.
An answered question makes less sense to others.
It is harder to find.
Second, it makes harder to make meaningful answers.
If there are more subquestions and answer covering only some may be accepted.
As a specific context is given, the answer may not be true in a more general one.
I'm not so sure what you want to discuss with this post, as I don't see an explicit discussion question. Are you asking whether that style of question is constructive and should be encouraged?
@eykanal It is a more a comment. And yes, the question asked implicitly is whenever other users agree with this point of view. If so then there is a separate issue what can be done (in terms of dis/encouraging, editing, closing, allowing, etc).
Well, academics to tend to talk a lot :)
Seriously, though, there's a balance between providing useful context and writing a blog post. I can think of two approaches to this:
We can make use of the beta to try to emphasize conciseness in the comments
We can try to emphasize conciseness over extensive background in the FAQ (I'm thinking it would be most appropriate in the etiquette section, but that can be discussed later).
Given our audience, though, this will probably be a problem we'll see often.
Such questions should be closed as too localized. They're not of general use to the readership.
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1931 | Why are my comments getting deleted?
From time to time my comments get deleted (sometimes right after being posted). For me it is very frustrating - I feel chaotic in an environment in which my things change without a notice. I refresh things a few times, double check if I posted a comment on the right post, question my sanity for a short time... and then only realize that it has been removed for a reason I do not fully understand.
Please, if you have to remove my comment, DO inform me. I don't claim that all of my comments have high value. I only claim that I don't want to participate in a place where my things disappear at random.
And for the last 2-3: could you write them (I don't have access to them) and present some rationale? (Hopefully the benefit for the community is bigger than the cost of frustrating a user (i.e. me), and potentially discouraging him for good.)
Notifications for deleted comments have been treated at meta.SE here and here.
And for the last 2-3: could you write them (I don't have access to them) and present some rationale?
I think it's useful for the the community to see what kinds of comments get flagged, and why. So here goes (these are listed most recent first):
Comment: "@DeboraWeber-Wulff It would be cool to carry a scythe."
Post: Presentation time is out in a scientific conference
Flagged as: too chatty
Comment: "[Best wishes for the overzealous comment deleter.]"
Post: PhD application denial - Is it usual to ask reasons/recommendations?
Flagged as: not constructive
I handled this flag, so I can comment further on the rationale. This post is not an appropriate place for a complaint about comment deletion. It's entirely possible that the "comment deleter" would never even see it, since it's not directed @ anyone. Instead, every future visitor to this post would have to read it... for what purpose? It does not improve the post in any way. If you want to start a constructive conversation about comment deletion, meta is the place to do it.
Comment: "You don't mention a country/system in which you applied. If you applied to a particular professor, you can get some informal feedback; if to a university/department - it's unlikely to get any feedback (see answer)."
Post: PhD application denial - Is it usual to ask reasons/recommendations?
Flagged as: It wasn't flagged. It was deleted after the user added the requested information to the post, presumably making the first part of your comment obsolete.
Comment: "@xLeitix I turned it into an answer, thanks."
Post: Is there a lack of oversight of how professors interact with students?
Flagged as: obsolete.
I handled this flag, too, so I can comment on the rationale. This comment is meant to notify a user of something but has no additional purpose beyond this notification. Generally when handling this kind of flag, , I check to see if the user it's directed @ has been on the site since the comment was posted. If so, I will delete it. Otherwise, I wait a little longer.
Please, if you have to remove my comment, DO inform me.
Since the purpose of removing comments is to remove "noise," it would be counterproductive for moderators to inform you by adding a comment. Also, there is no way in the moderator interface (when dealing with comment flags) to add a comment, so it would involve extra work to go to the post and add a comment.
I think a better way would be for the website to notify you automatically when a comment of yours is removed. If you want, you can suggest this as a feature request on Meta Stack Exchange (if it hasn't been suggested already).
Thank you a lot for gathering them and commenting! The "too-chatty" thing was my single interaction in that post, with at least +2. While I understand the rationale, for me it does more harm than success. "Best wishes for the overzealous comment deleter.]" was indeed non-constructive, but it happened just after my constructive comment was deleted (and the edit solved 1/2 of the issues raised there). With adding noise - you are right, and the best way would be automatic SE notification. In any case, I will try to refrain from commenting at all (since there is a risk of a silent deletion).
@PiotrMigdal - The "scythe" one was mine, I deleted based on the flag and the fact that it was, in fact, just discussion. However, looking back at it, I did violate my own policy of leaving those types of comments up for at least two days. My fault, I should have left it there for the duration of the discussion.
Generally when handling this kind of flag, , I check to see if the user it's directed @ has been on the site since the comment was posted. If so, I will delete it. What if I'm on the site and haven't read the comment yet?
@Joel That can happen. If you delay reading comments for some reason (for hours, days, weeks, whatever), you may find that they're no longer there when you go to read them. Such is the nature of comments, as we don't have any more reliable way to tell whether the recipient has actually read them.
@eykanal I guess, if you need to wait for two days for safely take action, you can propose a feature-request in the Meta to make another flag that inform you to return to the comment/post after two days.
@ff524 SE is not a real-time interaction, so delay does not happen "for some reason", but it's by design. While it's not possible to cover some cases, but I guess a day is a sensible threshold (IMHO it should capture most of the cases).
@ooker: Sounds like you are talking about http://meta.stackexchange.com/q/119096/135695 ?
@BenVoigt precisely that. +1 on here and there
There's a general principle on Stack Exchange sites that comments should be considered ephemeral and will be removed without warning or notification when the community feels they are not helpful or no longer needed. This is global across the whole Stack Exchange network and the SE staff have shown no signs of considering changing this. So if you want to participate in SE sites at all, I think you have to live with "your things disappearing at random".
Upvoted since this is a correct description of the state of affairs (not because I believe this should be the policy).
I know this rule, and don't mind if they are being deleted some time later. But deleting them just after they got created makes question my, my computer's, and SE's sanity. And while I am/was active on other sites (Physics.SE, TP.SE, MathOverflow) I only experienced such frustration on Academia.SE.
This is a terrible and entirely sub-optimal way to go about comment noise. Comments get votes. Let comments that rep'd users wish to delete go towards the site's background color, becoming less visible (or simply add a downvote button). Upvotes can return it to greater visibility in either event. It does indeed present a type of unearned censorship and just like the problems of censorship can produce events where unpopular but important texts get removed from history.
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3484 | Gendered pronoun usage
One of the community members has approached the moderators with a concern about gendered pronoun usage amongst our Academia members. Specifically, this individual felt that calling out gender in discussion—e.g., "he said…" or "as she commented…"—risks introducing bias and may affect the quality of the discussion.
As such, I wanted to ask the community on behalf of this member... should we, as a community, discourage the use of gendered pronouns in discussion?
Note recent conversation on this topic: http://meta.academia.stackexchange.com/questions/3280/how-do-we-feel-about-gender-specific-terms
I am not certain what is to be discussed. Is it the usage in case one assumes to know what would be correct like saying "eykanal in his post said[...]" or something else?
@quid Not sure I followed your comment, but yeah, its asking if we should ask folks to say "...as quid said..." as opposed to "...as he said..."
Thanks for the clarification. This is what I wanted to know. That is, if the scope is restricted to referring to a specific user or if it is more general. Tangentially but perhaps not completely irrelevant for this discussion, I would note though that the situations of our two examples are not exactly comparable as I feel there less information in my case than in yours that "he" should be correct.
@quid No! You should not try and predict the "correct" pronoun based on how someone looks. The only way to know what is correct is to be told.
@StrongBad yes, I understood that concern, which I tried to convey with the formulation "in case one assumes to know what would be correct." I still think the difference I high-lighted is relevant to a non-negligible proportion of users in this discussion (even if you think it should not).
@StrongBad are you serious with this also in the real world off-line? Now you made me have a closer look at eykanal's profile but I can't help agreeing with quid ;-)
@Dilaton I try not to say things that make people feel uncomfortable. I tend to side with people who have gender identity issues over those with grammar issues.
@StrongBad ok serious gender identity issues are probably painful and not fun. But I guess that in such cases language issues might be one of the minor things. Personally, I rather feel uncomfortable or put off by the inreasing number of for my feelings out of place "they", "them", etc or even worse things. In particular if somebody refers to me personally by such pronouns, I feel almost offended and and at least politely object to it ...
@Dilaton that is my point. If someone says what pronoun to use, I use it. If I do not know, I would rather offend someone who adamantly opposes the use of the singular they than risk mildly upsetting someone by using a gendered pronoun.
@StrongBad but what if the upset would be not because of grammar but because of the perceived implication that you felt unable to determine their gender from their appearance? Possibly this is especially a concern to some "people who have gender identity issues."
@quid lets take this to [chat].
@StrongBad also, referring to a single individual as "them", "they" etc might be taken as offending as it can be interpretted as insinuating that that individual suffers from a multiple personality disorder. Or for an SE user that that account is used by more than one real-world person and so on ...
@quid - I'm barely able to follow all the conversation this post generated, but I did see your mention of my name. I really wasn't kidding; this isn't my question, it was asked to me by someone else who wishes to remain anonymous. I'm simply doing a favor by posting it. For what it's worth, my personal (i.e., non-mod) opinion is virtually identical to ff524's.
The only time I mentioned your "name" as far as I can see, is as example in my first comment on OP. What I did express recently is that misgivings about the relevance of the question should be addressed at "the asker" which one can take as referring to you or the user that actually asked. Anyway, the main point I meant to make was that I am not the correct recipient for complaints about the relevance of the question. It could still be a good idea to edit the question based on my requests for clarification to avoid further confusions about its scope.
@quid - *facepalm* that should have been to Dilaton. My bad.
@Dilaton - See my above comment; it was intended for you, not quid.
I'll repeat what I said in the other thread, which seemed to be supported by the community (as indicated by their votes):
I am in favor of encouraging clarity above all else, and leaving other matters of language and style up to the author of the post.
As long as the language of the post is clear and it is consistent with the be nice policy, we should let authors express themselves as they prefer. If you don't like gender-specific terms or pronouns, don't use them in your own posts, but don't insist that others refrain from using them.
In response to StrongBad's suggestion that
if users list preferred pronouns in their profiles, then they can flag posts for moderator attention to "fix" references that use a non-preferred pronoun
I disagree completely. Moderators editing comments does not leave any edit trail, so the user appears to say whatever the moderator wrote. It is used with extreme care in exceptional cases involving comments that can't be deleted (e.g. because they are an integral part of some exchange), but have offensive content that violates the Be Nice policy. (Gendered pronouns are not offensive content with respect to the Be Nice policy that all Stack Exchange users are required to follow.)
Plus, from a linguistic perspective, having both "he"s and "she"s can disambiguate a sentence. "He gave me his work," could be person 1 or a third person, "He gave me her work," is obviously three people. As much as I support singular "they," it would obviously get confusing to use only "they" and "them" when discussing three+ people
If we're being precise, "Gendered pronouns are not offensive content" should be "may not be offensive content". One could see a user frequently misgendering another as offensive.
@Fomite If you flag a series of comments as "rude or offensive" because they refer to you using the wrong pronoun, those flags will be declined. "Offensive" here means "violates the Be Nice policy".
@ff524 Given flags have no capability to have context put to them, it seems like it would be extremely difficult to tell. Beyond that, "ff524 would decline a flag" = / = something is offensive content.
@Fomite If the only thing offensive about a comment is wrong pronouns, it's not offensive by Be Nice standards. Those are the standards that Stack Exchange moderators are asked to use in judging what is "offensive" for purposes of moderation.
Consistent misgendering - the example I used, would fail under both the "Bigotry of any kind" and "Harassment and bullying" standards of Be Nice.
@Fomite I'd be more likely to attribute it to poor language skills, unless there was other stuff going on to suggest it was intentional harassment.
@ff524 I don't disagree. I'm just stating that, in a meta question about the precision of language, in a post made by a mod, "is not" is possibly more absolute than is purely desirable.
@Fomite OK... I clarified that "offensive" means "with respect to the Be Nice policy".
Bueno :) I also have issues with the policy itself, but that's beyond the scope of this question.
@Fomite quite literally everything is potentially offensive if one follows your approach. If user A comments under each and every contribution of a particular user B. "This is very insightful and interesting" while having been told that they should not as it is noise and it seems they do it in bad faith, then this behavior becomes "rude or abusive" while the content of the comment is not in itself offensive or rude (though possibly "too chatty" but that's a separate concern). Additionally, using an "other" flag it is possible to add context to a (comment) flag.
@quid We don't disagree - hence my opposition to absolute statements on moderation. Though I would suggest misgendering is particular hurtful to certain segments of our userbase.
@Fomite It seems that the original concern is not about misgendering but about gender bias.
@MassimoOrtolano The two are not necessarily distinct.
@Fomite honestly given that your are happy with the new version I really do not get what your point is/was. To me it is as much an absolute statement on moderation as the original was. But if you are more happy now than you were initially I guess that's fine.
@quid I'd describe my as "Happy enough to move on".
It seems to me there are two different issues here:
The original question by eykanal asks whether we should "as a community, discourage the use of gendered pronouns in discussion" because this "risks introducing bias and may affect the quality of the discussion".
StrongBad raises an entirely different issue, claiming that it is difficult or impossible to write correctly using pronouns, arguing that "as very few of us list our preferred pronoun in our profiles, we generally have no way of knowing what the correct pronoun is" and "the only way to know what is correct is to be told."
These are really very different points, and it muddles the discussion to confuse them with each other. For example, the second issue would be obviated in a situation where all participants had specified their preferred choice of pronouns, while the first question would remain equally relevant.
In any case, I do not think it matters much: neither issue is within the bailiwick of the community/moderators/meta readers.
As with any SE network, contributors have the right to write their questions/posts in the form they desire, and neither the community nor the moderators should attempt to externally impose a particular style or preference. This seems close in spirit to edits to change e.g. British spellings to American, which has always been an invalid reason to edit someone's post.
If someone wants to try to convince contributors that a particular style would be better, that's fine; one can always try to convince people to agree with oneself -- although doing it in comments might be off-topic, since comments are not for extended discussion. But I would be especially wary of such efforts from moderators, since they might give the false impression that they represent a collective norm of the community, rather than one person's opinion. (If moderators can post without the mod diamond, that would remove this problem.)
"If moderators can post without the mod diamond, that would remove this problem." No, a moderator cannot do this. But, a moderator could add that a particular opinion expressed is this mod's personal opinion and not site's policy. This is sometimes done.
I think that, for all the reasons noted elsewhere, it is valuable to encourage the use of gender-neutral pronouns where peoples' preferred pronouns are not known, or when talking about a generic person rather than an individual.
It should be mentioned somewhere in help or on meta that this is the preferred behaviour, and some people will hopefully make a point of commenting and pointing to that policy where applicable. My reasoning here is that it avoids potential offense, and avoids potential bias of the "I assumed that all researchers in $field are $gender" type, and (as far as I can see) has no downsides[1].
I am far less clear, however, on whether (or to what degree) this policy should be actively enforced. Are people politely asked to edit their posts? Do community members edit others' posts just for this reason? Is it something for moderators?
(I would probably argue not the latter, except in cases of clear and deliberate misgendering where a complaint has been made - in which case it should fall under anti-harassment policies anyway)
[1] yes, sometimes gendered pronouns can remove ambiguity in a sentence, but so can rewording the sentence to not be ambiguous
What about user names that will be interpreted by many as quite strongly suggesting a gender? What about profile pictures? Both are quite common. Will they be discouraged, too? You might want to start the movement at your user name (that I speculate many many will read as being your male given name plus an initial; whether this is correct or if they should read it like this is irrelevant if it is about avoiding introducing bias).
@quid Whether or not a user has a clearly gendered name/picture is somewhat orthogonal to whether you choose to use "He", "She" or "They" when writing.
@Fomite first of all, how a particular user in practice is usually addressed will depend on this a lot. Second, and this is my main point, if somebody wants to avoid bias of the claimed form I think they better include this aspect in their analysis. A proposed solution is to use the user names rather than pronouns. So no "he" anymore but instead (to take some users with many points as example) Pete, Peter, Bill, Dave, Paul, Dan, Nate etc for then no gender becomes apparent. This just makes no sense in my opinion. [To be clear, I do not propose to do anything about user names.]
It is by no means the case, that everybody embraces or agrees with the crazy PC nonsense infecting more and more aspects of live in particular in the US now even to the extent of messing up with prefectly clear and correct language. It is NOT the "preferred behaviour" and should therefore not be mentioned in the help-center as such nor should it ever become an official policy.
Regarding the previous comment: FWIW, it is by no means the case that everybody embraces or agrees with the description of avoiding gendered pronoun usage as "crazy PC nonsense". Some of us are reasonably content to change the inflections of our written or spoken English depending on the professional or social contexts.
Should we, as a community, discourage the use of gendered pronouns in discussion?
Do you mean
Should we discourage users from using gendered pronouns in general? or
Should we avoid assuming a particular gender, when one hasn't been indicated in the question, username, profile, avatar or discussion?
For #1: No, that would be absurd; #2: yes, we should avoid making unsubstantiated gender assumptions.
I will share two reasons for my answer to #2:
When musicians audition for orchestra jobs, they play behind a screen, and their names are not provided to the committee. This practice was developed in order to remove gender bias. Compare youtube videos of historical vs. modern orchestra concerts. The contrast is striking. The gender make-up of the big orchestras has changed dramatically, thanks in part to this gender-free audition process.
When I was a child, anti-Semitic neighbors made assumptions and nasty remarks to me, based on my surname. Well, my surname came from my father, who had been raised Catholic (but who, except from his name and some books sent on random birthdays, was entirely absent from the scene). Jewish law and custom says you are Jewish if your mother is Jewish. Mine was (although not through religious practice). Where did that leave me? Uncomfortable with unwarranted assumptions.
Perhaps a new, more clearly posed question would be helpful for the site.
(I would not suggest an edit to the question, given that a lot of very confusing discussion has taken place based on the question in its original form.)
You should probably specify what you mean by "avoid assuming a particular gender". For example, for many people, use of "he" for a general, gender-neutral third person is still quite common in many contexts, and doesn't imply that the author assumes that the person they are writing about is male. Similarly, use of "she" for a person of unknown gender also does not imply an assumption that the person is female. This is especially true on an international site like this one.
On the other hand, saying something like "I downvoted this answer because you don't know what's it's like to be a male student in a program where men are a gender minority" would be an unsubstantiated and inappropriate gender assumption. (In addition to being a generally unproductive comment...)
@ff524 - Dr. Spock's book, Baby and Child Care, was the first book I saw that used "she" for a person of unknown gender. He explained what he was doing, though, at the beginning of the book. (He alternated between chapters.) I don't think this has become common practice yet. In general, wouldn't it be safer to say something truly neutral, e.g. s/he, him/her, his/her, they, use of the noun instead of a pronoun, etc.?
You are of course free to do so in your own content. My comment was about drawing inferences from other users' content. I think it is incorrect to infer from use of "he" or "she" that the author is assuming one gender or another.
@ff524: for use of he/she talking about a generic hypothetical person, sure. But if a commenter writes e.g. “Note the OP said he’s a grad student”, then this certainly does strongly suggest the assumption that OP is male.
@PLL the way many people use it, it really doesn't.
I think it's more important to try to avoid bias based on gender, rather than using gender pronouns to hide the reason for bias.
The first (which I agree is more complicated) is the actual issue we deal with.
The latter is only covering up the problem, but lets it proliferate.
So, if someone is or feels clearly male or female (name, photo, information) then let's use gender pronouns and let those that have problems with the specific gender reveal themselves and be stigmatized.
In the case that the question refers to the gender that a generic student or post doc should have, I don't see it as a big problem either. We can write he/she, or the student, or they...
@djechlin it might help to be more explicit regarding what you mean specifically. What I can think of does not really apply to the content of this post. Note that it seems the post only proposes to use gendered pronouns in cases where the account "feels clearly" gendered.
Having thought about this a bit more, and reflecting on comments, I thought I'd add a second answer rather than heavy editing on my old one.
I think there are three slightly different matters that are being talked about here.
1. Referring to a user whose name or icon suggests a gender
In an ideal world we would not make assumptions based on these things, but in reality, at least for now, this is going to happen, and the number of people for whom it will be wrong, as a proportion of the population, is very small. Except in the case where somebody is being deliberately misgendered (which would come under anti-harassment rules), I think this is something to leave alone.
2. Referring to a user whose gender is not suggested by name or icon
Here, users should make every effort to refer to that user by gender-neutral pronouns. It must be pretty offputting for a woman to post here under a neutral name (for whatever reason) and be assumed to be a man - or, probably less common, vice versa. It is not appropriate to make assumptions, which may tend to reinforce stereotypes.
I believe that this should be noted in the help, and people should make an effort to remind askers and answers of this policy in comments.
3. Referring to a generic person
I mean here when somebody is not talking about a specific SE user, but is referring to, for example, "a student" or "a postdoc". Here I think that it is really important to remain gender-neutral, lest we reinforce the idea that all researchers in $field are $gender.
I think this is by far the most important of the three items here. I think that correcting gender-specific terms used in this sense should, in itself, be grounds for editing a post. If there is argument over this on a specific post, then preferring gender-neutrality in generic people should be the guidance for moderators.
Would anybody like to explain the downvotes? (I realise that they mean something different on meta, but a blind "NO" doesn't help discussion much...)
No, dont mess up with gramatically correct language and pronouns to make them not even wrong for nonsensical PC reasons!
@Dilaton I have explained the reasons above. Would you care to elaborate on how they are nonsensical?
I mean it is enough to just estimate and treat others based on their knowledge, skills, qualifications, and personality, instead of being prejudiced based on things related to the physical appearance such as body height, gender, body weight, race, age, hair color or length etc. This is what most academics do among themself anyway, so there is no need (on an academic site) to embrace for example the messing up with perfectly correct gendered language advocated by PC advocates and busybodies. I am personally appaled by how far this crazy PC movement has gone in particular in the US ...
@Dilaton Hah! I recommend that you have a skim of http://blogs.lse.ac.uk/impactofsocialsciences/2016/03/08/gender-bias-in-academe-an-annotated-bibliography/. You might be surprised about what "most academics" do.
But, you have indeed explained why you disagree with encouraging gender neutrality - because if you don't think there is any problem, then it does make sense that asking people to change their language is an unwarrented imposition. Thank you for that.
@Dilaton What is this definition/measurement of "most academics", given that academia exists outside North America and most importantly outside STEM?
+1 to Simon W, btw
Down voted because the issue of guessing users gender by their username or profile picture is not the issue here. Often the people referred to in a question are not the OP but advisors, TA, students, etc.
@Dilaton it's perfectly possible to write in proper English, respecting all the rules of grammar, and formulate things in a way that does not mention people's gender.
@cape code that was one point out of three, and it was one on which I recommended no action. The point that you raise is exactly my point 3. Care to reconsider your down vote?
I like your other answer better.
@CapeCode Of course addressing specific users of this site is the issue. Please read the comments on OP where I specifically asked for clarification on this point.
@quid you seem to be the only one worried about that. The general issue is the use of gendered pronouns to describe generic people, like someone's adviser. It's very rare that we refer to other users in a way that would require pronouns.
@CapeCode rare or not (I don't think it's that rare by the way) this is what the question was about. If you find it irrelevant tell the asker about it.
I strongly object this would-be "politically correct" thought police, which is only done to hide real problems. A person so unstable it get's offended by a mere wrong pronoun needs help, by a therapist, not a thousand "friends" who really just find it unsettling to see a guy breaking to pieces over a trivial misconception.
I add this much: If I have not hint as to what pronoun could be right, I also use "they" to refer to an individual person. It's a bit crude, but the other has solicited for it, and it is embarrassing for both having to correct me. Otherwise "he" implies "she" unless otherwise mentioned. If I need a lawyer, it does not matter to me if he's a man, woman, transsomething, or this very clever aarvark my second cousin refered me to.
-1. You are free to object to the proposal, but there's no need to resort to insults (and ad hominem arguments certainly don't make your position stronger). Also see the Be Nice policy.
I am sorry if it offends anyone, but i find it dangerous, to the individual and to the freedom of out academic community, to suppress problems by policing the language. "Ad hominem"? Yes.
So write an answer about the danger to the individual and freedom of our academic community (you haven't mentioned anything about that in this post). That would be a much more convincing argument than one that just attacks those who disagree with you.
I thought an academic audience might not need https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thought_Police explained, be self-critical enough to question their motives, and see how it doesn't help to save a person from slight discomfort by essentially well-meaning colleagues, when there is a harsh outside world he has to cope with. Not to mention that it insults everybody who has not yet convertet to newspeak. But perhaps i should append to my post. And I am sorry if this here again offends anyone. ;-)
Since I have talked to academics with actual experience of totalitarian regimes, I find the glib use of "Thought Police" needlessly offensive. And if your reply is that people should have thicker skins; it works both ways
@YemonChoi I am offended by your implied derision of totalitarian regimes. Does this statement alone automatically make me right and you a bad person who doesn't care about the feelings of others?
I think we should discourage the use of gendered pronouns in discussion (as well as in questions and answers). The use of gendered terms generally does not add clarity and has the potential to be offensive/upsetting when the wrong term is used. As very few of us list our preferred pronoun in our profiles, we generally have no way of knowing what the correct pronoun is.
The issue is, how do we want to discourage the use of gendered pronouns. I do not think policing usage is the way to go. In other words, we should not systematically remove all usage of gendered pronouns. Instead, I think we should bring up in chat and meta that we strive to use gender neutral language when possible.
I also think if users list preferred pronouns in their profiles, then they can flag posts for moderator attention to "fix" references that use a non-preferred pronoun. I am not exactly sure how to handle edits for individuals who are gender fluid or who's preferred pronouns change with time.
Concerning "we generally have no way of knowing what the correct pronoun is": You seem to think that we usually can't infer a person's gender from a name or picture. I think such inferences are usually correct. If my gender were inferred incorrectly from my first name (which sometimes happens when people ignore the "s" at the end) and if I were offended by such errors (which I am not), then I would make my preference known (in my profile, or perhaps by signing my name as Herr Prof. Dr. Andreas Blass).
A person that is offended by a mere wrong pronoun needs a therapist. What would you say if i told you i was offended by you trying to neutralise me? Stupid, eh? That it is.
There is absolutely nothing wrong with the gendered pronouns as they have been used since centuries: -1
@Dilaton Whether gendered pronouns are good or not does not follow from the fact they have been used for centuries. Traditions can be good or bad; the fact that a tradition exists does not say anything about whether it is a good one.
@gerrit playing devil's advocate it is possible "as they have been used" could be intended as "in the way they have been used" and not as "because they have been used."
@quid yes this is what I wanted to say, thanks!
People don't check profiles, and its unreasonable to make people do so. If people don't know what pronoun to use based on a user name and avatar, and the impacted user takes offense, I can see that as problematic, but don't see a community-friendly resolution
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1312 | Difference between not constructive and obsolete flags
When flagging comments it is possible to flag comments as either "not constructive" or "obsolete" among other things. If you delete a comment or make an edit that makes another comment obsolete and no longer constructive, I think it is easiest for the moderators if the comment is flagged as obsolete instead of not constructive.
This is correct. However, some users may not see the deleted comments, and know that they are there. Therefore, we may have to tolerate some mismarking.
However, if the comment looks like it's somewhat relevant, it's probably better to mark it "obsolete" than "non-constructive" as a precaution.
I have been interpreting "not constructive" as being more along the lines of destructive criticism. Under that interpretation, anything that was ever constructive would still be constructive, but might become obsolete. I do not know, however, the degree to which others agree with this interpretation.
What you call "destructive criticism" would be better flagged as "rude or offensive" (at least, by the example on Wikipedia right now)
Maybe I've been setting too high a bar for "rude or offensive": that I've been trying to interpret as "to everybody" rather than just to myself...
I like potatoes!
^ That is not constructive.
@Compass Well played. I think I should adjust my personal filter, and maybe delete this post...
Comments that definitely violate the be nice rule are "rude or offensive."
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603 | Evidence based answers
I understand that questions on AC.SE are going to be "softer" in nature than the programming questions typical of SO.SE, but I think our answers often are "softer" then needed. I often read answers and think "Citation Needed". Are we answering questions based on our personal experience when we could be providing answers based on well conducted research? Should we be up voting "easy" answers that we agree with when they are void of references?
@CharlesMorisset that question asks about "how should we deal with "soft" answers to questions that demand them?" and I am asking about questions that DO NOT demand soft answers but are getting them anyway.
This is a very difficult area for our forum, as most of the answers and advice dispensed here is not borne of thoroughly research, but rather real-life (and therefore pretty localized) battle scars.
Personally, I favor the "hands-off" approach; policing this sort of thing is very tedious, with minimal benefit, as the community tends to do a good job upvoting stronger answers over the soft ones. As the distinction between strong and soft answers is typically pretty nebulous, I don't think a policy-based approach for treating this is correct. If this is something which needs to be addressed (which I'm not sure of myself), I would much prefer an education-based approach. One method could involve a community-defined comment template to leave on those sorts of answers, suggesting the commenter leave stronger answers and directing the answerer to the appropriate meta discussions. Another parallel method could be to make use of the community blog feature to publicize posting guidelines and suggestions. I would much prefer these to policy.
I think that, without forbidding experience-based answers and anecdotal evidence, we should push ourselves a little harder towards fact-based and statistics-based answers. There are quite a few questions on the site who are answered mostly with “I advise you to do this” or “I observed around me that X is more common than Y”, and which could be much improved if they were backed up with links to actual official policies and/or statistics.
Now, how to do that? I myself try, on questions where it is appropriate, to add a comment to try and remind us that fact-based answers are at the core of the Stack Exchange Q&A concept, and while we have a “softer” policy than most other sites of the network, fact-based answers are good. While I don't always add such comments (also because I don't want to cast myself into “that guy”), I think it's overall a great strategy to steer us in that direction, without policing. So, please consider adding them too!
As recent examples of question where I think we could have a more fact-based approach: here and there
I am not sure where the idea of policing it came in. That wasn't my intent. I think your answer echoes my thoughts exactly.
@F'x I don't mind seeing a fact-based answer if one is indeed available. But in the vast majority of questions here they only provide a partial solution. Your response to the second question you listed is a perfect example: for every "around 4 weeks" program, there are probably twenty that are much lower or higher, and depend on the advisor. The large standard deviation is what kills you on that question, and (I believe) a better answer is "it depends." Not as satisfying, perhaps, but it is easy to be fooled by an average in this case.
@F'x To go a bit further--if someone applied to grad school expecting 20 days vacation per year, he or she could end up very disappointed, or very happy, and would be doing him/herself a disservice by not seeing if a policy was in place before applying. You certainly stated the appropriate caveat in your answer, but this is almost always going to be necessary in these types of questions.
@ChrisGregg if your point is that most questions would be much better answer by “it depends” than actually collecting the statistics, to the extent that they exist and taken with a grain of salt, then I have to disagree
@F'x Yes, my point is that this is the case for many questions we get here. Using your example (and not to pick on you): trying to generalize the typical amount of vacation time by using a tiny sample size is misleading at best, and disingenuous at worst. I completely agree that statistics are useful when they are used properly, but I would urge against trying to shoehorn statistics into answers for the sake of trying to be scientific about it.
@ChrisGregg first, the sample can of course be expanded… and it also means “such policies do exist, and you can go look it up for the places you apply to”, which is to me an important message (more than “sorry boy, it depends”)
@ChrisGregg clearly a larger population would be better. In the absence of a large population survey, looking at a small sample of schools and their official policies is a much better answer than personal experience without any links to official policies. In the absence of a link to a survey I like the answer by F'x. While it is a small population it provides the insight into how to really get the answer.
@DanielE.Shub I disagree that it is a better answer -- it is misleading to assume that by looking at a few schools' policies you can get a general idea for vacation time, which is far, far more dependent on discussions with an individual advisor (and regardless of official policy). To "really get the answer" is to ask your advisor. If you don't yet have an advisor or a school, then you need to either reach out ahead of time or start working on your persuasive skills for eventually talking to your advisor. That question is the perfect counterexample to your argument, IMHO.
@F'x Ah, but the key here is that even at schools with a policy, the policy is almost certainly deferential to your advisor's whim. Quoting a policy someone put on a website actually does a disservice in this case. Academia is one place where there is so much leeway given to professors that I would argue it is more common to disregard the policy than to uphold it. I'm not disagreeing that there are lots of questions that benefit from data, but this example is (IMHO) one where it is not.
@ChrisGregg I will just state one final remark on this: I don't think you can be better off by not knowing the policy, rather than knowing it (and knowing that, as in life, actual results may not strictly conform to the policy). I think, if you're a certain type of professor (not an accusation against anyone, just a statement of fact), you may prefer that the policy is not known :)
@F'x BTW, “such policies do exist, and you can go look it up for the places you apply to” -- I absolutely agree that this is a good answer to the question.
@F'x To your last point--and I will drop this, too! :) -- I agree with your comment that it is better to know the official policy than to not know it.
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1955 | Is unethical vote accumulation possible?
Suppose three users A,B, and C, enter Academia.SE in collaboration with moderate knowledge. Each one would vote the post of the other. That is, each would be able to get at least two votes for each of their questions and answers due to the other two collaborators. This would make A, B, and C gain reputation and privilege immediately over a short period of time. As SE does not show who voted the posts openly, it would be difficult for this plot to get detected by the peers of the site.
Is this even possible? Or would such unethical accumulation be detected by the system and intimate the higher moderators?
The reason I post this question to Academia.SE-Meta and not SE-Meta itself is that this act would be easily taken care of in solid Q&A sites like StackExchange.SE and ServerFault.SE; the number of downvotes would counter-balance the number of unethical up-votes. Whereas Academia.SE is where there is not always a solid answer for a given question. It would be easier for A,B and C to slip away with mediocre Q and A due to the illusive nature.
Is there already a way to prevent this? If not, what could be done?
In addition to @ff524 answer, I just meant to add that the daily automatic vote reversal script that undoes strategic mutual upvoting (in the past, around 3am) is triggered only when a certain number of votes is exceeded. At MathSE, I've witnessed a scam that took over 2 years before suspensions followed because the lead user involved had, by experimenting, deduced that triggering number, the ring acting below the threshold. If that happens, moderators can still confirm vote fraud, but it takes effort and manual intervention (ff524 - kindly correct me if anything I say is no longer correct).
@gnometorule Yes, that's what I was alluding to in "In some cases, these votes may even be reversed automatically." On Academia, I personally check in on the manual vote fraud detection tools semi-regularly to pick up on things going on just below the automatic threshold.
Or would such unethical accumulation be detected by the system and intimate the higher moderators?
Yes. This is vote fraud, and moderators have tools that alert us to this.
In some cases, these votes may even be reversed automatically without moderator intervention, as described here.
(The specific nature of these tools is kept private to avoid people trying to "game" the vote fraud detection.)
Could you elaborate on that? Users require a min. reputation to become moderators. Different moderator privileges are unlocked at higher reputation points. At what level would a user get to use such a tool.
Agreed (+1). One more question. Can any user with sufficient rep. points could have access to such a tool? Or are they predetermined users appointed by the site admins?
@ÉbeIsaac it's not unlocked at any level of reputation. Sensitive tools, such as those related to vote fraud, destroying spammers, etc are only available to "diamond moderators" who have been elected and who then accepted the moderator agreement. (And to employees of Stack Overflow)
That sound intriguing. Do you get paid for this or is this some altruistic work? Your comment stated 'Stack Overflow' not Stack Exchange. Are there this sort of employment opportunities for each of the SE sites or only for Stack Overflow?
It's on a volunteer basis. As it says in the moderator agreement I linked to: "I am an independent volunteer moderator to Academia Stack Exchange and I am not an employee, agent or representative of Stack Exchange Inc."
By "Stack Overflow employees," I was referring to the people who work for Stack Overflow, the company responsible for the Stack Exchange network of sites (among other things.)
@ÉbeIsaac - For reference: the agreement we signed when we started as mods.
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3935 | How does one appeal an account suspension?
Although rare, account suspensions can happen to users on SE sites. In most cases the reason has been discussed in length by the defendant, site moderators, and SE team admins. With details privy to the parties involved.
However for those who are interested in how the appeal process works, I wanted to ask, just how does one appeal an account suspension?
A related FAQ post on [meta.se]: What can I do to lift or reduce a suspension?
When a user is suspended, they receive a message (a "mod message") in their Stack Exchange inbox giving the reason for the suspension. They can then write a response to that message. If they believe that the suspension is in error ("Did you mean to suspend the user ff523, not ff524?") this is a quick way to clear up the misunderstanding. Note that you can't keep sending multiple responses, one after the other; you get one response per mod message, so use it wisely.
All mod messages and the responses to them are copied to all the diamond moderators on the site. So if there's a rogue mod acting up ("You voted to close my post? See how you like a ten year suspension!"), other mods will see and intervene.
Finally, if the moderator team on Academia.SE is not willing to lift your suspension that you believe is unwarranted, you can use the "contact us" link in the footer of every SE site to ask the SE team to look into the matter.
+1, why can’t upvote twice!? So there are checks and balances given the hard coded messages to all moderators and a final appeal to the SE team. With this in mind, is this appeal process the same for all actions that can happen to a user? E.g account deletion, question restrictions, voting restrictions.
@Frank some restrictions are applied automatically by the software based on certain conditions and can't or won't be undone (e.g.: if your IP address is automatically spam-blocked for a day because your neighbor who steals your WiFi keeps posting spam here, we can't do much for you.)
I see. Understood now. Thanks for your time and input. A class act as always.
But what if you use the "contact us" link and nothing happens? (As in, no response at all for four weeks) And then you try again, and still nothing? How long should one wait before losing hope? Is four weeks too little time to wait? The moderators at Parenting Beta suspended me for posting a comment that they felt should have been posted as an answer.
I mentioned to them that my appeal had received no response, and asked if there was some better way to appeal the decision. They said the team is very busy and to be patient. How patient?
@aparente001 If this was over the holidays, it probably got lost by mistake. I would try again now that holidays are over. And then wait a week after that. (See “Contact us”… and then what?.) Don't really have any advice beyond that... I see you've used the 'contact us' form before and got a response, so you already have some experience with that.
@ff524 - Thanks, I will try once more, as you say, because of the holidays.
It is described at the end of this meta.se post:
How do I escalate my individual suspension/conflict with a moderator?
There are, I think, three options:
Reply to the moderator message directly. This both preserves privacy and notifies other moderators and a community manager. It's also the best way to show you are a reasonable/misunderstood/repentant user. Note you can only reply once, so make it count.
Use the "contact us" link. If you used up your reply or feel the need to elevate your concern, the contact form is a direct line to a community manager. We take complaints against moderators seriously. See also, the advice in the previous item.
Post a question on meta. (Not recommended.) Obviously, you can't do this during your suspension. (Though some folks come here to Meta Stack Exchange instead.) This is a master-level move that requires discipline. Be aware that most communities appreciate the hard work of their volunteer moderators so they tend to get the benefit of the doubt. You really need to go the extra mile to show yourself reasonable.
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1460 | Why there are so many mathematicians on Academia.SE?
This is probably OT, but I'm curious: why there are so many mathematicians here? It seems to me that the overall community is made by people who study/research math. Even undergrads post questions. Given that (at least in my country), math workers are a tiny fraction of the (academic) population, this seems an exception.
You can see the results of an informal poll here: http://meta.academia.stackexchange.com/a/470/929
Uh, great. Thanks.
Lone anthropologist here. Studying the natives (not really).
Mathematics is certainly disproportionately represented here, although it's only a minority of the site.
One reason is MathOverflow, which is arguably the most successful stackexchange site devoted to research-level academics. As a consequence, the stackexchange network probably has more visibility within mathematics than in any other academic field except computer science itself. When non-technical questions come up on MathOverflow, people are often advised to come here instead, so we get a steady stream of visitors interested in mathematics.
A second reason is critical mass. If a mathematics student or professor visits this site, they will quickly see that it's a welcoming and useful place to ask/answer questions, while this may be less apparent in some other fields. The net result is that first-time users in mathematics are probably more likely to become active participants.
The general "tilt" of SE sites is towards math and computer science, so it's not much of a stretch that such disciplines would be well-represented here.
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1519 | Why do people on academia.SE often suggest courses of action that are very different from what most people would do in real life?
When browsing this site, I see a lot of questions like
Should I let a senior student/professor/etc be a coauthor on my paper when he didn't do any work/made only negative contributions to the project?
Or
What should I do if someone asks me to write my letter of reference myself?
The answers usually encourage the OP to be ethical, and say stuff like
You shouldn't write your own letter because that would be academic fraud
or
You shouldn't let your colleague be a coauthor because coauthorships are supposed to reflect the contribution you made to the project
Now I think if I asked these questions to academics in real life, their answers would be something along the lines of "of course you should let him coauthor your paper/write your letter of reference yourself, because doing otherwise would be career suicide, and you are in no position to take the moral high ground here." Why is the prevailing opinion on academia.SE so different (and is this a problem)?
Why is the prevailing opinion on academia.SE so different? Citation needed.
"Everybody does it" is what people talking themselves into a bad decision say. Are you so certain that your colleagues are all making bad choices and giving bad advice?
Related: Are we presenting an idealised view of academia?
@ff524 I think this is at its heart a duplicate of my earlier question.
In fact, it seems to me that answers often clearly state whether they are about "the right thing to do" or "the best thing for you", or discuss both aspects.
Many of the questions that we get on Academia related to ethics necessarily involve "grey" areas, since what is the most ethical choice, as you suggest, may not be the most practical choice.
However, I believe we would be remiss if we, as a board, did not encourage best practices—what we believe should be done in a given situation. Of course, people reading the answers need to weigh the advice given against their own personal situations. There may be circumstances in which following the advice given may be detrimental. It is better, though, if the reader knows what is appropriate, so that they can try to avoid having to do something less ethical in the future.
Along with this, there is a reason why the OP can select the best answer that fits their situation regardless of what the community voted for.
In essence, the standard disclaimer applies: always apply due caution before following advice from strangers on the internet.
The following is a good paraphrase of a conversation I had with a junior colleague yesterday:
I: I just wanted to say that I would have discussed the issue of coauthorship of this paper with you if I thought there was any chance that you would consider it.
She: I didn't contribute any of the results of the paper.
I: Yes, but I've seen cases where people get added as coauthors with less involvement than you've had, in some cases just by being in the room when the work was done.
She: [reddening] There is no way that I would agree to that!
I: I know. So I didn't ask.
Or, from the other side, here is the last paragraph of a recently accepted paper by Jacob Hicks (my PhD student) and Dr. Kate Thompson (a 2014 PhD from my department):
All of the computer implementations and almost all of the mathematics was done by the named authors. P.L. Clark’s mathematical contributions were (only) the statement and proof of Theorem 4 and the proof of Corollary 1. The statement of Corollary 1 is due to the named authors and was (earlier) proven by them via a different and more computational method making use of quaternions. Clark also contributed to the writing of the paper, working off of an early draft of the named authors.
I had been invited by the named authors to be a coauthor, but I declined.
Or let's switch it around again: twice in recent memory I wrote papers that benefited substantially from conversations I had with more senior academics (one of whom is many years older; the other is not that much older but many times more famous and eminent); in the latter case there was no way I could have written the paper without the ideas this guy gave me. It happened that the ideas were difficult for me to implement, required some variations, and I finished the paper years after I had the conversation, but I have no reason to believe that he could not have carried through what he proposed to me. I offered coauthorship to both of these people and got turned down both times. And, to come full circle, in the former case I did coauthor the paper with a (different) student in my department. I wrote the whole paper and contributed the majority of the results: still, what he contributed was the best part, and his name comes before mine (alphabetically!).
I could go on, but you get the point: when it comes to issues of coauthorship, in every coauthorship situation I have been directly involved with, all parties involved have taken what the OP calls "the moral high ground". I don't really like that term because it makes the practice sound different from the norm. Speaking for myself, i would rather say that I have always acted according to the ethical standards that I was taught and that are followed by the majority of my colleagues the vast majority of the time. My career is alive and reasonably well. In fact I would like to think that I have a reputation for acting honorably and that reputation helps my career.
So my recommendations that other academics uphold professional ethics no matter which way the power flows are not only unhypocritical but sincere: I really do think that following these recommendations are in junior academics' best interests.
I have never directly witnessed a refusal to compromise on these kinds of professional ethics end anyone's academic career. Perhaps I've been very lucky, been in the best places, surrounded by unusually great people. Perhaps mathematicians are more samurai-like in their codes of honor than other academics. Perhaps. But overall my reaction to such questions on this site tends to be the diametrically opposite one: I find it shocking that so many young people are being placed in situations where they feel like they have to choose between their professional integrity and their career. When no one around you is behaving well, it seems hopeless to take an ethical stand even when it actually isn't. So having people on this site firmly steer questioners in the direction of "best practices" seems very, very important.
Well, in your situations you are offering coauthorship to people, and they are declining. This is quite different from being coerced into sharing coauthorship with a senior colleague when you as the junior colleague don't believe they deserve credit. Specifically, offering someone coauthorship will rarely hurt their feelings or ruin your career.
@Ben: Yes. I have never had a senior colleague try to coerce me into coauthorship: everyone I have ever actually interacted with knows better than that. But if one of my former students was being leaned on by his postdoctoral advisor in this way, for instance, I would strongly advise him not to roll over on this and I would remember that in all my future dealings with this errant person. The community as a whole needs to push back when people in power are behaving badly. If the junior academic rolls over, there can be no push back.
What if this ruins his career?
If standing up for what you know is right ruins your career, I have to ask what kind of career you had in the first place. If you're working in a coal mine to support your family, feel free to punch me in the nose for saying that. But if you're in a PhD program hoping for an academic career: then (this is my own choice and opinion, of course) do it right, and if your career is really ruined for not doing the wrong thing, go on to the next career. But again, I have never seen a young person's career ruined in this way. Have you?
The more likely outcome is that it leads to a parting of the ways between a student and a bad advisor. By the way, students switch advisors (and even universities) quite frequently for lots of reasons. A lot of the OPs here imply that they are unwilling to leave their current location, but moving around periodically is an inherent part of the academic lifestyle anyway. If you're in a country with only one university, I hope you're deeply discounting my advice, but in a place like the US there is always somewhere else to go.
I knew someone who took forever to get his PhD because his advisor wanted him to do something unethical and he didn't, and the advisor was his enemy for the rest of the PhD. If he had gone with what the advisor wanted he would have gotten the PhD years earlier. Transferring schools/advisors was not a great option for him because his CV was weak and he wasn't good at networking.
IMO it's a lot easier to be ethical if you are strong and in a good life position (in this case, a position where you could easily transfer to an institution of comparable quality). For instance, it's easy for me to say cheating on tests is morally wrong, because my grades have always been good enough that I've never needed to cheat. But if I was literally in danger of failing classes I imagine it would be a much harder ethical dilemma
I've definitely seen people run into serious career problems due to resisting unethical behavior. That doesn't mean the wise thing to do is to be unethical.
@Ben: So what happened to your friend after he got his PhD? Did he go on to an academic career?
@PeteL.Clark He's unemployed and I believe he has not published in the past decade or so.
@BenBitdiddle Regarding your comment about cheating: I assume that you understand why people on academia.SE tend to suggest not cheating as a course of action, even if it might have practical disadvantages in some situations. It seems that the same reasons would apply to your question.
@TrevorWilson: Good point. I've never heard an academic (in grad school or higher) actually advocate cheating, even in real life. This is probably because the people who cheat aren't strong enough students to go to grad school.
It is my impression that mathematicians are in fact more samurai-like on these matters than fields where experimental work demands larger teams where author contributions are more dilute and tangled up, or where expensive experiments introduce strong financial incentives to skew the authorship assignments.
I think some reasons may be
People on academia.SE don't truly care about anonymous Internet posters in the same way they care for their family and friends. They would rather uphold ethics than side with a random person, but in real life they would side with their friends rather than upholding ethics.
Many people on academia.SE post under their real name, and they wouldn't want to endorse unethical behavior where people could see it. On the other hand, never endorsing unethical behavior may be one of the things that make them comfortable posting under their real name in the first place.
As others have said, people who stay in academia have generally been screwed over less than people who don't, and have good relations with their colleagues and supervisors. They can afford to disapprove of writing letters of recommendation themselves, because they've probably never been in a position where they had to write one.
Is this a problem? Personally, I think it is okay as long as questioners are aware of this community bias.
"On the other hand, never endorsing unethical behavior may be one of the things that make them comfortable posting under their real name in the first place." I think there's some truth to that, yes.
The best remedy to many moral ailments is sunshine.
I like a lot an answer by Suresh to Are we presenting an idealised view of academia?, i.e. that we should make a split:
what we would all like to happen
what typically happens
what should NOT happen under any circumstances (even if it's sadly not rare)
what is completely abnormal.
I understand that [survival bias, etc] many profs here may never had to write a recommendation for themselves or were never in situation where presence and positions of authors reflected other factors than thier contribution.
(And I am sure that they would not set their advisees in these conditions.)
Yet, to answer: Why do people on academia.SE often suggest courses of action that are very different from what most people would do in real life?, I think that:
some people didn't met these problems in person,
idealizing academia, advisor-advisee relations, etc (survival bias + wishful thinking),
it may be dangerous to put under one's name an advice for a breach of ethics,
"lesser evil" doesn't sound well plus may be an excuse for others as a normal, acceptable behaviour.
Apart from the other good arguments, I think that we should answer “what should I do?” questions from the point of view of ethics and academic standards, because that’s the only point of view from which we can give a useful answer to most of these questions.
Let’s take this question for an example:
Should I let my supervisor be a coauthor on my paper when he didn't contribute anything to the project?
The decision that the asker eventually has to make strongly depends on the following questions:
How high is the risk that not making the supervisor a coauthor has negative repercussions of what kind?
How high does the asker value the damage done by these repercussions?
How high does the asker value the ethics involved?
The first question obviously strongly depends on the supervisor and can only be answered by somebody knowing this person; the other two questions can only be answered by the asker.
We cannot make the decision for askers of such questions; we cannot even give direct advice for such situations; we can only help them to make an informed decision. To this end, the main thing we can do is to inform askers about ethics and academic standards. We can and should also inform them about possible repercussions originating from them being expected to breach ethics – but in most such questions that I am aware of, the askers are already aware of possible repercussions.
I think that it is a good thing to help give people ways to weight the tradeoffs, though. I have noticed that some answers advocate dealing with an ethical problem immediately, while others advocate waiting until a person is less immediately in peril from acting. I think this is appropriate.
I certainly agree that it is only appropriate to inform people of the risks of various actions, and part of the advice should be the best way to pull something off, not just what is abstractly the correct thing to do. I think that we are pretty good about doing that.
We typically only have the problem description of one side. Which we do take care of by (staying in the example) e.g. asking the OP to consider whether the supervisor really didn't do a scientific contribution (and by a variety of answers that covers within the ethical a variety of different "local" = field-specific customs).
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1333 | Are questions about doing research related to academia?
The question is rather straight forward. Are questions, related to doing research, related to academia? Academia is, after all, the main place where research is done and which often sets the standards of doing research. If not, what forum would be more appropriate?
Sure, as per our help center:
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.
Note, however, that this is site is for questions about process, customs, standards of behavior, etc. in academia and/or research.
Just as a question on a user's particular field of academic study would be off-topic (e.g., a question on mathematics), similarly a question on a user's particular field of research would be off-topic (e.g., a question on how to find information about Netflix's global strategy).
But would we accept questions on non-academic research? Say, a project in industry where the goal is to develop a product rather than to publish? I'm not sure this community would be a good source of expertise on such questions.
@Nate as long as it's firmly in the "research" category and not straightforward product development then yes, I think we would.
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1527 | Bilingual confusion question to community wiki?
This question about confusion in science from language differences got some really interesting answers before it was put on hold. I think putting it on hold was a good thing, as it doesn't fit the normal question model. I do think, though, that it could be a good community wiki question, curating an informative list of just how much difference and confusion can occur from seemingly precise terminology. Would others agree?
(This is not an answer to the discussion prompt, but a suggestion on how to proceed following said discussion.)
I have converted the question to CW in the interim.
The question can now be handled by the usual community reopen vote/review process. If you believe the question has sufficient value to be kept around, you can vote accordingly. If you previously refrained from voting to reopen because you felt it should be kept, but only in CW form, now there is nothing holding you back.
If there is a consensus as a result of this meta discussion that the post should not be made CW (regardless of whether it is reopened or not), flag and a mod can change it back.
This is an answer to the discussion prompt :)
/takes off mod hat/ Also, this post is my opinion, not some dictate of policy or anything like that.
I am not in favor of reopening the question under consideration.
I am in favor of using CW to keep otherwise unsuitable posts very, very rarely, when a question and its answers are expected to be very broadly useful to most users of this site.
For example, see the current CW questions:
What do you wish you knew as a student before you became a researcher?
Software to draw illustrative figures in papers
What do publishers provide to authors in different disciplines?
What does first authorship really mean?
Compiling ethical standards for coauthorship across academic fields and regions
I am not in favor of expanding use of CW to keep posts around that are inappropriate for a Q&A model, and wouldn't be expected to be very useful to most users of this site. (Also see The Future of Community Wiki.)
I've seen just now this meta-discussion about my question. To avoid any conflict of interest, I'll restrain myself from voting in favour of reopening it :-) For what you are saying about CW, I was wondering: since at least a few SE sites allow big lists questions (e.g. Mathematica.SE), what about trying to identify, here on Meta, a few questions of this kind which can be significant to the whole community and can be asked as CW? For example, I'm thinking of questions addressing specific aspects of academic life across countries (e.g. cheating, publication requirements for PhDs, etc.)
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1155 | Question related to bibliography research
Do you think that a question like "I am looking for papers in this subject" is valid for Academia StackExchange?
Examples:
I am looking for papers and researches in Data Mining with Python
I am looking for papers and researches in Big Data in Education
I am looking for papers and researches in Open Data in Government
No, those questions are not in scope. They usually get closed reasonably quickly.
If the question is,
What are some good methods for finding papers in my research area?
it's on-topic, but was probably asked already. Check the literature-search tag for ideas.
If the question is,
Can you suggest papers on subject X?
Then it is off-topic. This site is about research in general; it's not for domain-specific questions about your particular subject.
Great! Thank you for your answer. I will accept it as soon as it is available (~ in 10 min).
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1221 | political-science, politics and law tags, are these synonyms?
I was reviewing the tags list and came to the following ones with excerpts as:
political-science with 4 questions
On standards or conventions specific to political science as an academic >discipline, and programs that lead to a degree in this field.
law with 11 questions
Academic questions and answers about law and political sciences.
politics with 3 questions
this tag has no tag excerpt or wiki.
All these tags seem to be synonym and I think politics and political-sciences should merged and the difference of them and the law tag should be declared more or this also should be merged into the previous ones.
No, these tags should not be merged.
law is never a synonym for political-science; they represent two completely different fields of study. (In general, law faculty would not even work in the same building or "school" within a university as the political science faculty.)
Similarly, politics does not have the same meaning as political-science. You would use the former tag for discussing "power" relationships within a university, a department, or research group; you would never use political-science for such a discussion.
If you look at the questions tagged with law, you can see that they're not about the academic discipline of political science. Some are about the academic discipline of law, and graduate studies leading to a degree in law; some are about legal issues affecting academicians. None are about political science.
Similarly, of the questions tagged politics, one (which is also tagged political sciences) is about the academic discipline of political science. The others are about interpersonal issues.
So while law and politics could do with some improvement, they are not synonyms of political-science.
To resolve the dual purpose of the law tag, I've split it into law, which has the following excerpt:
On standards or conventions specific to law as an academic discipline, and programs that lead to a degree in this field.
and legal-issues, which has this excerpt:
On legal issues affecting academicians, including questions on the general legality of certain practices and questions on circumstances brought on by legal issues. Note that Academia.SE, like any SE site, cannot offer specific legal advice; consult a lawyer for such questions.
and retagged a few questions with law to legal-issues.
So it may be better to edit the law tag's excerpt and omit the last part [...] and political sciences. The excerpt needs to be more specific and better written.
Don't you agree that these tag's excerpts mislead the user? It is so vague where to use each of the tags.
@EnthusiasticStudent I agree that 'law' and 'politics' need improvement, as I wrote in my answer. Your question was whether they should be synonyms of 'political-science', and my answer to that question is "No."
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1621 | Thank you sentences and greetings under posts, should they be edited?
In some questions, users write some greeting sentences like thank you for your attention. or any advice is appreciated. or other sentences like these by which the users want to express that they are thankful to the people who read and give advices on their questions; or they appreciate any comments or solutions and answers which are posted to their questions.
Most of the times, I edit such sentences because I do not find them really helpful, relevant or on-topic to the questions' text. But, should they really be edited or it is good to have them in the body of the questions?
http://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/2950/should-hi-thanks-taglines-and-salutations-be-removed-from-posts
Related: Are taglines & signatures disallowed?
Dont be a sourball ;-), such comments and remarks make the.community warm and friendly ...
They are not germane to the text of the question, and therefore need not be preserved. My preference is to remove such text.
If the question is "fresh," then I would think that an edit just to remove such text is appropriate. However, I would not edit an old question, as this is not a significant enough change to the question that would merit moving it to the top of the "active" question list.
I wish there were a way to do edits that didn't push them to the top of the active list. Maybe a "minor edit" checkbox a'la wikipedia.
@RoboKaren I also wish there were such feature. At least users could do edits to tags assigned to the question without bumping them to the active list of questions. However, I think that the active list is a way to bring changes to the question in front of other users to control whether the change or edit is suitable or not. At least, minor edits without bringing them to the top-list should be available to the more established users, such as those with higher reputation or moderators (who are not doing careless edits to the posts for sure).
@RoboKaren request on Meta? Addition to request: Minor Edits need not change at least 6chars?
I realize that across SE sites the accepted answer is what is increasingly recommended, or at least common behavior (certainly among those network sites I have frequented), but I find its reasoning dubious. On the one hand, the site suggests that reasonably minor spelling or grammar errors go unaddressed (specifically mentioned: "...or two words"); but with the accepted answer staying unopposed, it is now searchable best practice to edit "Thank you!" out of a fresh question. I find that sad.
As with other issues, I see no reason why ASE should adopt habits I find unfriendly, not welcoming, and so questionable. The sub-sites are given leeway to be different from another, and academia always struck me as the "friendliest," for lack of a better word. Within reason, let people talk in their language.
Well, I have impression that Academia.SE goes to much into a forum mode and he should coerce more (not less) to stick to the SE format.
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1247 | Academia's policy on broken links in posts
I have seen many questions and answers in which a link is provided and after a while, the link is corrupted, out of date, changed or currently is not accessible.
Unfortunately, there is no bibliographic citation included in the posts to chase the linked content, users usually only have the link on their posts.
How should these types of posts be edited, should that link be removed or the link should be remained unchanged?
PS: Some links may be temporarily unavailable and will be working in the future; so we should avoid to edit links instantly.
So, the link to the Library of Congress's article on how to design preservable websites is... broken. That may be the most ironic thing I've seen in a very long time.
The link in the post you mention works fine for me... Maybe it's just blocked by whatever network you're on
@ff524 It did not work at the time I was posting this question. Instead, a page came up indicating an error exists.... :(
So, a temporary website outage? Whatever the reason, probably a lesson not to be too zealous in editing things that appear to be broken...
My suggestion to such links is that we should include kind of bibliographic citation to the links. Not just including a link.
Should the question/answer be edited and an Internet Archive link be added in braces after the original link or perhaps as a comment to the question/answer? (Example question with broken link: https://academia.stackexchange.com/q/85712/22062. In this case the broken link would become: http://lipn.univ-paris13.fr/~bennani/CSRank.html (broken link: Internet Archive version))
There isn't really a "policy" here. Please feel free to update links that are out-of-date. However, to quote from a similar discussion on Meta:
The standard way to deal with this is to make the answer not rely on a link in the first place. An answer should contain some sort of relevant summary, excerpt, or explanation from the content it links to so that if the link breaks, the answer is not compromised. If you're finding answers that contain practically only links, they might not be salvageable.
What should we do with links that don't work and there is no citation for the linked page on the posts. How should I edit broken links that are not accessible at all?
@EnthusiasticStudent Good answers will summarise the linked content making the link unnecessary and only mildly helpful. If you can find the new link, hey replace it, if not, then leave it be since someone else might have better luck finding it.
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1329 | Are questions about standard syllabus on a course on-topic for the site?
I want to ask a question about a standard syllabus for a research methods and technical writing course; but I am not sure whether it is on-topic for this site or not.
I seek advices on how the course should be arranged and what topics should be covered in it.
I agree in principle with @ff524, but must say that a course on "research methods and technical writing" is probably much more likely to be appropriate, given the audience than a course on math or biology. Basically your audience are effectively experts in "research methods and technical writing." It very much depends on the specific question.
It's hard to say definitively without seeing the specific question.
My intuition would be that just as a question about your work as a student in a particular class would be off topic (e.g. a question on mathematics for a mathematics class), so would a question about organizing/developing a particular class. The reason being that it's more a question about X (where X is the subject of the class) than a general question about teaching.
Thanks. I won't ask it.
This is the perfect site, potentially, to ask a question on what might go into a course on "research methods and technical writing." This is effectively what nearly every STEM academic spends a lot of time doing. I disagree that this is like asking a question about what math topic should be covered in a math class. The class could almost be titled "How to be an academic" perhaps you can phrase the question less about what belongs in your class specifically (as ff524 does have a good point, you don't want it to be too specific) and more about academic writing in general. I think this potentially works as question.
However, ff524 is right in general about the question in your title. I think it is the specific type of course you are talking about that offers an exception here.
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1087 | How to find duplicate of a question?
One or two questions of mine are correctly marked as duplicate in the community.
How can I find the duplicate of my question before I post the question in the site?
Because it is not easy to find similar questions by simple search in the community.
Unfortunately, it's really just mostly searching. You can limit your search using tags—just include the tag name, surrounded by brackets, when doing your search (e.g., "[phd] grades"). That helps limit the search. You can also use "is:question" to only search only questions (e.g., not answers). Past that, it's just making sure you use good search terms. Good luck!
Note that when you start typing a new question title into the "Ask a Question" box, it lists some possible duplicates immediately underneath. Read through these questions to make sure you are not asking a duplicate.
Yes you are right, I did not pay attention to that list.
This is too long for a comment ...
Before asking a question it is best to have a quick search for similar questions. If you don't find a match and then ask a question that eventually gets closed as a duplicate, it is not an awful thing. While most closed questions eventually get deleted, duplicates are special and tend to get left on the system. This means that a duplicate question makes finding the original question a little easier for the next person.
In addition to all the correct answers, I have to agree that the search features of StackExchange are not exactly inspiring. I myself often think "I think we have seen this question before", but when I go and look for it, I can't find any duplicate. It always seems to me that I am only able to find a duplicate if I remember at least some words of the question title.
As such, for a new user, I would propose to do a quick search, and if you can't find a clear answer, just go ahead and ask your question. If it is closed as a duplicate, you at least know where to look. Always remember that a question being closed is not an insult, and does not cost you reputation on the site.
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1979 | Questions that call for answers based on opinion to some degree
I have see quite a few questions placed on hold because they call for answers based on opinions rather than facts.
My question is: is this an appropriate standard for Academia.stackexchange?
I understand and support this standard if the domain were programming (e.g. TEX.stackexchange) or science or history.
In the domain of academia this standard seems very inappropriate. While there are many questions that might be proposed that could be answered by facts (e.g. "What percentage of PhD graduates from non-top-10 Sociology departments get tenure-track jobs within 5 years of graduation?"), the vast majority of questions on academia.stackexchange call for answers based on judgment, which might also include personal opinion.
If answers are based on opinion and also provide justification and explanation, then I believe this will be sufficient to meet the needs of questioners.
Recommendation: I propose that the standard -- "answers should be based on fact rather than opinion" -- be dropped.
I assume you're referring to the "primarily opinion based" closures and not the "The answer to this question strongly depends on individual factors" closures - if I'm wrong, please [edit] your post to clarify.
Recommended reading: Good subjective – bad subjective
Also a quick comment on the question that probably inspired this: I would not have voted to close: “What are arguments for and against starting a journal article with ‘Towards a theory of’?” In fact, some of the answers rather addresss this question. As it stands, the only subjective answer to the titular question are usage statistics but you already give these yourself.
@Wrzlprmft I read the article. I understand how this standard applies to technical and practice domains. "Academia" is not one, in the main. But if that is how you all want to treat it, then I will just obtain from posting questions. Carry on. BTW, your revision to my question would not change its substance, in my opinion.
@MrMeritology: your revision to my question would not change its substance, in my opinion – In that case, I suggest that you revise it (keeping in mind not to invalidate the answers) and I probably will happily vote to reopen it. As it stands, the question invites answers like “I am tired of reading such titles; I would say they are dated” – preventing which is pretty much the purpose of closing as primarily opnion-based.
tl;dr: While you may dispute the closure of individual questions on the grounds of "primarily opinion-based" (some people will even disagree with the examples I gave in this post!), I think this close reason is useful and has a valid place here.
I don't think we should - or do, generally - close questions based only on the fact that answers will be supported by opinion.
We do close questions if the answer is going to be "It's basically a matter of preference/personality, here is what I prefer." In these questions, essentially every answer is equally valid (see the first bullet point in the help center article on what not to ask.) While I may read an answer and think "I have a different opinion," I couldn't really read an answer and think "The person who wrote this answer is so wrong." For example, I think From an author's point of view, what would you consider as negative peer reviewer comments? falls in this category.
I think it's good to close questions like this. Otherwise, they tend to attract a stream of low-quality answers that pile on, don't add anything useful, and bring down the general quality of the post. The votes on the answers turn into an opinion poll, instead of a true indicator of convention or a measure of answer quality.
The "primarily opinion based" close reason is also used for questions that are closer to discussion prompts than questions, i.e. questions that seem like an invitation for people to share opinions and not much else. For example, How essential is curiosity?
If you have a specific question in mind that you believe doesn't fall into the categories mentioned above and shouldn't have been closed, open a new meta post about that specific question.
"Otherwise, they tend to attract a stream of low-quality answers that pile on, don't add anything useful,": this should not be an issue if there are also high-quality answers, that is, we should not close questions on the ground that can end up in the hot network list and attract also low-quality answers. I think we have a fair number of closed questions with very good answers.
@Massimo I agree with you in the general case of questions that also attract good answers. Then at least the "bad" answers can be flagged, deleted, downvoted, etc. In the case of a question whose answers are "it is totally a matter of preference, here's mine" we just end up with pages of personal opinions with no real grounds to delete useless answers (the question asks for opinions, so they're not NAA...)
I understand your answer and reasoning, but I don't agree with it. If the goal is to only allow questions that have answers that can be judged as correct or incorrect (right or wrong), then that excludes most of the interesting and pressing questions that people face in academia. (I am excluding discussion prompts)
Now that I amassed appropriate reputation to vote on closure, I see a good number of the closure votes are for claims that something calls for an opinion. In general I have thought these were questions that deserve to be answered on this site. So I agree with OP that the general criterion is too broad.
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5265 | I am an unsung genius. Suggestion for a community answer
There seems to have been an unusual spate of questions on Academia with a similar "unsung genius" theme. I'm not going to highlight any particular post but the bulk of them relate to fields of physics (especially quantum mechanics and relativity), psychology, and mathematics, but occasionally include other domains. The questions usually involve one or more of the following things:
A statement about the researcher's unappreciated independent work that would, could, or in their view already has, produced a revolutionary new way of looking at the topic of interest.
A description of the paucity of their own academic training or credentials usually due to the lack of time the author has had to pursue a mundane academic career while working on the revolutionary theory, or due to bias on the part of a degree awarding institution.
One or more self-publications, predatory journal publications, or YouTube videos.
A desire for money (employment as a senior research director), pinnacle fame (nomination for a prize of award of some kind), widespread recognition (adoption of my theories into mainstream physics, medical, mathematics, or psychological practice).
A request for suggestions about how to force, coerce, convince, bribe, leverage or otherwise manipulate others into overcoming the hurdles the OP has faced.
Ultimately, most of the posts get closed for want of clarity... but I'm wondering whether it would be more useful to:
Produce a community answer of the kind that I've seen elsewhere, that addresses the main problems. Such an answer might include separate sections with comments that are domain specific
Close the questions as being duplicates, rather than as merely requiring clarification. The advantages of doing that would be that all similar questions were ultimately directed towards a useful generic answer and the OP would be given clear information about how their question would have to be improved before it could be reopened as a non-duplicate.
The second of the points above would also cater to those questions (of which I've seen several) which, at a first glance, appear to be like those I've described but turn out not to be.
There should be an upper crackpot value, according to: https://math.ucr.edu/home/baez/crackpot.html
https://web.mst.edu/~lmhall/whattodowhentrisectorcomes.pdf
I think that many questions of the kind you describe can be considered duplicate of
I believe I have solved a famous open problem. How do I convince people in the field that I am not a crank?
or
I believe I have a clever idea/tool that should be widely adopted by the research community. How to interpret a lukewarm response?
The latter has a negative total score, but the answers therein are on spot.
There might be other similar questions too, and I don’t know whether we could say much more on the topic.
When encountering similar questions, it is certainly advisable to vote to close them as duplicates of one of the two above targets, depending on which one fits better. However, regarding a few of the recent questions we have received, I admit that I've found them unclear, and in such cases it's reasonable to ask for clarification before closing.
Perhaps another "type" of question is like this one -- "How can I discuss my theory with an academic?" I've seen a few of these and always feel for the asker, many of whom are quite reasonable and would gladly pay to be told their theory is wrong. But I don't think this question has a good answer; there doesn't really seem to be a marketplace for these kind of interactions.
I think a key issue with these sorts of questions is that when we entertain them individually, they commonly devolve into a discussion of the merits of the asker's theory. Effectively, the answer to "how can I discuss my theory with an academic" becomes "ask on Academia.SE how to discuss my theory and rely on Cunningham's law" (e.g. from XKCD). Unfortunately, these conversations are rarely actually productive for anyone involved.
@BryanKrause Especially when they're in Ac.SE favorite areas: math, physics, etc.
@AzorAhai-him- Also I think those areas are just more prone to crankery of the "I solved an open problem" sort than more experimental fields; the latter have bigger issues with methodological issues in statistics (e.g., p-hacking) as well as outright fraud, as well as breakdowns between academic understanding and the general public.
@BryanKrause Perhaps. There are plenty of cranks in linguistics as well.
@AzorAhai-him- Gotcha. I guess I'd consider some of the evolutionary psych folks pretty crank-y, not to mention the modern-day Freudians.
@BryanKrause I'm just guessing our crank distribution is a function of both the SE field bias and maybe an underlying crank distribution toward those fields.
These questions are not really different to other questions, so we should treat them the same (close as duplicate if they are, otherwise not).
However, for those questions especially we should remember that they are valid questions, often asked in good spirit and not talk the user down or insult them. This meta-question for example has, in my opinion, a bit of "down-talking". Mostly, the user asking those truely believed they improved physics etc. While as a researcher, you know there are millions of those people, they still deserve a valid answer (which should also tell them that they are likely to be wrong, but in friendly terms).
I have seen on this site those kinds of questions and people suggesting that they are duplicates of some other, not useful question, because in both questions the asker is identified as a "crank". This is not useful and adds to the "arrogance of the academics", possibly intesifying the feeling of "I can do it better without academic educations".
So if the duplicate is relly a duplicate, close it with that reason, otherwise give helpful answers. I believe a community answer would be too much and too confusing to help here.
I think it is wrong to fail to communicate to someone that they are acting foolishly. It isn't somehow better to go along and pretend they may have actually discovered something that disproves e.g. the Second Law or found a major flaw in existing theory. It's far more likely they have a gap in their understanding, and the kindest thing to do is to let them know that as soon as possible.
The impression I have so far, particularly after looking at some of the linked pages from the answer @MassimoOrtolano, is that many of these questions get closed for "lacking information" or some other "not clear" reason ... whereas it would be better for them to be closed as duplicates with links to some good existing answers.
@BryanKrause: I argue for saying "There are many people who believe they find a flaw. Usually, they are wrong. Consider getting a degree to understand things better" instead of saying "This is a duplicate" (if it is not easy to see for them why or if it isn't a duplicate) or "You are a crank." And I don't think it's the kindest thing to call them "foolish" or "unsung genius" - you can just leave those terms out if they act in good faith. If you don't know academia and believe you are right, you are in my opinion not acting foolish, you just don't know the system.
@CrimsonDark: If it is, for them (not for us) easy to see why it is a duplicate and the answer is helpful, obviously it is better to link to the duplicate instead of closing for unclear.
@BryanKrause: Let me emphasize: When I said "they deserve a valid answer", I didn't mean to pretend they actually discovered something. But also not closing unhelpfully.
@user111388 people can act in good faith and still be unsung geniuses or crank. You are right that in many cases these people don’t really know what they are talking about, but the point here is to communicate to these people precisely that they don’t know what they’re talking about. Once can use “crank” or any equivalent turn of phrase, but ultimately there is no way of sugarcoating the foolishness of their position.
@ZeroTheHero: I don't think there is anything foolish about not understand how academia work. And one can indeed talk to the people, tell them why no academic would read their "papers" and suggest them to do a degree. This is indeed more helpful then just linking to another question which has nothing in common except both questioners are "cranks". And I would be surprised if people react the same whether they are called "cranks", "unsung geniuses" or not. I know people I think are idiots - I don't think it would be helpful to call them exactly that if they want my advice.
@user111388 yes I get that point that the links might not be good fits, and I’m not advocating calling people “idiots”, but this is not a synonym of “crank”. One does need a solution else this becomes sealioning, and I don’t think one can sugarcoat the basic fact that, in most instances, these people don’t even know that they don’t know.
@ZeroTheHero: I read your link - my impression is that this sealioning is not done in good faith. Of course, if someone is not acting in good faith, we should not engage in useless discussion - but this is the same for any other types of questions. Are those people really a problem on this page? And I do believe that one can tell (goodfaithed) people nicely that they don't know or call them cranks. While this may not be as bad as "idiots", I'd consider it neither nice nor useful (in convoncing them they don't know).
@user111388 "Are those people really a problem on this page?" - Yes, they are, though usually worse on the sites in specific fields since we don't allow questions about the content of research here.
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5322 | suggest: function to cite a question on academia.se
Triggered by a recent question about a possibly AI generated paper (link), and the presence of a cite handle below the questions on mattermodelling.se to provide a snippet of BibTeX, e.g.
(screen photo of post What factors could cause a calculation to run successfully on a laptop but encounter issues on an HPC system?)
would other fellow users of academia.se equally consider this a useful addition to this site?
The post on [meta.se] mentioning this feature: Citing Stack Overflow discussions.
There is also the long-standing feature request to Add the ability to cite questions and answers on all Stack Exchange sites.
I don't see it as a priority. It would not be useful for me personally, but it's worth looking at it more broadly. Searching for academia.stackexchange.com on Google Scholar, I find only 162 hits. This can be compared with the current number of questions, 41,937, not to mention however many answers there might be. The #hits/#questions ratio on Academia.SE is roughly an order of magnitude smaller than on MathOverflow.
Inspection of an ad-hoc selection of the search results for academia.stackexchange.com reveals that
some are just mentions of the site, e.g. to state where they collected data. These would not benefit from a "Cite" button. At least one of them is an ironic epigraph quote in a thesis, which might not need a full citation.
some rely on posts instead of more authoritative sources, a practice we might not want to encourage further. An example is this paper, which cites this post but not the sources cited therein. (The paper also cites the post for various factoids not found within the post.)
some are outright mistakes. For some reason, the question How do you cite a Github repository? has been cited at least twice instead of the intended repository. See this thesis and this IEEE magazine paper.
out of the citations that seem valuable, a large part are in journals or fields where I would not expect TeX or BibTeX to be common. Would the bibtex format be familiar enough to those authors that they would know whether their reference manager supports importing such references? Or would they desire an expanded "Cite" button functionality?
In general, StackExchange don't want to add buttons on sites where they would never be used. On Academia.SE it seems likely a "Cite" button would be used at least sometimes, but given the overall low volume of existing citations and the debatable format of SE's BibTeX entries, I'm personally ambivalent about it.
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4803 | Conflict of interest questions
There seems to be an increase in questions along the lines of "Is this a conflict of interest?" where the answer is "No." Is there, or should their be, a way to close these as duplicates?
PhD student I am working with as an undergrad may pursue something similar to what my senior thesis is on, is this a conflict of interest?
Conflict of interest -- recommendation letters
Is getting an oral recommendation from a professor who has known me since childhood a conflict of interest during graduate admissions?
Is it ethical to submit to a journal if I know the editor in chief?
This reminds me of the "Is it plagiarism?" questions.
https://academia.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/4436/what-to-do-with-is-plagiarism-plagiarism-questions
https://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/149095/should-i-suggest-my-sources-as-reviewers
https://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/104858/asking-reu-professor-for-a-recommendation-letter-when-applying-to-their-universi#104858
Those questions are definitely rather different from each other, and there's no ground to close them as duplicates.
The only possibility I see would be that of creating a general, canonical Q&A about conflict of interest, covering the large majority of cases, and then closing those questions as duplicate of the canonical one. None of those questions have the necessary breadth to become the canonical one, and so we would have to create this from scratch.
I doubt there is a sufficiently strong interest in the community for a canonical Q&A on conflict of interest, but if you wish to draft one, you can then propose it on Meta.
I'm not suggesting they are duplicates of each other.
Agreed, and I point out that in some ways having multiple questions on somewhat different situations actually should help people more than a single 'canonical' question by giving a broad range of situations and suggested actions to contemplate. That assumes, of course, that they find them and actually read them...
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5173 | Why was this question closed as "unclear?"
Can I use Trebuchet MS font for my manuscript on arvix?
I strongly disliked the question, but it seems to me that it is completely clear what is being asked. The only visible "request" for clarification is pointing out a typo.
Why was this close reason used by four voters?
It's likely because the OP didn't clarify whether by arvix they meant arXiv.
@MassimoOrtolano To me, that was totally unambiguous.
@AnonymousPhysicist - well, the existence of viXra and the fact the OP is a high school student (making submission to arXiv somewhat more difficult) adds to the general uncertainty.
also, arvix was used throughout the question (4 times), so it is unlikely to have been a typo.
@Sursula-they- It's still a typo if you do it consistently. I do not think it is plausible that the asker intended "arvix".
https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/typo
@JonCuster Even if they meant viXra (not a plausible interpretation), it does not change the question.
As noted in the comments, people presumably used this close reason because they were unclear whether "arvix" was supposed to be arXiv or something else.
Personally, I suspect they meant arXiv. I feel that the best practice would have been to:
edit the question to correct this;
edit the question to ask about "font requirements" generally, rather than a particular font;
leave the question open / vote to reopen.
That said: I do not think this is a very valuable question generally, and since the OP did not respond to our requests for clarification, I presume it is not very valuable for them either. So, I personally do not think trying to salvage this question is a good use of my time. (Others may disagree, and can make these edits and vote to reopen if they like).
Based on your tone in the comments, I would suggest that this post was not made simply to ask for clarification; rather, you feel that these close votes were incorrect and in response, you would like us to....do something, I am not clear what. In future, I would suggest that you should (1) tell us upfront what proposal you are making, and (2) explain why you think the problem is of sufficient importance to merit a community-wide discussion rather than the usual vote-to-close/vote-to-reopen procedure.
The action I wanted you to take was to explain what happened and what should have happened, which you did well. No further action is needed, in my opinion.
"explain why you think the problem is of sufficient importance to merit a community-wide discussion rather than the usual vote-to-close/vote-to-reopen procedure." The usual procedure allows users to select the wrong close reason without explanation. Discussion addresses that. Also, this is not a community-wide discussion.
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4687 | Request for moderator apology
A low reputation user posted a very short answer. The answer had a net 13 upvotes. A moderator deleted the answer giving the reason that "It adds nothing whatsoever to the earlier answers and has no lasting value. Moreover it mocks the asker."
Votes indicate the first reason is wrong - it was a high quality answer. The accusation of mocking was completely baseless. I would like the moderator to apologize to the answerer for the personal attack of calling the answer "mocking."
Matters of answer quality should be decided by vote.
(question edited, I was reading the wrong policy)
Can you post a link to the deleted question?
@eykanal I didn't think a call out was needed. It was an answer.
I guess then I'm not quite sure what the goal of the discussion is. If you're just asking for an anonymous injustice to correct non-anonymously, I'm not sure what that would accomplish. To me, at least, asking for an apology publicly necessarily requires a bit of consensus that the apology is warranted. I'm willing to be convinced otherwise, though.
@eykanal I would think you would be able to see the flag, so it's not anonymous to you? I raised the flag before seeing all the details.
Once the flag is cleared by anyone - mod or 10k+ user - they're pretty much gone. There are ways to go back and review old cleared flags but its pretty tedious and rather uncommon.
I should add that at some point a moderator replied to my flag, but I only saw the reply (which was not signed) after Wrzlprmft sent me a link to it.
Background
The answer in question was posted on this question, which is a hot network question with 2k views as of now.
The answer’s full content was:
Am I putting undue weight on this [...]?
Yes.
At the time it was posted, there were two other answers in the same direction (but with explanation). At the time it was deleted, it had +17|−4 votes. In the comments on the answer, there was some discussion going on whether this should be a comment or not, etc., with the highest voted comment saying that this should not be a comment.
My Decision
I deleted this answer for two reasons:
It is rude for the reasons I elaborated in general here.
Specifically, the answer mocks the asker and nothing else by implying that they are too stupid to find out the answer themselves (or similar).
Just consider how you would feel if somebody replied to this question of yours only with “not at all” and that answer got a highly positive score.
There is a small chance that this was not intended as rude, but even then we have to assume that it will be perceived as such and should be deleted for that reason (mind that I only deleted this and did not nuke this with a rude or abusive flag coming with further repercussions such as a −100 reputation penalty).
It adds nothing whatsoever to the existing answers (at the time of its posting). It is common SE policy to delete such answers, even though they rarely happen on our site, where different answers along the same lines usually offer different approaches of explanation or similar.
I stand by my decision.
Further Thoughts
Votes indicate the first reason is wrong - it was a high quality answer.
Do you honestly believe that this answer has a high quality?
(If yes, what features make it high quality?)
Votes rather indicate that some users, presumably HNQ visitors, like to pile up on mocking the asker.
In fact, given that most HNQ visitors cannot downvote, that answer has a rather bad vote ratio (+17|−4).
Matters of answer quality should be decided by vote.
This is not a matter of quality.
Quality is not really a deletion reason and not the reason why I deleted that answer.
(Yes, there is a very low quality flag, but all posts that could be flagged with it can also be deleted for other reasons.)
We usually implicitly assume for all questions that they are asking for an explanation.
Going by this, the answer in question can additionally be deleted for not being an answer to the question.
Whatever that answer is, it is clearly not a comment as it does none of the things comments are for.
You called this answer a comment, indicating that you do not think it should be an answer.
As it should neither be an answer nor a comment, only deletion remains.
If we accept such answers, somebody could go around and post one yes and one no answer each to a huge portion of our questions.
They could then delete the least popular answer after a while.
Do you want that?
I do consider shorter answers to be better in many cases.
I agree that a more concise explanation can be better than a long one:
It may be easier to grasp or simply convey the same content in shorter time.
But here we are talking about no explanation whatsoever.
There is nothing to grasp.
I can skim almost any answer in the same answer in the same time to get its tendency (if not, it should be arguably edited to add a summary or similar).
In this specific case, the first line of the current top answer (which was there first) already contains as much as the answer in question.
"You called this answer a comment" False.
I still hold that your earlier deletion comment violates the "assume good intentions" policy.
I don't agree with many of your remarks, and I do consider shorter answers to be better in many cases.
"You called this answer a comment" False. – You did so here (link only visible to you). I went by memory here and did not check that this was not public. (Should that concern you, I am sorry and I can delete all references to this, including yours.)
For everything else, see my edits.
Might be better to cite instead this answer on meta: https://meta.stackexchange.com/a/110170/401068 Questions that could be interpreted as "yes/no" questions still carry an implied "and why". This was a poor answer because it missed any of the "and why". It likely received positive attention simply because of the HNQ, as pointed out here.
Quoting from that answer: "showing the reason for a yes/no answer makes the answer useful to more than just the single asker, which is the whole point of Stack Exchange."
"But here we are talking about no explanation whatsoever." This is also false; the explanation was present in the question and didn't need to be restated in the answer. But that is not relevant to my request, which is that you apologize for calling the answer "mocking."
"You did so here (link only visible to you)." So I did. But that is blatantly a typo. You will notice I called the answer a question as well.
As much as I love short answers—and I really do love short answers both here and in real life—, I think that the deleted answer was way too laconic in that it failed to explain the reason for which the below highlighted part of the question is presumably wrong:
Am I putting undue weight on this, or am I right to think that, if I'm going to devote an entire day (sometimes two days) to peer-reviewing an unknown colleague's paper, and since I anyway cannot say yes to all the requests I get, I might as well do it for authors who don't appear to take this effort for granted?
Note also that before the deletion, the author had been invited in a comment by David Z to expand their answer:
it'd be better to expand this answer with another paragraph that gives some reasoning behind the statement.
But to this invitation, there was no follow up, not even an explanation of why such a short answer would suffice.
Overall, I therefore think that the deletion was warranted, even though I don't think that yes/no answers should be considered rude—I definitely don't think that this was the intention of the answer's author—and I'd advise against flagging as such.
This meta post is more about the inappropriateness of the moderator's comment than it is about the deletion.
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5195 | Should these question closure instructions be included in this canonical question?
However, please be sure that the below answer actually answers OP's question before voting to close! If the question asks about something not covered below (other than the specific fields), the question should be left open until its answers are merged into this canonical question.
In (How) Can I switch from field X to field Y after getting my PhD?
Related: Suggestions to improve the use and the findability of canonical questions
Note that the boldface is not present in the original.
The instructions are stating what should be obvious: don't hammer a question for being asked-and-answered unless it has actually been asked and answered.
It is understandably infuriating for the asker when they ask "how does X affect Y" and it gets closed as a duplicate of "how does Y work?", but the linked question does not address X, does not address any generalization of X, and does not explain why we're not addressing X.
Moreover, this is a problem for the site: if the canonical question should address X, but it doesn't, and we close all questions that ask about X, then there's no way for askers to learn about X or for answerers to realize that their expertise on X might be valuable.
I won't go line-by-line through your points, but I want to address the first two:
It is impractical to determine the contents of a long and changing community wiki for each potential duplicate.
Disagree completely. If you are going to close someone's question as a duplicate of another question, it is your responsibility to verify that it is actually a duplicate. It is not good enough to say "well, they're basically the same, it's too much work to make sure it actually contains an answer." No one is forcing you to exercise your close votes or reopen votes, but casting a duplicate vote means telling a human being "your post should be deleted because it's been asked-and-answered elsewhere." If you're going to do this, you should take the time to make sure that you are correct.
Voting to close a question as a duplicate of another question should be based on the content of the question, not the content of answers.
If the two questions are identical, then there is no issue: close away! The instructions don't state otherwise. As discussed above, the issue is where to draw the line when the questions are close but not identical (most often, the new question asks about a specific case of the canonical question).
[By the way, I did not invent these instructions out of the blue, they were specifically requested here].
Update, 6 mos later: I decided to reword these instructions to make them a bit more concise. The "question closure instructions" have now been edited into the main canonical question intro paragraph. This is just wordsmithing and does not imply any change to our closure procedures.
"if the canonical question should address X, but it doesn't, and we close all questions that ask about X, then there's no way for askers to learn about X or for answerers to realize that their expertise on X might be valuable." That's just not true. Answers can read the closed questions and respond to the canonical question. That's how it's been working for years.
"it is your responsibility to verify that it is actually a duplicate." That only applies to the contents of the question, not the answers.
"If the two questions are identical, then there is no issue: close away! The instructions don't state otherwise." The instructions you posted on that question do say otherwise with the phrasing "answer actually answers OP's question". That's one of my objections.
(1) This is how it hasn't been working for years; OPs are frequently frustrated when their questions are closed, and info is rarely added to canonical answers. (2&3): If the questions are truly identical, then it follows logically that the canonical answer will truly answer OP's question. The alternative is assuming that the canonical answer fails to answer the canonical question, which is just nonsensical.
We don't have canonical answers. Only canonical questions. Those questions can have multiple answers. A canonical answer would defeat the whole point of the voting system.
Here is an obvious example of a question I would consider "canonical" that has lots of answers. https://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/2219/how-should-i-deal-with-becoming-discouraged-as-a-graduate-student
Of course we have canonical answers -- they're the ones where we have one big community wiki and ask people to edit rather than post competing answers. It is true that not every canonical question uses this format (and some questions are just popular but not canonical).
I disapprove of the idea that the existence of a community wiki implies alternative answers should not be posted. Wikis are for evolving answers, which is very different from "canonical." https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/11740/what-are-community-wiki-posts
I disagree that 2 identical questions will have identical answers. Reasons being: not every question is black and white and depending on who is answering, the shades of grey might differ - especially if alot of time has passed between the two identical answers and the answerers and the circumstances might have shifted.
Also: by closing a question as a duplicate, I explicitly do NOT say "Your post it not valuable", I rather say "Your question has merit and should be on the site, but it has already been asked and answered." Questions that have no value are simply closed.
Good point, I edited that line. I’m just trying to emphasize that when someone takes the time to write a valid question, we should be careful before closing it. I’m baffled by the suggestion here (made by others) that the system is working as it should when we tell people their valid question is a duplicate of a different question, the answers to which do not address what OP asked about.
Here's a possible alternative wording:
Note to close voters: please consider this meta discussion before closing a question as a duplicate.
This page is already linked from the question text; moreover, it does not provide any guidance about which questions should be closed as a duplicate.
These instructions should be removed because:
It is impractical to determine the contents of a long and changing community wiki for each potential duplicate.
Voting to close a question as a duplicate of another question should be based on the content of the question, not the content of answers.
Merging answers is impractical and undermines the answer voting process.
Redoing close voting after merging answers is also impractical.
If it is unclear if a question is a duplicate, the meta site provides a good mechanism for resolving any uncertainty.
We do not need more rules and special cases.
"Voting to close a question as a duplicate of another question should be based on the content of the question, not the content of answers." - this is not how duplicate closure (is intended to) function (s) on Stack Exchange. The duplicate closure reason and notice even state this - the question has been closed because it is already answered elsewhere, moreover duplicate closure is not possible if the target does not have an accepted or upvoted answer.
Duplicate, unanswered questions are useless. Close them.
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4462 | Is putting drafts and links on questions fine?
I have a question to ask on the main site, and I want to ask on the meta first. My concern is that I may need to put links to my works, which can be perceived as hidden advertisement or making the question too narrow (individual factors). I'm not sure how to address that. Maybe you can ask me questions and I will answer. And if it's fine to put links, then I think having tracking links are fine too?
Below is my draft:
I want to email to a professor to ask for his feedback on my work, and to know if he wants to recruit new grad student. Because I have many links and bullets to provide, I'm not sure if this is too much for the first contact? The professor is Edward Slingerland, and the field is cognitive science of religion. For a quick overview, here is his TEDx Talk: Trying Not to Try: the Power of Spontaneity.
Here is my draft:
Subject: Inquiry from potential graduate applicant
Dear Prof. Slingerland,
To introduce myself, my name is Nhat, from Vietnam. I am writing this letter to ask if you take any new student this year, or if you can introduce a suitable professor for me.
My research interest is about how to connect Eastern philosophy with linguistics and psychology in one framework. My observations are explained in this article: Connections between cognitive linguistics, cognitive psychology, Buddhism and
Daoism.
In summary:
Communication cannot go anywhere because the partakers aren't aware that they are talking at a polysemy
Tacit knowledge makes an obvious thing ineffable. Metaphors can help express it
Understanding wuwei as "non-doing" can nurture psychological issues
There are lots of negations in Daodejing and Middle Way
Yinyang is best understood with double negation
The article is well-received in Daoism community. Accompanying with it is a proposed framework to illustrate and visualize Buddhist concepts like sunyata, nirvana, dharma, the transformations, transcendences and distortions of perspectives, and discuss it various applications: A theory of perspective. I hope you will find it interesting as well.
Thank you for your reading. I hope this letter finds you well.
All discussion about the content of the e-mail has been moved to chat.
I agree with StrongBad that the question should about the problems of links, not whether the draft is good or not. But I'm not sure if including a draft is bad too. From Buffy's answer, it's evident that having it is useful for both the askers and answerers. Even StrongBad answers this question mainly based on the information on the draft. So I think there is no problem with having it at all.
From what I can piece together, you want to know if your draft email is good. That is not a good fit for AC.SE. If instead you want to know if an initial contact email to a professor can include links (and possibly links to your work, and possibly tracking links at that), that is a great question for AC.SE. That said, it does not require the draft email.
Yes, I want to ask whether it has too many links or not. But I'm not sure why the draft email should be excluded. Like this very question, I have to provide the draft question, or you will say something like "without further context my guess is...". It is basically about as specific as possible, as written in How do I ask a good question?
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3859 | How to make the question asking for books on academia/science not a shopping list?
Is there a (text)book on how academia works?
I agree that it looks like a shopping request as its current form, but it is stemmed from the question "how to have a systematic understanding on how science and academia work (without having to browse Academia.SE too much)?", and I don't think that is of any off-topic reason. Isn't looking for a research field about academia and/or science will give me a systematic understanding on them? It's also hard to ask questions on science and academia separately since they are convoluted and I want to have a broadest view first.
By stating your specific requirements. For a similar discussion, see: https://math.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/21514/is-it-appropriate-to-ask-for-references-and-book-recommendations
I agree that in principle a book request should have specific requirements. But would it be a catch-22 if the OP is required to list what they're looking for when what they're looking for is to know what they're looking for?
I don't think it is a catch-22. If you don't know what you need, how can anyone else help you? The question would then evolve about how to find out what you actually want/need? People can always give more context, what they already know, what their background is, what they expect, .... All these things would enable the answers to be actually useful.
@Trilarion I agree. It just that I've seen many book requests that only merely ask what books to learn X. I know that they can provide more information, but it seems that everyone sees them clear enough
I'm not sure they see them clear enough. We have no control how much the recommendation really helped. In the worst case we just get popularity contests/polls about recommended resources.
@Trilarion doesn't the vote number reflect how the question helps? At least in Math and Physics, I see reference requests are always in wiki posts
Perhaps we need to carve out an exception for books on the practice of academia, since that is (usually) an on-topic discussion here.
I agree and I'd add to the exception also books about the history of academia.
And research fields too?
@Ooker No, research fields no: there are specific SE communities for many fields, so better ask there, taking into account that they might have different rules about reference requests.
I think anything that is a reference request for a reference regarding this site’s topic should be an exception.
@MassimoOrtolano sorry, I should have been clearer. What I mean is the fields, areas, branches that related to the study of science/academia exclusively. For example in my question you can meet several fields/branches such as "science studies", "sociology/history/anthropology/philology of science". I can even invent more terms like "political academia, interstellar academia"...
I disagree. A shopping question about good sources to learn about science is still not a good fit.
Asking for a textbook on how science works is too broad. There is lots that has been published on that subject, and it's not clear how to narrow down among them.
Asking for a textbook on how academia or science works is even broader. Asking how academia works is quite different from asking how science works, so you shouldn't ask for both in a single question.
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4403 | Technical support: rational vs emotion
(Just to be clear, although all of the link here are about my question, I no longer have interest in the original question and only want to generalize the problem.)
According to Are questions asking technical issues on academic services on-topic?, I see that:
The yes answer has 10 votes
The no answer has -8 votes
Since the polarization is clear cut, I conclude that rationally we accept technical questions.
I also see that:
The specific meta question for the specific question in the main site Should this question on the OSF system be reopened? has a consensus that it should be opened (5 vs 0)
The question itself (Is there a way to move a preprint from one service to another within the OSF system?) is still closed
According to What does consensus mean if there is no action?, it seems to me that having consensus doesn't mean it can generate enough support to turn words to actions. The community is still indifferent on its closed status, and based on the votes on that question we can conclude that the community don't think consensus must lead to an accompanying behavior. Therefore, I conclude that generally emotionally we don't want technical questions.
I would also speculate that the reputation of the software/service determines the emotion we have on it.
What do you think? Is this the perfect example on whether a topic is in borderline, and should be consider case by case? Or can we draw a thinner, finer line?
I think the issue with technical questions is how "deep in the weeds" the technical issue is. The more specialized the issue or less well-known the platform, the less traction it's going to get here. A question about Web of Science or Google Scholar is much more likely to get answers than a question about the OSF and its related platforms. I suspect that's what happened here, rather than a complete rejection of technical questions.
So do you think we should leave them all opened and don't close any of them? Whether a question gets answers or not depends on its popularity
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4211 | Is there a consensus if there is only indirect evidence?
According to a declined flag, the meta question Are questions asking technical issues on academic services on-topic? does not reach a consensus:
I agree that there aren't many upvotes on the yes answers, but we also have "indirect consensus":
the no answer has 4 downvotes
the question itself has 15 upvotes
there is no opposite comment in the yes answers.
Can we safely and objectively assume that we have reach a consensus?
And in general, is there a consensus if there is no direct evidence but only indirect one?
Related:
• What is "consensus"? But in the end it just says that consensus is subjective.
• Consensus decision-making - Wikipedia
The first link seems to be broken.
@henning: The first link is visible to the asker and moderators only.
Note that I featured the Meta question in question to attract more votes or answers.
The issue about consensus on meta is that just a tiny bunch of users participate to meta discussions.
@Wrzlprmft it has 5 upvotes now. Does it have consensus yet?
Is this a meta meta question? ;-)
I am really lost. On the surface, this question looks a lot like a duplicate of What is "consensus"?, but I don't think it really is. Instead, I think it is asking if we have come to a conclusion about Are questions asking technical issues on academic services on-topic? On the surface, that question seems very broad and important, but looking at the details, I think is is really asking if Is there a way to move a preprint from one service to another within the OSF system? should be closed or left open.
With the mismatch between the titular questions and the actual questions, I am not sure that it will be easy to see a consensus. It is usually better if the titular question and the question in the body are well aligned and not to try gain consensus on a general idea to then apply it to the specific case.
I agree with you. Sorry. But I think general questions are stemmed from specific cases, and general answers should give solutions to specific cases, right? I've edited this question, do you think it's better?
@Ooker the edits do not help me. I still think you are trying to gather evidence that your OSF question should be reopened. I am not sure the answer here or in the other meta question is really going to achieve that. Ideally general cases should tell you about specific cases, but the scope of the general case needs to encompass the specific case. I personally think the specific case is on the edge of the general case.
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4271 | How do I ask a good question?
I asked a few questions on this website and I think all of them got deleted. I have no idea how to ask a good question on this site. I'm not a researcher. Maybe researchers have knowledge that I don't have from which they can figure out how to ask a good question. I read How do I ask a good question? and What topics can I ask about here? and neither of them helped.
Basically, I would like a detailed answer teaching me how to ask a good question. I don't really know how to explain what type of answer will help me. Maybe somebody could explain what's wrong with the question Is math useful for non-math-research (accessible to 10k+ users) I asked that got deleted. Maybe people never know for sure whether a question is worthy of deleting, and when somebody deletes a question, they do it because they're pretty sure that it's worthy of deleting and pretty sure that it would waste so much time more heavily researching whether that question is worthy of deleting.
Firstly, it's worth you asking yourself why you are seeking to participate on this site. This is a forum about academia, where people can ask and answer questions about academia. This is not an "ask an academic" website... its goal is to help academics navigate the world of academia. If you're not in that field you may have a hard time participating, as there's a lot unfamiliar to you. That's not a judgment call, it's simply an observation; I'm not a plumber, so I would have a hard time participating in an advanced discussion about plumbing. The same is true here.
Secondly, the second page is really where you should be looking. Specifically:
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!
Your questions should be about those things. If they're not your question will likely be closed. If it is on those topics but too broad, unclear, or any of other other close reasons, it will likely be closed.
but it doesn't explain why the question is deleted
@Ooker It was automatically deleted after having been closed for a while. see: https://academia.stackexchange.com/help/roomba
I don't have 10k rep so I cannot know what the question is really about, but base on the title I think it arguably falls into the category:
Requirements and expectations of academicians
Or in this case, non-math-researchers. The 404 page suggests me this question, and I think it's the same with the question in discuss: Is there a place in academia for a physicist who reads mostly about math? Therefore, I think this question is on-topic.
I find this question on Mathematics, perhaps it will help you reword your question: What fields of math would be most interesting for non-mathematicians?
If your question cannot be asked here, you can ask it on Reddit or other forums as well.
The internet is unreliable. Maybe I'd be more likely to find accurate information if I read a scientific journal. Maybe really good researchers would realize that they can derive a contradiction if they make every assumption almost everybody would make so they would break assumptions and find that there's very little they can prove with certainty under those assumptions and would decide that stating that something is almost definitely true or is a simplified model of reality helps speed up research and publish it in a journal.
I don't understand how that convey relates to the question or to my answer. Can you explain for me?
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4242 | Work-around for migrating outside of Academia SE?
This question asks how to treat certain ambiguous answers in a research survey, and I regard it as off-topic on Academia, and should be migrated to Cross Validated. When I tried to put in a close-vote to this effect, the only option to migrate was to Academia Meta:
This restriction has been raised in another meta post, and it seems that it is a fixed aspect of this site that is unlikely to change.
In view of the fact that people cannot vote to migrate to other sites (other than Academia Meta) it seems like it is unlikely that questions like this will receive the requisite close-votes to cause the moderators to close/move them. Does this make it more difficult to migrate questions out of here? If so, what is the appropriate work-around?
Related on Meta SE: https://meta.stackexchange.com/q/96205/260800
First note that migration paths being restricted to close voters by default is by design.
There are a lot of pitfalls when migrating¹ and it’s more efficient to train a few moderators on those² than all close voters.
Therefore migration paths are only created in the rare case that the amount of migrations between two sites exceeds what moderators can handle. To cut a long story short, the following is not a work-around but the intended way:
To effect the migration of a question, do both:
Flag or vote to close it with the not within the scope or a custom close reason elaborating why it is outside our scope.
If the situation is not crystal-clear, the latter is strongly preferable.
The argument for this should be independent of the existence or scope of other sites – “it is on-topic on [Topic] SE” is not a valid close reason.
Also, if the question is closed for any other reason, migration will not solve its problems.
Raise a custom moderator flag, stating where and why the question should be migrated.
¹ You got to have know a minimum about the scope of the target site, keep in mind the golden rule of migration (mind that I am not saying that this applies in your specific case), etc. Half of the migration flags we get blatantly ignore these. Also, for many migrations feedback from moderators or members of the target site is sought before anything happens.
² This is not only because mods are fewer people. They also have special tools to ask other mods and, in turn, they can be easily contacted if they make a mistake migrating and learn from it.
But this makes the migration depends on a single mod, and not the consensus of the community?
@Ooker: Yes. But the relevant community is the target community, who is not asked either way – at least by the system. Practically, many migrations involve moderators investigating whether a question is actually suited for the target site.
But the mods of the source site is just regular users in the target site, and the effect of the community of that site only starts after the question is migrated? It's like asking a new question: if it hasn't existed in the site then no one can decides its fate. Í still don't see how having a mod handle the migration is better than letting the community decide. I understand that practically educating every voter to know the golden rule is hard, but that's what the rep system is for.
@Ooker: How does reputation educate you as to what should be migrated and what shouldn’t? And it’s not only the golden rule, but knowing a minimum about the target site’s scope. Educating all close voters about this (assuming against all odds that it is even remotely successful) for three migrations per month is simply not worth it. Training a handful of mods in migration is much easier, not only because it’s fewer people: Mods have special tools to ask other mods and, in turn, they can be easily contacted if they make a mistake migrating and learn from it.
I think your last comment has nailed it. You may want to add it to your answer I think
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