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4037 | Could we just stop editting old questions?
I was just informed that I got a "Revival" bag. I didn't notice that I answered a question that was asked 11 months ago.
This question went on top again because somebody edited some trivial typos. After 11 months, the OP no longer care. In fact, (s)he has not logged in from last year.
I have no interest in earning some upvotes, and I feel I'm wasting my time because of some grammar nazis.
Can we have a strict rule for editing questions that are older than, say, 3 months?
Related: https://academia.meta.stackexchange.com/q/3985/20058
No, we can't, because this is a feature, not a bug, of the Stack Exchange system. If you disallow edits for minor typos, then you also eliminate edits for major issues. Part of the Stack Exchange philosophy is curation of the site over time. Remember that we’re not just helping the original poster. The point of this site is to provide resources for future visitors who may have similar questions!
If you are concerned about the age of the question, you can look it up. It’s posted along with the original poster’s ID. If you don’t want to answer older questions, then that’s your right. But it’s not a reason to impose a sitewide rule.
| Stack Exchange | 2025-03-21T12:54:48.888091 | 2018-03-09T23:55:35 | {
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1840 | Which closing reasons have higher priority?
In some questions on Academia, it happens that some questions should be closed for more than one reason. For instance, a questions is about undergraduates, and at the same time it should be closed because of it's content for asking a shopping question. Which one do you choose, being off-topic because it is about undergraduates or being a shopping question?
This also applies to broad questions. I mean, some questions ask about a list of relevant websites or journals in an area of science; this question may be closed for being too broad or for the reason of being a shopping question. Which reason do you choose to vote to close a question? Being a shopping question or being too broad?
My question here is, as a person deciding to close a question; how do you give priority in choosing such reasons? Which reasons are more important to be checked and to be in mind when judging on-topicness of questions?
Good question! I have encountered this problem hundreds of times. Thanks for asking it!
I don't know about others, but the way in which I have approached this question is to think about which issue is the most salient for any attempt to fix the question.
Close votes put a question on hold, at which point the asker is encouraged to try to repair the question if possible. Thus, if the question has multiple problems with it, I try to select the one that I think will pose the largest problem for attempting to reopen it.
As I see it, then, there are three "high priority" reasons where we usually expect the question to not be re-openable via editing:
"Not about academia" has highest priority: it doesn't matter if a question about debugging a Java program has other problems; it still doesn't belong on this site.
"Undergraduate only" is similar (though occasionally it can be fixed)
"Duplicate" also generally can't or shouldn't be fixed by editing (though occasionally clarification will make it clear that it is more distinct than it first appears).
The remaining reasons ("Shopping", "too individual", "too broad", "unclear", and "opinion-based") are all generally fixable if the original poster cares to do so. As I see it, these get superseded by the high priority reasons, but then we should just pick the one we think is most problematic with the particular post, i.e. will best guide the person in editing toward reopening.
If the OP then edits to fix only the one reason without dealing with the other, we can guide them further in the comments.
It depends.
If any issue makes the question clearly unsalvagable, e.g., if it is blatantly off-topic, select the corresponding close reason. Keep in mind that you may err about unsalvagability. If there is any doubt, better leave a comment.
If there is only one underlying issue that is captured by two close reasons, select the more helpful close reason. For example, for most shopping questions that are also too broad, making them non-shopping will also automatically make them not too broad anymore. In this case, the shopping-question close reason is probably more helpful to the asker.
Remember that an individual comment explaining what’s wrong may help the asker to salvage the question before it’s closed in the first place and give them more specific information as to what is problematic than a canned close reason can (see also here).
If there is more than one separate problem, e.g., if the question is unclear but from what can be understood you suspect that it’s also too individual, by all means leave a comment explaining all that is wrong with the question. It is very frustrating for an asker if they put effort into fixing a question and then get told that it has another issue which they may not be able to fix.
Select the most problematic issue to ease the job for future reviewers.
My (not at all well-defined) approach is usually to select the close reason that is most evident. I do not have a "taxonomy" of close reasons in my head, in which some count more than others. At the end of the day, a close is a close, and any single reason alone is sufficient to close a question.
If multiple close reasons seem equally pronounced (interestingly, there are many questions that are at the same time very localized and very broad, AKA the notorious "here is my life story, what can I do?" questions), I typically just select one at random if there are no previous votes on the question. Depending on how much time I have and how realistic I see the question being fixed and re-opened, I may explain the other problem in a comment.
| Stack Exchange | 2025-03-21T12:54:48.888228 | 2015-07-11T08:44:00 | {
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1698 | Event Proposal: Decide on Unanswered Questions
Last day, TeX.SX had an event called answer the unanswered to create an opportunity for the questions which did not receive enough attention to be reviewed. The outcome was so interesting indeed. In my opinion, the event had such productive outputs:
Unanswered questions went under users review. Each user in the chat room, copies the link of the question which he think it needs more attention. The unanswered question then may
receive an answer,
edited to be more clear,
closed for reasons of moderation,
deleted.
Some discussions would be made to the questions and answers which did not receive enough up-votes.
If some posts are edited, other changes to their tags, minor grammatical errors, titles, etc. can be corrected and edited too without hesitation about bumping questions to the active list of questions just because of a minor edit.
In my opinion, such chat room events are really helpful for Academia too. We do not have so many unanswered question, but some of them can be updated and edited to receive more attention. Their tags can be updated during events so fast. Their existing answers can be reviewed by their posters too. The best feature would be the concentration of discussions and fast decision making on the posts. Also, as these events may happen once in month or on other regular time table, there would be less worries on bumping old questions to the top list. As, most of the users would know this is the time for editing questions and posts.
I think that, even five questions and answers be edited in such event, that would be a success for such event. We need to review the posts on our site to keep it fresh and up to date, with high quality and perfectly edited posts.
My proposal is to have a chat room event on Academia as described above. In the first step we can have an event to review unanswered questions and the next would be for closed questions, down-voted questions, etc. Also, I think that having such event for decision making on tags, their excerpts and wikis, their scope, elimination of tags with low number of questions, etc. will be useful.
Please post your opinions for and against such event, and if you think we should have such event; propose on when such event should be held or how it should be moderated to be a more productive chat room event for Academia.
As this site is currently running at 98% answered, I don't think we've got any pressing need for such an event.
However, I do enjoy dipping into the unanswered pool myself occasionally to do solo essentially the same thing that you are suggesting we do as a group event. If a few other people are like-minded, I'd enjoy making it a chat room event for the company.
Update: I think we're good. My personal procrastination campaign has removed about 1/3 of the unanswered questions, bringing us up to 99% answered.
What about having such event for other review purposes (closed questions, tags, etc.), as described in the last paragraphs?
@EnthusiasticStudent Sure, why not? As long as there's a critical mass of 5-ish people who want to play, I'm in.
@EnthusiasticStudent Go check out chat - I've tossed some of the unanswered up for handling.
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1220 | What's the role of Teachers tag?
Academia is a Question and Answer website for graduate students and faculty members. What's the role of the teachers tag in this website.
I read the questions tagged with teachers which where not very related. Also there is no excerpt or wiki provided for it.
I just proposed that 'teachers' be a synonym of 'teaching', those who have the necessary reputation should feel free to vote on this proposal
Academia is not a question and answer website for graduate students and faculty members. It is a website for people interested in asking questions about the "meta" aspects of research, teaching, and academic life in general. Its reach is much broader than just "graduate students and faculty members." Your definition, for instance, leaves out postdocs, and researchers at non-academic institutions.
That said, teachers can refer to anyone who is actively engaged in the teaching process: this can include graduate students, postdocs, professors, lecturers, visiting scientists, and even undergraduates acting as teaching assistants.
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1469 | What are the roles of brand name tags in Academia?
On the website, we have many brand names in form of the website's names, publishers, etc. exists; however, we have a more general tag each of them. For instance, we have elsevier with only 6 questions tagged or scopus while we have a publishers tag with 52 questions tagged. The same also situation exists for facebook, twitter, etc. with no more than 10 questions tagged; while we have a more general tag social-media.
My question is, what is the role of having such brand name tags on the website, while we have good general tags as well? And, what can we do to have more orginised tags when we can have a general tag and we already have brand or website names tags on Academia?
Specific tags have some benefit, as long as they're used appropriately.
Someone looking for information about elsevier policies in particular isn't necessarily interested in general practices of publishers. Specific tags allow for finer distinctions when searching for questions of interest. Synonyms destroy those distinctions.
Tags that are a brand name also have the benefit of name recognition and SEO-friendliness. Nobody asks Google, "Can I cite a wiki-type website in an academic paper?" They ask, "Can I cite Wikipedia?"
Some other SE sites use brand-specific tags very successfully. For example, on Travel, there is the general airlines, but also ryanair, jetstar, qatar-airways, etc.
There may be individual tags on Academia that are too specific to be useful and should be re-evaluated. But I don't think making all brand-specific tags synonyms of a broader tag is useful as a general rule.
I'm not an expert of the SE software, but I think the answer to your question boils down to the role of tags in this website.
My impression (correct me if I'm wrong), is that tags are:
used by users for browsing and finding Q&As they are interested in
used by the community to organize Q&As, clean up the mess, have a coherent taxonomy
used for SEO purposes by the SE devs (meaning: search engines look at tags)
From a librarian point of view (which is mine, and it's not neutral :-) findability is very important, and tags are useful and helpful when they actually are. I agree with ff524's answer: sometimes specific tags are useful and sometimes they are not.
I'm not a fan of perfect, coherent taxonomies that do not help the user (especially, the new ones). They are beautiful to see, but they serve no other purpose than be consistent. The world is fuzzy (even a small world as academia.SE) and thus there is no taxonomy that can be created bottom up, as we do, that can maximize consistency and usefulness. We need to pick one :-)
To me, the critical question is this: what resource is expended by tags?
Infrastructure-wise, there is no limit on number of tags in the database. There is a per-post limit, so we cannot have a general taxonomic policy without needing to allow for frequent truncation. There is also a limit on citation time expended by the community and on rate of change that does not disrupt the front page.
I thus see it as better to think of tags as identifying clusters rather than creating categories. The value of a tag is then not defined by how broadly it is used but by how informative it is: frequency of use times specificity.
Brand name tags, such as Elsevier and IEEE thus make sense when there is a large number of people who are likely to find the direction highly specific. A much more specialized brand name like IJCAI or CACM, however, is much more dubious because we are starting to get into non-generalizable territory.
At the end of the day, though tagging is fuzzy and bottom up, and we aren't going to be able to have a completely precise policy no matter what we do.
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1481 | What are the exact applications of cover-letter and application-letter tags?
We have two tags with the following excerpts:
cover-letter
For questions about cover letter attached to applications or curricula
vitae. This is not for cover letters for submissions to journals.
application-letter
Discussing content and approach for formal letters of application, to
be written by the candidate (not letters of reference).
Which I think have similar excerpts and user may be confused by their applications.
What are the differences between those two tags and in which questions should they be correctly used?
Also, it seems that we do not have a tag about the cover letters which should be written in order to submit a manuscript to a journal or conference and we have many questions about this on website.
Here are my suggestions:
We should edit the the tag excerpts above and make them more precise.
We may need a new tag to cover questions about paper's cover letters. (But I think that we do not need a new tag for paper's cover letters because we can edit the existing tags.)
@Wrzlprmft Could you please take a look at this question?
These are pretty much identical, and should probably be merged, with the latter as a synonym for the former.
@aeismail Also I think that the cover-letter tag's excerpt should be edited to include all kinds of cover letters; such as the ones written for admissions purposes, applications letters, and letters for paper submission.
But that last type is vastly different from the others (and also seems to be outdated in most cases).
@EnthusiasticStudent: I agree with Tobias. A journal submission cover letter is completely different from the others. I don't think it needs its own tag, though: it's adequately covered by [tag:paper-submission].
Actually, many of the questions currently tagged [tag:application-letter] are tagged incorrectly (the questions are actually about [tag:recommendation-letter], [tag:statement-of-purpose], or just general [tag:application]). These should be corrected (slowly); then a moderator can merge application-letter into cover-letter.
I think that most of the questions tagged with [tag:application-letter] can be covered by either [tag:cover-letter], [tag:graduate-admissions] or [tag:application] tags.
@ff524 [tag:application-letter] tag has now no attached question.
@EnthusiasticStudent: @-pinging only works for people involved in the respective post, so I only noticed this now. Anyway, I have little to add to the existing remarks and am not sufficiently experienced with applications to answer on this aspect.
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5355 | How can I improve my question about " 'inclusive' access", textbook self-destruction, and resale prevention?
Not too long ago, I posted the question: Why don't " 'inclusive' access" textbook publishers find a way to prevent resale, without requiring automatic textbook self-destruction after a year? It appears to have received zero upvotes and one downvote.
What are your thoughts about the question? Is there anything I can do to possibly improve it?
Thank you!
One downvote is nothing. Don't worry about it. The real problem I am seeing is that there is no answer to your question. I tried to think of an answer for you, but come up with none because the textbook publishers are business people who want to make money. Unless you can help them to make more money, there is no effective solution.
@Nobody: It is true that the "positive herding" voting effect causes upvotes to snowball, but not downvotes. (Source.) Yet I still wonder why nobody upvoted the post. I wonder if anything might be wrong with it. ❧ Also, an unanswered question with a score of −1 gets automatically deleted after 30 days. (Source.)
I wouldn't normally have said anything, but since you asked....
There is no obvious difference between this question and your previous question. So, the new question is likely to be closed. Sure, it's possible there is some technical difference buried in the post, but the difference is not obvious. One reason for which is....
It is far too long. The ideal post length is a couple of short paragraphs, perhaps with an additional "more details" section. You may be willing to write a lot of words, but your audience is usually not willing to read a lot of words.
Random words are bolded.
The "my question" section alone is 8 paragraphs. You need to "boil this down" to a clear question.
If you had boiled it down, it would be something like "why do publishers rent access to digital books rather than selling indefinite access?" And it seems like the only possible answer is the trivial one (this way increases revenue, which is the only thing that matters) -- which indeed, is basically the answer you got. And so this feels more like a rant than a genuine question (though the original post got 13 upvotes, so I guess not everyone agrees with me here).
Edits should (usually) be edited into the original post, not added as a separate "edit" section. We already have the machinery to see what changed. If the edit improves your post, just make the change in-line. If the edit does not improve the post, then it probably shouldn't be an edit. For example...
On your original post, the "is my post title clickbait?" is unnecessary. First, you have a length problem already, and this does not help. And second, there is no need to raise the question at all. Perhaps someone suggested in the comments that your title could be improved, but you are free to reject this suggestion; either way, best to avoid addressing these types of issues in the post itself.
On the good side, your post shows effort, is on an interesting topic, uses bullets strategically, is grammatically correct, and is well sourced.
+1. I've significantly shortened both questions, and removed the "Is my post title clickbait?" discussion. ❧ The bolded words are meant to help retailers distinguish between e-textbook e-retailers (e.g. VitalSource) and IA providers (e.g. Willo Labs). E-textbook e-retailers let you rent or buy. On the other hand, IA providers only let you rent.
I've shortened the second question, and added some bolded words, to help show how it's different from the first question. ❧ The first question is "why do IA textbooks expire?" The second question is "if IA textbooks expire to prevent sharing and resale, why can't publishers find a way to prevent sharing and resale without mandating expiry?"
Huge improvement!
I just thought it a toss up between a duplicate and off topic. There a difference between "interesting", which it is, and appropriate for this stack. If you really want an answer, perhaps the Security stack might be better, but read their tour carefully first.
Even if I really do get an answer, I'm not sure how it would make the world better. Some textbook company staff do tend to be geeky about textbook-related matters. Maybe one day a textbook company employee will be Googling for textbook-related information, will find my thread, and will be inspired to improve the "inclusive" access system? I dunno.
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1061 | Font used academia
Can someone tell me what is the font used by academia.SE?
It is very elegant.. Why it is not used throughout the stack exchange network?
Edit:
This is a screenshot of what my browser renders.
I added the [tag:design] tag so the design team will see this question. It may take them some time, but hopefully they'll answer it.
Which font? In the logo or in the text?
This actually depends on what is available on your computer. You can check the source code for the page to see what fonts might be used, but to see which one actually is used you'll have to cross-reference the list with what is available to your browser, and I don't know of an easy way to do that.
@eykanal thank you very much! I added a screenshot of the text I get
One way to answer questions like these it to use WhatTheFont!
For me the font for regular texts is Open Sans, questions in the question list are in Museo Slab – identified with Opera’s and Firefox’s Inspect Element tool. I strongly suspect (but cannot verify it right now) that this is loaded as a web font¹, so it should be the same for you, as long as your browser supports web fonts. PS: Looking at your screenshot, it almost certainly is Open Sans.
As to why this is not used all over the network: A font font should match the design, tone and topic of the site. For example, English Language uses a slab-serif font, which I suspect to be a trade-off between readability and feeling a little bit historical (and thus matching the design of that site). Open Sans would not be a good choice for that site in my opinion, as it is too modern. Also, using the same font all over the place eventually gets boring².
¹ At least one other Stack Exchange uses a web font.
² I, for example, have set my browser to auto-replace Arial (and similar) with another font, just because I got so tired of it.
Great thank you.. I added a screenshot of the font, is that useful? By the way, what does web font mean exactly?
@Ant: I edited my answer accordingly. A web font is a font that is directly downloaded by your browser to be used on a web page. For example this page uses a web font to display a font that is most likely not installed on your computer.
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4751 | The perpetuation of the 60h week workloads myth for PhD students
Recently there has been few questions (that I will avoid linking) about PhD student workload expectations and how that can compare to a "normal" 40h/w job. Generally, this comes from PhD students or prospective PhD students that are worried or actually overworked.
My worry is, that these questions are generally answered with "Yeah, welcome to the world of superstars, you need to work 60h/w or you will never get your PhD". I understand that academic world is diverse with lots of subcultures, however, in my experience this is completely and utterly false*. My worry is not false information being spread, but actually illegal (in most countries) and utterly unethical information to be pushed and promoted in our page.
Furthering a culture of essentially worker exploitation is bad. No wonder 36% of PhD students suffer from mental health issues. Overworked, underpaid, and when asking for help we say "this is how its supposed to be". Academia has a serious issue with these kind of things. Abusive supervisors exist, and the fact that some of us may had them but survived it is not an excuse to go telling others that that is the normal thing, and we can say the same about overworking PhD students (not even sure its a different problem even).
Yet we do. So, aside of angrily donwvoting a highly upvoted answers, is there anything we can/should do in this page about it? Should we just leave it as it is and let people answer/upvote this, in my opinion, quite unethical advise? Or is it really the overwhelming academic opinion that this is normal, and I have been living in a bubble?
*It is provably false that students need more than 40h/w to get a PhD. Perhaps you need more to become the head of department of a Oxford faculty, but the questions are about getting a PhD. I have known lazy outright not smart people that worked 10h/w in the engineering field obtain PhDs. And I have met almost no PhD student that worked on average more than 40h/w and all of them successfully got their PhDs and some of them are academics now. This is in top 10% UK universities.
late edit: Just to clarify, I understand why people work more than that and I have myself worked more than 40h/w for long period of times, particularly after my PhD. But I am (somehow) attempting to further my academic CV, while the vast majority of PhD students are not.
I am not sure what you would like to see changed? It's not a myth, or else people wouldn't answer as if it were. I'd like to see a link to your question that has the same attitude as your quote.
@Azor it is a myth, because its not required. Lots of people had the unfortunate circumstances of an abusive supervisor, but we don't come here and say "it's the normal thing, lots of people have it, you should take thr beat". I'm sure that could be flagged, not just downvoted. 60h/w is less extreme, yet equally ilegal and inmoral in most western countries at least, in all fields but academia.
@AnderBiguri I don't think that could be flagged, but anyway, I don't think I've seen an answer on this site that says "Yes, all PhD students work 60 hours a week. It is required, and there is no reprieve" and treats it as a good thing. And trust me, you don't have to convince me it's immoral.
@AnderBiguri There are certainly students who work many hours because they have abusive advisors who compel them. There are also students, postdocs, and (particularly early-career) professors who work many hours because they are personally driven and competing with their peers for the most prestigious positions. I'd advise to contrast between these when reading between the lines of many of these posts. If you want to advance in a competitive field, you often cannot be successful by doing merely what is required at a minimum.
Examples of people who work only 10h/week yet get a PhD and have a successful career in academia continuing to work at that level would be people who are simply incredibly efficient with their time - they're the unusual ones, and no one should expect to be able to do what they have accomplished.
@BryanKrause who said "and"? Nor me nor the people asking imply they want to be successful academic researchers, in general. That does not mean they will not get a PhD. It makes sense to advise people and say "if you want to be the best, you need to work hard", just not everyone wants that. You dont need that much workload to be a succesful PhD. Perhaps you do need it to be a successful lecturer, but not what this is about
I think the best you can do is write an answer that shares your perspective. I'd read the existing answers, though, and check to see that they don't already do this.
For example, the most upvoted answer here: https://academia.stackexchange.com/a/151639/63475 as of right now starts with:
First of all, I know many PhD students (also myself) who did exactly that and finished their phd: They worked 40 hours a week (or less)
The most upvoted answer here: Is it true that PhD students need to work 10-12 hours a day every day to be productive? says
The answer is no.
This question: Is it typical to work 60 hours per week as a PhD student? includes at least one counter-example, and the first answer agrees with you that it is a problem though it also argues that it's still a reality:
The experience of working long hours, for little pay and little power is, unfortunately, an almost universal experience for science PhD students ... However 60 hours a week is not normal for the simple reason that very few people can be productive for 60 hours a week on a long term basis
I think the number of votes those answers get is indicative that others also see it as a reality.
Overall, the consensus I get from the community is that working long hours in academia is common but not necessary. It is clear that some people are working long hours and see others around them doing the same.
If you view things differently, you can offer answers that fit your views. I think you'll find the community responds positively if you say long hours are not necessary; I think you will find less of a positive reaction if you say they don't happen, and I think that claim might actually be covering up a problem you intend to surface.
Echoing @AzorAhai's comment, I did not notice this sentiment:
"Yeah, welcome to the world of superstars, you need to work 60h/w or you will never get your PhD"
in any of the answers receiving a lot of up votes on those questions. If you want to point some out, I'd be happy to take a look and probably downvote them if indeed that is what they say, because I disagree and am myself one of those people who got a PhD while working fairly relaxed hours.
I must say that I had this impression in Maarten Buis' answer before her edit today. "I know one student who maintained to work only 40h" and "this was only possible because she was very focused" seemed to be like "you must work really a lot or be that one genius".
The comparision of phd students with movie stars in another answer also sound like "welcome to the world of superstars" even though it makes no mention of the 60h for students.
@user111388 It's really really helpful if you would include links; there are multiple questions being discussed here.
I mean the first question you discuss. I don't have time to find out how to link to exact answers -- if you wish, I could do so, but only in a few days.
There's also this Question, on which I wrote a bit of a contrarian answer that talks about the "always-on"-myth
I will accept this for now, because its essentially the only thing I can think of, but I still strongly disagree with us as a community giving such unethical advise.
@user111388 - in case you come back to this: under each answer is a "share" link. Click that, then click the "copy link" link in the box that pops up. You can then paste the link elsewhere, and it will link directly to the answer you chose, something like this for this particular answer: https://academia.meta.stackexchange.com/a/4752/80004
Thank you @Stobor! So here @BryanKrause is Maarten Buis' answer (which was really different before the edit): https://academia.stackexchange.com/a/151627/111388 and here the "phd students and Tarantino movie stars": https://academia.stackexchange.com/a/151640/111388
The problem is that this myth has nothing to do with PhD students or academia. Most people who have unstructured jobs overestimate how much time they spend working productively.
Yet on Workplace SE you will not find the kind of answers the OP talks about.
@user111388 I don't go there much. Do they provide an answer to this question?
@AnonymousPhysicist it has, because no one would advise a non-academic/PhD to break labor law (in most countries) as a norm. Only our job culture thinks this is not only OK but expected. My question here is not "why does this happen" or "is this a myth", my question is "In this webpage we keep telling people that they are expected to work an unhealthy amount of hours (when its not for passion) by their bosses and peers, and this is not only a false requirement to achieve their goals, but also illegal to do and immoral for us to suggest, should we (academia.SE) do something about it?"
I think you will find many workers outside academia do not have their hours limited by labor law. My point is that I do not think this website can fix your problem because it is a problem with people's estimation, not with this website.
Sorry, perhaps I haven't explained well what I mean. I meant that I think that us, as a website, should not be advising in favor of those things. Yes, people have work-hours breaking labour law, but we should not encourage that, and my question is if we should actively do something about it. If someone encourages someone else in this webpage to be stealing money from the department, should we just leave it for the votes to decide if its OK, or should we actually act on that (e.g. flag the post)? I don't think this example is far off from the real topic at hand.
@AnderBiguri I don't know your local laws, but working 60 hours is only illegal in certain specific cases. Stealing money is illegal almost everywhere. These are not the same.
@AnonymousPhysicist working +20h/w unpaid is illegal in very specific cases? It is illegal in the entire EU, AFAIK. That should cover a decent chunk of worlds academia. Its called "wage theft", i.e. stealing. If one does it voluntarily out of passion, then its not, but we should not tell people "this is a requirement of your job", when 1)its illegal and immoral 2) its false for it to be a requirement.
@AnderBiguri You are wrong about the EU limit, and I didn't say unpaid. https://europa.eu/youreurope/business/human-resources/working-hours-holiday-leave/working-hours/index_en.htm Laws vary.
This is not the place for legal advice.
@AnonymousPhysicist clearly not, but I hope you are not assuming PhD anyone is advising working +60h/w as a PhD student for that sweet sweet extra pay, because no one is getting it. Lets focus, this is not a place for legal advice as you say, because we are talking about academia and PhD students that work unnecessary extra hours unpaid thanks to our advise, among other things. My questio is, again, about us as a community giving immoral and unnecessary advise (lets remove the illegal so we don't go off-topic, while I still think it is).
(BTW, your link says that 48h/w is the max allowed in EU)
@AnderBiguri (60 - 20) < 48
I am confused about those numbers. 60>48 is the only relevant one.... right? Perhaps I did not use the right notation in my previous comment. +20h/w on top of the required 40, I meant. Which leads to 60, which is in the title and body of my question. In any case, the point is: 60h/w on average is illegal in the EU and we are telling people to do it when its not required, not by the law, but by their personal goals, which is getting a PhD.
I think, this has something to do with the survivors' dilemma. It's a sampling bias.
Basically, most people here are still interested in an academic career, have mastered it, or are somehow related to academia. Now, most PhD students leave the academia the one or the other way.
So, although those questions rather state "workload as a PhD student", the subliminal understanding of the most, including myself, is "how I nearly worked myself to death, but got tenure".
Right, I agree. But well, we should not be more reflective and try to not give biased advise to prospective PhD students!
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5479 | imposter-syndrome tag?
Should we consider adding an imposter-syndrome tag? A recent post on Academia SE had me looking at this, and emotional-responses and psychology which are commonly used tags don't quite seem to capture it. Given its prevalence in academia, just thought I would raise the question here.
A search of "imposter syndrome" as a keyword returns 200 results, but is there a threshold number for consider this?
The [tag:psychology] tag should be used for questions about the field of psychology, but what makes you say that [tag:emotional-responses] doesn't capture impostor syndrome? The tag description is "On emotional issues such as guilt, discouragement, jealousy, anxiety or feelings of inadequacy affecting academics and researchers."
Perhaps less that it is not subsumed within the broad category of emotional responses, but that imposter-syndrome is specifically focused and prevalent enough that it might warrant a breakout tag of its own. This would allow a seemingly common topic to be differentiated from the other more general emotional-responses. Similar to 'coursework' vs 'phd' and 'masters' and other broad/narrow categories. I'm new, so if there are more stringent guidelines for deciding this, beyond the "what are tags and how should I use them" page. I'd be happy to have a look.
I haven’t checked this, but I would guess that despite the several search results there are few questions where the asker would tag them like this from the start. After all one of the key features of the impostor syndrome is that you are not aware of it.
In general the criteria for a new tag are not number of mentions, but whether it would help anybody to categorise questions, e.g., to find answers to one’s question before posting it or for experts to find questions that you can answer.
Perhaps imposter-syndrome should be a synonym of emotional-responses?
@cag51, it isn't an emotional response, but it might be a "health" issue. Response to what, exactly?
This seems like a reasonable question, but I'm unenthusiastic for the reason that I don't think a new tag will greatly enhance the findability of questions on this topic. Meanwhile it does have the very real possibility of making question askers feel even worse if community users add such a tag to a question as a frame challenge.
Yes, I suppose if the term is mentioned in the discussion and responses, it would be couched to minimize any insult in the explanation of the term, rather than just a cold slapping of that tag on their question. If one didn't know the term, it might be badly received.
I don't see the need for this. Usually imposter syndrome is suggested by those answering questions, not those asking them. It is something the asker doesn't normally recognize in themself.
I wonder how many of those 200 search results are in questions, rather than answers. A quick scan suggests about a quarter of them are from the OP. And in some (many?) of them the OP rejects imposter syndrome as a reason for their question/problem.
Such a tag might be added by a reader in such cases, but that would, I think, fundamentally change the nature of the question itself.
OTOH, I have a very high standard for new tags and often delete new ones that seem misplaced. Some users confuse tags with keywords and we already have search for keywords.
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4441 | A question was deleted by Community - why?
A question from a new user was recently deleted by Community. It had 0 votes to close and was seemingly a good question to me (I answered it). I am curious why it was deleted. Was something wrong with a question itself, or with a used asking it, or with something else?
In future, can it be a good practice for Community to leave a comment explaining why a question was deleted, to precede questions like mine?
A moderator (in this case me) deleted the user in such a way that the community user (a bot) deleted all the content of the now deleted user. In most cases it does not make sense for an automated message to be attached to the question as only 10k+ users can see the deleted question. As a high rep user, you should just assume that if the community bot deletes a user and all their content, there is a reason for it. If the community user deletes a single question/answer, it leaves a message that says the post was rude or spam (10k+ users can look at the message on this awful answer, I cannot find a community deleted question for reference).
When a moderator decides to delete a user, the decision is not based on any individual question or answer from that user. We also have choices about how we delete the user and what to do about their content and votes. If we decide to delete a user and their content, we generally do not know what will be deleted by the community bot when it cleans up for the user. Therefore, retroactively giving explanations would be really hard.
I don't doubt there was a reason, but I was curious what the reason was. Two users have contributed answers to the question, and now they are wasted. Not a big deal, but it would've been nice to have a brief explanation. Oh, well. There was a reason. Thanks, I guess.
Can we undelete the question, though?
@MassimoOrtolano we could technically un-delete it, but given the reason the account was deleted it would be inappropriate.
Sorry, but this seems to be in contrast with what has been done in the past for other users who deleted or dissociated their account because they didn't want to be recognised: the user was removed but the question was kept.
@MassimoOrtolano see edit. Yes we can delete a user and keep their content or delete a user and delete their content. In this case it was appropriate to delete the user and their content.
If we decide to delete a user and their content, we generally do not know what will be deleted by the community bot when it cleans up for the user. – That’s not correct. The interface for deleting and destroying users tells you exactly what these options do. Also, we can manually correct this afterwards. That being said, I concur that destroying the user (which deletes all content) was the right choice here.
@Wrzlprmft and StrongBad: The question reappeared here in a slightly milder form which actually hardly justifies the deletion of the original version.
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4833 | Why was my question ("Any way to sync my Papers 2 library to my newer iPad?") closed?
My question (Any way to sync my Papers 2 library to my newer iPad?) was closed as off-topic today. To be honest, I hesitated before posting it because it felt not quite like an exact fit for this SE site. However, when I saw that there were tags for both [reference-managers] and [technology] I felt reassured, and went ahead with the post.
Let's face it, managing references is an indisputable part of academic life. Anyone who works in academia has probably had the experience of misplacing a research paper they later want to cite, or misremembering where they saw it ("Let's see, was it Blovenstein & Cobbler in Journal of Widgets, or was it Cobbler, Blovenstein et al in Annals of Widget Research?") Solving this problem is both part of the job and an information-management problem for which a number of technological solutions are available, each with their own advantages and disadvantages. My situation is that I had a method that worked well until recently, but now seems to be reaching its end-of-life. Is it really off-topic to ask for advice on how to manage this, or to see if anybody else has been in a similar situation and found a workable solution?
Somewhat related: What are the limits of “shopping” questions when it comes to software?
This sound like a perfect fit for Super User
I am not sure why this meta question pops up suddenly. IMO, our site deals with soft questions like, how to deal with advisors, how to apply for PhD, etc. The linked question seems to be a technical (hard) question. Therefore, It's off-topic.
This is quite a borderline question to me. Its definitely more of a software reference question, and honestly should just go on the Papers 2 support site. That said, this is clearly an academic issue, relevant to other academics. I'm in favor of reopening.
Looking at the open questions that we have e.g. about Mendeley or Zotero, I'd say that there are several ones which can be considered similar. I suspect that the closure had been driven mostly by the fact that that reference manager is a lesser-known one. I'm thus in favour of reopening too.
@MassimoOrtolano I can sort of agree with the technical argument here, but I think the more fundamental question is if we shouldn't phase out all these "reference manager" questions in one way or another. These really don't feel in spirit of the site, and frankly it's not like these questions tend to get very satisfying answers.
@xLeitix I have no preference one way or another. I'm generally in favour of being as flexible as possible for what concerns the scope of this site, to be useful to as many users as possible, but I agree with you that such kind of questions get mixed-quality answers. As a mod, though, what I would like to see is a uniform treatment of questions belonging to this same class, regardless of the specific reference manager (this is valid in general also for other types of questions). If I see that there are several other technical questions which are open, I consider unfair singling out this one.
@xLeitix - Worth mentioning that a week plus change later the question still has no answers. While its relevant, I don't think that these questions are simply what this site is either looking for or able to answer.
@mweiss I've found Academia Stack Exchange to be the most pedantic and heavily moderated forums on these sorts of topics. Personally, I think the elimination of "subjective" questions is frustrating, while others seem to prefer it to keep out the riffraff. I would personally recommend reddit.com/r/askacademia as a more democratic space. That said, what is your take on Papers software? I'm intrigued by its capacity to integrate search, annotation, and citation, but am reticent to shell out $60/year.
Sorry, but the question is a purely technical one. I'd vote to close (again) but the system won't let me. There are other places for this sort of question.
The application isn't the heart of the question. It is about syncing devices.
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1952 | Is academia SE a place where PhDs take authority that has not been given (as if head of your dept, e.g.) and threaten other users of suspension?
On several occasions, moderators have suspended an account (your's truly) for making mere questionable comments or providing answers that are not with convention. Now, SE has a voting model, yes? What is the legitimacy for scolding other users when it can only result in the inbreeding of already established and perhaps all-too-conventional practices? And then to suspend them, as if the threat to the eyes of ears of other PhDs is of such enormity, that a moderator must be called in to take the helm and whisk the offenders out of the room.
Is it the case that A.SE is a place where people can get answers that have already been asked somewhere within Academe and here provided a forum for publishing such answers online, or is it also the place for developing different types of rapport, for developing best practices in academia which are not perhaps yet universally agreed upon, and otherwise for keeping a bevy of PhDs in line by online (i.e. harmless) banter?
By that last question I mean, to make a place where the Doctors can come and push each other a little rather than merely reinforce each other at their weakest points, which seems to be where moderation is taking the site. For there hardly is any other place within Academe or on the Internet itself to cross-fertilize standards of conduct across fields or across Universities themselves.
So the question is: When is moderation here done by actual wisened masters of the original ideals of Academa, rather than poseurs (that while having all the apparent credentials, act like children throwing a tantrum just because they still have their bit of power to wield)?
Academia.SE is part of the larger Stack Exchange network, and therefore site users are expected to adhere to the network-wide community guidelines.
I have read the question three times now and still I am not sure what your problem is, how it manifests and what you want. Voting to close as unclear.
I have figured out what's happening and have answered the question below. I urge @aeismail and Wrzlprmft to look at it.
I figured out what's happening. The SE Badge system here at 500pts makes users into cops -- nitpicking everything that's going on regardless of their personal expertise on the topics or interest.
When users are checking out everything from a priveleged position like that, they tend to use the power. It's exactly like what happened in the Stanford prison experiment (c.1971) where students were given power to monitor and affect everything other students were doing. In that experiment it ended up traumatizing many of the students, so take heed. (There's even a documentary about it.)
SE really needs to change this. It will help the site tremendously and reduce moderator abuses. (One could never tell how many good users have been turned away from SE, could they?)
I can only suggest that you read A theory of moderation. Also users do not gain any actual powers at 500 reputation, as you already may have noted. Finally, how would you suggest that moderation should happen?
Academia.SE is a question and answer site. Quite a bit of cross-fertilization occurs here, given the breadth of disciplines represented. There is also a lot of discovery and refinement of thinking about academia as a side-effect of the question and answer process---I know that I've learned a lot here, and I have heard others make similar remarks.
However, it is not (in general) a place for debate and discussion---for that, you want to find an forum, blog, or other such medium. Likewise, the community has developed fairly strong expectations regarding "collegial" interactions, which are generally expected to be civil, courteous, on point, and lacking in ad hominem attacks.
It seems that you have been finding that things that you consider "keeping in PhDs in line" and "pushing each other" do not fit with the standards of the community. Most moderation on this site is done by the community, following the general principles of the Stack Overflow system as laid out in "A Theory of Moderation", so if you're having problems, it's not that you are being singled out, but that members of the community are flagging your behavior as problematic in various ways.
It's hard to say more since you've declined to provide any specifics in your original post, but if you cared to point to a specific post or incident, it is likely that people will be able to provide a more precise and informative response.
The OP's most recent post in Academia is a good example of a bad example: it's a rant rather than a question, phrased in terms that many will find offensive, based upon a deliberate misinterpretation of the term PhD. In other words, it fails to fit the SE model in several ways, and should be taken to some other site that enjoys debate for its own sake rather than Answerable Questions.
Wow, very nicely said.
I figured out what happened and have answered my own question. The problem is that there are users interacting with power above PhDs -- the censoring of their own (copyrighted) comments.
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3853 | Do we need a post notice for possibly controversial questions?
According to this meta post, the SE staff has implemented for a couple of communities a post notice for sensitive, possibly controversial topics.
The notice recites:
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.
We sometimes receive questions about gender issues, harassment etc. that generate many debates: Would such a notice be useful for our community as well?
I would add a note saying why this notice has been added. Something like "In the past, other questions about {race,gender} have been derailed in the comments."
OMG, this is about trigger warnings??? Please DONT,
@SSimon no, it's not, but feel free to believe otherwise.
@barbecue lets vote
@SSimon We are already voting. The answers down below are in favour of such a feature: upvote them if you want it implemented; downvote them if you don't.
@MassimoOrtolano I dont understand? this is official voting??? really? why not polling? it is better..
@SSimon The title asked a precise question: Do we need a post notice for possibly controversial questions? Two people answered that, yes, it'd be useful to have it, and several other people approved. If you don't want such a notice, write your own answer, explaining your reasons. That's the poll, as "official" as any other meta post. If you want a more explicit, separate poll, write it yourself, but it will be probably closed as duplicate of this one.
@MassimoOrtolano I would suggest poll since 12 ppl are not representative of the whole community.
@SSimon I don't know what you have in mind for an "official" poll, but there's no way other than writing a post here to make a poll. People who are interested in the development of the community usually participate in meta. Those who didn't vote probably simply don't care whether this feature is implemented or not. If you look around, you will see that for many other decisions the voting rate is similar.
@SSimon 12 ppl is a pretty good response for us on meta. Especially when the voting skews to +14/-1.
@StrongBad is decision made yet?
@SSimon we now have the above example mentioned post notice. As for how and when mods will use it, it will probably be reserved for the worst case scenarios to make it easier for users to understand why their comments were moved/deleted. I doubt it will change eour behavior much. I tested it out on https://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/102698/upset-by-male-classmates-openly-comparing-female-students-according-to-physical if you want to ask a new meta question about when it should be used.
I am sorry, maybe I wasnt clear. @StrongBad what is decision on OP question? Is there will be such a notice?
@SSimon yes, diamond mods now have the post notice that the OP requested.
@aparente001 Uh, what's wrong with "recites"?
@MassimoOrtolano - You can recite poetry, for example. Check a dictionary. If you're still in doubt -- post a question at ELU and ping me.
@aparente001 I'm not a native English speaker, but I choose the words carefully and I know well what to recite means. And dictionaries confirm that can be used also for texts other than poems. I'm happy to have mistakes fixed, but please don't make stylistic changes.
@MassimoOrtolano - Why don't you post at ELU then? I checked a dictionary to make sure of my edit. However, you apparently found a dictionary that you feel backs up your point of view. The folks at ELU will help us straighten this out!
@aparente001 If you want to ask a question about this on ELU, please, go on.
@MassimoOrtolano - Seeing as it's you, I will attempt to construct something useful (a little later).
@MassimoOrtolano I like reads better than recites. I wouldn't say recites is wrong, or even unclear, but I think Americans would say reads.
@StrongBad Most of the times, I'd write "reads", but sometimes – like in this case – I'd write "recites". I don't think we should flatten out our writing style by using just the most common forms.
@aparente001 I apologize for my brusque reply, but it was late and I don't like to be told "Check a dictionary". I work with words and I routinely check dictionaries, several times a day. I certainly make mistakes, as anyone else, and I'm happy when I see my mistakes fixed (I actually think that my posts here get too few edits, I certainly make many mistakes).
I'm not a big fan of ELU: it's a community that struggles to reach an equilibrium, and I find the answers about word choice not particularly impressive. That's why I'm not interested in asking there (I like ELL more), but I'll happily discuss my choice of words in our chat room if you wish.
@MassimoOrtolano - Sure, ELL it is. Here's the new question: https://ell.stackexchange.com/q/155543/18523
So far, this feature seems to be helping. See my post on meta Philosophy.
I would expect that such labels should be applied rarely, if at all. But it wouldn't necessarily be a bad thing to have the option available to us.
I'm taking this as a "yes I want this", which is why I upvoted. FWIW, over just the past few months I've seen quite a few questions that could have used this notice.
Feel free to just ping me if/when you have occasion to use this. Takes very little time or effort to add. aeismail, @eykanal
I upvoted this answer instead of the one by xLeitix because I don't believe such a label should be applied "aggressively", but I do think that "rarely, if at all" is underestimating it.
By "rarely," I mean on a small percentage of posts. But if we're running into that problem daily or even weekly, we'll need to take stock about what's going on.
I'd say that the consensus tends toward the implementation of the notice. Shall we have to ping Shog9, or you have already asked?
I'm assuming that in "Controversial Post — You may use comments ONLY to suggest improvements" the 'suggest improvements' bit also allows for 'requests for clarification'? A strict interpretation does not allow for asking for clarification, currently.
What's the best way to suggest that a post be declared controversial?
Yes, please add this. And no, I don't think we should add this sparingly. I would propose to aggressively add this to questions that have a potential to be controversial. If used too much it does not matter (the warning does not say anything that's not true for all questions anyway), and if it salvages just a few questions that would otherwise get derailed it's a win.
(OTOH it will only help if the diamond mods actually do end up aggressively removing argumentative answers and comments without notice, as the warning would indicate - in my opinion this has not really been the case in the past)
“in my opinion this has not really been the case in the past”. It actually is... and not only comments that are argumentative, but any comments that are not liked by them. If you look at HNQ on Academia.SE, Travel.SE or Interpersonal.SE you can see a constant show of mods deleting whatever comment they stumble across. Except theirs, of course.
@AndreaLazzarotto Here moderation is fairly unaggressive with respect to other communities, and our mods tend to remove comments only exceptionally when there are flags (see this chat discussion). And the last sentence is definitely unwarranted for this community (yes, I'm quite happy of the mod team here ;-) ).
@MassimoOrtolano I am also quite happy of the mod team here. Saying that they delete comments does not necessarily mean there is something wrong with it. Of course the situation is quite worse on Travel or Interpersonal, but Academia doesn't rank so bad wrt HNQs as was originally mentioned.
@AndreaLazzarotto What's HNQ? Anyway, personally I have never really understood why people get so hung up on deleted comments - y'know, them being defined as volatile and so on ...
@xLeitix Hot Network Question. About comment deletion, it depends on the context: for instance, on Electronics.SE, I once wrote a comment pointing out that a certain answer was technically wrong and the discussion was later moved to chat. I think that comments that point out potential mistakes should not be moved because most of the readers don't check the chats. Usually, this kind of moderation reduces my interest in a community.
@MassimoOrtolano indeed. Not to mention mods who prune all the comments and then bash at you if you ask for clarification that was "already asked" (according to them). Then they go on pruning your comment but leaving their rant against you.
@MassimoOrtolano I feel the spirit of Stack Exchange is that you should post your own competing answer rather than post meta-info about an existing answer in a comment. Personally, I feel more aggressive deleting of comments, maybe even automatically after some time, would actually help in the way that it would train us all that comments are indeed not meant to be permanent. At the moment comments are in a weird state where they usually stick around but sometimes get deleted (for usually not very clear rules), and then people like Andrea seem to get mad.
@xLeitix If there is already a correct answer, there's no need to post another one, but technically certain answers can be subtly (very) wrong and non-experts might not be able to catch the error, especially if the answer comes from a high-rep user. Comments can have an important function, and regardless of their original temporary status, I think they should be deleted with care.
The main issue is that, afaik, mod tools don't allow much flexibility in handling comments.
@xLeitix Usually yes, but sometimes you know an answer is wrong but can't find the correct answer yourself.
@xLeitix "for usually not very clear rules" partially yes, but what I dislike the most is that I could even start to recognize some specific mods in some communities who I know would delete a lot more comments than others. It looks like these few people don't care if comments are being left to add a contribution (whether it's an edit suggestion or a clarification request) but they just want to pick what stays.
@AndreaLazzarotto - I agree there is a serious problem with SE. The moderation style varies so much from one site to another. I have participated on a site where moderators delete comments without warning because they should have been posted as an answer, deletes answers because they should have been a comment, edits answers until they are unrecognizable because ... well, I have no idea why. And if you contact SE with an objection, lo and behold, you are banished for a year fro mthat site. When your year is up, you try again to try to understand their "rules," but they ...
... pounce on the slightest infraction in order to ban you for another year.
@aparente001: Does that site to which you refer to happen to start with an "I"?
@user21820 Parenting Beta.
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4269 | Could we please reopen these questions about salary and treat all salary questions in a uniform way?
This question and this other one have been recently put on hold for being strongly dependent on individual factors.
I think that the closure of the above questions is unfair and unwarranted, given that this community has well received many other, even much broader, questions about salary in various parts of the world, and I would like to encourage everyone to treat in a uniform way certain types of questions.
A few examples:
After my PhD how much salary should I expect as a professor of computer science?
How much is the normal salary of a postdoctoral fellow in North America and Western Europe?
What's the net income of a W1/W2 german professor?
How much non-salary income do computer science professors make in the United States?
Academic salaries at European universities
Given you yourself state "the questions linked above have a limited scope and they are reasonably unswerable" then that is reason for closure.
@SolarMike Limited in the sense not broad.
and how do you then classify "reasonably unanswerable" ? You are making the clear case for closure...
@SolarMike Have you seen the other examples? Just because you don't know the answer, it doesn't mean that others cannot have the answer too.
You gave clear reasons for closure but don't want to follow them...
And, as the OP is asking about possible salary, how do you think non-salary income is relevant? - which does not have much of an answer ergo reinforcing the case for closure...
@SolarMike I don't, but I removed that sentence that seems to mislead you.
It's alright - I kept a copy - it stated the situation too well to loose...
@SolarMike You don't need to take a copy, the previous sentence can be recovered from the revision history...
@SolarMike What makes you think that the question can't be answered? It can't be answered if you are working in the states. I would guess for an Indian academic these are really not very difficult to answer.
I propose that any such question should be rephrased as follows:
Where can one find salary data for job type X / country Y / field Z?
If the question is just "What is the salary range?", then what would an answer look like? If it just gives specific figures, then it can't be expected to be valid into the future. If it comes from someone's personal experience or guess, then it's purely anecdotal. What you really want are statistics based on large-scale data from a reliable source. So if such a source exists, then why not simply link to it? That way, people will be able to find well-referenced data into the future (assuming the source continues to update their data, which many do).
Also, if the source turns out to give a broader range of data (covering multiple job types / fields / countries) then the question can be broadened retroactively, so that people searching for any relevant combination can find their source in this question, and not have to ask separately.
This way, instead of giving people fish, we're teaching them to fish, or at least telling them how to get to the river.
Very much appreciate this answer. Some of the answers to questions Massimo linked as previously open examples fit this recommendation exactly, even if the original question did not.
Many well-received questions here and on other Stackexchange sites are, as it were, about getting a single fish. A good answer should certainly aim to teach the poster how to fish a bit, but we don’t normally insist that the questions must all be rephrased.
There is a question
What is the average postdoctoral salary in China?
and the question listed in this meta question, I think we should either close those salary questions altogether or open them all because the US is a country, China is a country, Germany is a country, Canada is also a country, …..
In fact, I'm for let's open them all.
@MassimoOrtolano I already voted to re-open both questions you mentioned above. Let's wait and see.
Looks like they are both still closed...
I don't understand why these questions were closed. The closing rationale is given as "depends on individual factors". While undoubtedly some universities will pay more than another, one can still give an answer based on salary range.
For example here's the rough salary of a Computer Science professor in the United States:
The average Professor - Computer Science salary in the United States is $110,787 as of July 31, 2018, but the range typically falls between $87,575 and $155,093. Salary ranges can vary widely depending on many important factors, including education, certifications, additional skills, the number of years you have spent in your profession.
The equivalent for engineering teachers in Pakistan/India would answer the question.
So, go on put us out of our misery then, what is the range in those countries?
@SolarMike I don't know, which is why I didn't answer the question.
@SolarMike The fact that one doesn't know the answer doesn't mean that a question should be closed. For instance, I'm not from India or Pakistan and I wouldn't be able to answer those two questions, but I'd certainly be able to answer a similar question about my country.
What, really, is the point of salary info for USA ? As an answer to the question as asked it is completely useless...
@SolarMike as I wrote in the answer above, the equivalent for engineering teachers in Pakistan/India would answer the question.
@SolarMike I don't know what your deal is with regards to these questions. Post your own thoughts as an answer here, and stop passive-aggressively commenting all other answers.
The figures themselves aren't so useful in your example, since they'll be obsolete next year. What was really helpful in what you did was to give a link to where good data can be found. Hence, as I suggest in my answer below, the question should be asking for a data source, not just a number.
@NateEldredge I think the figures themselves are useful actually, since one can always manually adjust by inflation afterwards. The adjusted values won't be as good as the current figures of course, but they're still a lot better than nothing.
I am conflicted. While on the face of it all questions for the form
What is the average salary for position X make in field Y in country Z?
seem to be a good question for the SE format since there is presumably a concise evidence based answer that will not become rapidly outdated. Assuming position X is related to academics, then these questions are relevant to our community and potentially one that someone may not have easy access to resources to answer. For example, a US trained Postdoc looking to move to Japan might not know where to begin to lookup salary info and there may not be a specific job that they are applying to during the early stages of researching job opportunities.
I think the issue I see with them is that there are an awful lot of permutations of X, Y, and Z and we would get bored answering these questions. That in and of itself is not a reason to close the questions. I however am not intrigued by any of the listed questions and have not upvoted any of them (and have only left a somewhat snarky answer on one of them).
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4077 | Should we discourage simultaneously answering a question and voting to close?
I've been thinking of writing this for a while. It doesn't happen frequently but, yes, it happens: a user answers a question and also votes to close it.
Though not forbidden by the system, I think that such kind of behaviour is bad in two ways:
It confuses the questioner, especially when they are new to the site: how come that this expert user thinks that my question is off-topic, too-broad, whatever and answers it anyway?
It might give the message that, yes, the question is off-topic, too-broad, whatever, but the user who voted to close answers it anyway to get a few more reputation points.
Should we thus discourage such kind of behaviour? If yes, could we actively discourage it by commenting with a boilerplate comment? E.g.,
Please, avoid answering a question you voted to close. See this meta discussion.
To add to your arguments: Many reasons for closure (too broad, unclear, depending on individual factors, primarily opinion-based) exist only or in parts because such questions cannot be reasonably answered within our format. If somebody answers such a question and votes to close, this either means that the closure was invalid or the answer is not good.
@Wrzlprmft I would suggest that "the answer is not good" is often in those cases "the answer is a reasonable attempt given imputed information".
@Fomite: But if we can make a reasonable attempt to answer the question, why close it in the first place? After all, the main point of closing is to prevent answers.
@Wrzlprmft An attempt to still try and be helpful?
@Fomite One can vote to close and comment to be helpful, or can direct the user to the chat, but answering and voting to close is incoherent.
@MassimoOrtolano I think it’s incoherent for some but not all close reasons. For example, an off topic question might be worth closing but you might also happen to know the answer.
@Fomite That's not a good reason to answer, or we will end up answering questions about all sorts of topics just because someone knows the answer. As I argued in the above question, this kind of behaviour generate confusion, it delivers several wrong messages (see? Answer if you know the answer), it weakens the action of closing, and it generates more incoherence in people's voting behaviour.
@MassimoOrtolano Not saying it’s good, saying it’s not “incoherent”.
@Fomite The purpose of closing a question is to prevent answers, so, yes, answering and voting to close is incoherent. As I said, if one knows the answer to an off-topic question, they can leave a short comment or direct the user to the chat.
Two thoughts: 1) Unless you’re a mod, your vote isn’t definitive, so one might hedge. 2) It’s been my experience that new users who have their questions closed become ex-users, so one might be willing to engage in a little incoherence in exchange for engaging someone who might otherwise be lost.
@Fomite: Right, but if you can actually provide an answer that is more helpful to the user than the close reason, you should re-think whether the question needs to be closed or whether you can edit it to make it a good fit for the site. Many close reasons exist exactly because we cannot provide a helpful answer to the respective questions. Of course, this is not always the case, e.g., if a question is outside our thematic scope, in which case I see no problems with answering the question as long as you are sure that the question is a good fit elsewhere and flag it for migration.
@Wrzlprmft Note I upvoted the suggestion to re-evaluate. I just also think that the comments came out overly strongly on “I can answer” and “This should be closer” being inherently mutually exclusive
@Wrzlprmft How do we measure the usefulness of the close reason, though? I've often seen a question closed or put on hold because an answer to the question is in another Q&A. But the actual question in that other Q&A is meaningfully different; related, but reasonably viewed as distinct. One of the answers just happens to also be a really good, complete answer to the new question. In what sense is "an answer to this already exists" useful? It's technically true, but someone who looks at the questions alone may be frustrated by how the questions are different and never look at the answers.
@zibadawatimmy: Well, duplicate closure technically is about answers. If there is nothing we can answer other than copying (parts of) another answer, what’s the point to keep the question open?
@Wrzlprmft I don't mean to say that I don't understand such closures. I'm just using it as an example of how closures that are, by site mechanics and intents, perfectly justified need not necessarily be useful in the eyes of all askers and visitors. Sure, we can't please everyone all the time. But what if you see a question which you know has an answer elsewhere, but are convinced it would not seem to many like the answer to it is in the indicated place? Perhaps then you both vote to close and answer.
I'll also note that the reverse sequence of events has happened to me (I think). I think a question is on topic, not a dupe, and that I can answer it. So I do so. Then someone else points out a dupe, or a good reason for why it's off topic. I'm convinced, so I add my vote to close.
@Wrzlprmft 'what’s the point to keep the question open?' The point is so that others can find the answer. Many questions can have the same answer (eg 42), but that doesn't mean someone asking knows what other questions happen to have the same answer.
@JessicaB: What about the big duplicate indicator we slap on such questions?
@zibadawatimmy See Jeff Atwood's take on duplicates. The upshot is we don't need to be (shouldn't be) overly stringent with dup-closing. If you think the question is different enough from the "duplicate" that further explanation of how the answer fits is needed, it's probably different enough that it doesn't need to be dup-closed.
@Wrzlprmft If I was a new user and saw a question labelled as duplicate, and went to the duplicate to find it was a different question, I'd be pretty confused. The point of this site is not to produce answers, it is to produce question-answer pairs.
I'd say the best behaviour is to vote to close and wait. This doesn't confuse the question asker. And when the question is reopened, you can slightly adapt the answer and submit.
I can support "Please don't answer if the question is obviously poorly posed" as a guideline, as long as it isn't enforced blindly as a hard and fast rule.
You say that it doesn't happen very often. I tried to find some examples with careful googling ("closed as unclear what you're asking by" OR "closed as off-topic by" OR "closed as too broad by" academia stackexchange). I couldn't find any closed questions where the same person voted to close and answered the question. (Although I have occasionally written an answer to a question that was clearly poorly posed, e.g. https://academia.stackexchange.com/a/107357/32436.)
Could you post some links to some examples that concerned you?
I'm a bit more bothered when I see a high-rep participant contributing an answer which gets wildly upvoted, and dozens of people getting involved in very involved discussions, while the answer gets closed. This suggests that we have more work to do as a community to get on the same page about when to close questions.
Also, I think it would be helpful if we put together a set of canonical questions or common questions. Benefits:
Easier for askers to find the information they need.
We'd see fewer questions that are variations on certain basic themes.
It would be easier to close repetitive questions.
We already have some questions and answers that would be candidates for such a tag (although they might need a bit of adjusting).
Some possible topics:
How does funding work in country X
How do I go about changing fields
What should I do if the professor seemed agreeable to something but is not responding to email now
How do I strengthen my application to grad school given such-and-so weak areas
Since you ask, a recent example is this one, where, incidentally, you answered and voted to close: https://academia.stackexchange.com/q/62176/20058 But it's a phenomenon I observed over the years, I'll try to find other examples if necessary, but I didn't want to single out anyone.
We also have already a fair number of canonical questions, a list can be found here: https://academia.meta.stackexchange.com/a/3825/20058 Others can be added but it's not the point of this discussion.
@MassimoOrtolano - Well, that wasn't the point you intended when you brought up the problem. // Thanks for the list, that is really helpful. // In that example I contributed clarification about process and terminology, which I felt fit better in an answer than in a comment. I raked in a total of one vote, so clearly the motivation had nothing to do with reputation. // I voted to close approximately two weeks after the OP accepted an answer. All in all, it doesn't seem like a significant problem -- but I don't mind you using my answer as an example. I fact I linked to another such one.
I really don't understand what the canonical questions part has to do with my question, which is about a specific issue. If you want to propose other canonical questions, the usual process is to ask first on meta (one meta question for each proposed canonical question), wait to see what the community feels about it, and write a draft in case of positive response. See also past inquiries under [tag:canonical-question].
I would argue there can be circumstances where answering and voting to close together makes some sort of sense. There are many questions asked that are not really suitable for this site, but it is clear that the OP is hurting. Answering could be a way of pointing them in the right direction, which achieves its purpose in a short timescale (long enough for the OP to read it), while longer term the question will be deleted.
AFAIK, if there are upvoted answers, the question cannot be deleted or it's not deleted automatically. As I said in other comments, one can point the OP in the right direction by commenting. These, yes, are temporarily and don't prevent the deletion of the question.
Jessica's answer explains the motivation that I, for one, have experienced when doing this seemingly contradictory action. Generally it's not for the one or two votes I might get -- it's to help OP out, without having to write comment, continuation and continuation. Example: https://academia.stackexchange.com/a/107357/32436
By the way, @MassimoOrtolano, when I've seen this occur, more chances than not, no voting occurs on the question or the answer, one way or the other.
@MassimoOrtolano I for one, and I suspect many others, do not have all the details of what allows/prevents what stored in my head.
@aparente001 It's not that I don't want to help OPs out (I'm here for that reason, after all), I'm suggesting that one can help the OP and avoid the drawbacks of such kind of behaviour (answering + voting to close). In fact, in addition to comments, there is also the chat, where several people have been helping people with off-topic questions for a long time (e.g. the OP of the question you linked has enough rep to chat). I don't understand this reluctance at using the alternative means that SE provides for such cases.
@JessicaB - Could you rephrase that? You lost me in that last comment.
@aparente001 She's probably saying that she cannot recall what prevents or what allows the deletion of questions and answers on SE (or, more generally, what actions or states prevent or allow other actions or states). For what concerns deletion: https://meta.stackexchange.com/a/5222/300001
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4963 | Would you be interested in becoming a moderator?
We're thinking of running a moderator election. The moderation workload for this site is not too burdensome, but having one more moderator on the team would allow a better redistribution of the workload when someone has work peaks at the office.
Since there is no urgency, before starting an election, we would like to gauge the community to see if there is a reasonable number of potential candidates to ensure competitiveness. In case, the election will likely take place around fall 2021.
So, if you're interested in becoming a moderator, you're welcome to express your interest and motivation here! Indeed, expressing interest now is not committing and, likewise, not expressing it now doesn't keep you from running if there is an election.
This Q&A covers many aspects of the moderator activity, but if you have further questions, please don't hesitate to ask here.
Agree that an additional mod would be helpful, though mod functions seem to be handled in a timely manner. No interest myself, but there are a few active users I'd recommend for the quality of their contributions generally.
By the way, the Fall date may be fungible: if you are interested but are worried about the timing (election near the beginning of Fall semester), please let us know that as well.
a better redistribution of the workload when someone has work peaks at the office What's the time in the day you guys need coverage? North American? Europe? Or in between?
@scaaahu: It’s not really a timezone thing. Most of the workload is semi-urgent things that take a rather long time to handle.
@Wrzlprmft I got it. Like some difficult Meta questions that would take quite sometime to answer. In that case, I take my name off the list.
@scaaahu: Meta activity is in that category, but it’s not the major part. The major part would be too-many-comments flags and deciding about the fate of consistently rude users.
I suggest simply spending less time on the too-many-comments flags.
Is this dead now? It's been very quiet for a while. No hordes massed at the gates.
@Buffy: Kind of. A decision was made.
I think the team here does a great job of covering things and it's rare that anything lingers that shouldn't linger, but I trust y'all if you want an extra pair of hands to cover.
I'd probably put my name in the hat if there were an election.
And I would probably support you. I note you are already a mod on another site. I'll also note that your posts and such are helpful and not just in the technical sense.
@Buffy Thanks; yes, I moderate on Biology where the work load is even less than here (both from popularity and the nature of the sites). I think we have a lot of users who would be well-qualified to moderate the site, should they choose to do so.
And, I won't even complain about you beating me to the punch: e.g. https://academia.stackexchange.com/a/170849/75368
I hope that you don't.
@user1271772 I'm sorry you feel that way, but respect your opinion. I know we've had some interactions across the network (https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/366736/who-can-change-usernames-and-when-would-they-do-it-if-theres-no-flag-or-imperso is the last I recall); I thought these have been cordial but perhaps I am mistaken. If you can elaborate, it might help me improve for the future, but I also understand if you'd rather not restart some past argument.
I certainly hope to see your self nomination happen.
It would take me a long time and a lot of effort to compile a list of all the nasty back-and-forth exchanges you've had with people like Franck, so I don't want to have to do it if not necessary, but I can do it if you do nominate yourself and if I have time. That link you provided here was to quite a cordial exchange with myself in which I asked you to convert your comment to an answer, and you did, and I clicked "accept" right away, so that's not what I was talking about here!
@user1271772 Understood, thank you. I'd prefer not to discuss other individuals with a third party, but of course you're welcome to raise any specific concerns you have with what is public on the site.
@BryanKrause In response to your previous comment where you asked for elaboration, I can do it if you think it could help you improve for the future (as you said in the comment), but I don't think there's any need for a rush to do it during the election. Also, with only one other candidate, who also happens to have a much lower candidate score and overall rep than you, it looks like you're on your way to winning the election anyway --- so congratulations in advance!
Although I think that there are some excellent potential candidates for the moderator position, with far more reputation on the website than me, I would be happy to help.
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5111 | Questions on drawing software
Questions about drawing software appear periodically on this site, and get either closed as off-topic or closed as duplicate of this one, which is again closed.
I think that this state of affairs is unsatisfactory for the following reasons:
Certain types of software recommendations are now considered on-topic, and I think that drawing software is definitely a software that "solves a practical problem that is specific to academia or teaching", and the fact that questions of these kind pop up every now and then is a sign that this is a problem felt by many academic users.
Closing a question as duplicate of a closed question which cannot be updated is useless.
My proposal is then that of considering, once and for all, drawing software recommendations on-topic according to our current policy on software recommendation and reopen this question and the others that are not duplicate.
Completely agree. I would even argue that they are already on-topic under the policy you linked; I don't understand why this question was recently closed.
@cag51 Yep, the policy that we have should be enough, but I thought of writing this anyway for a while to make it explicit, given that certain questions continue to get closed (and, for the moment, I wanted to avoid to reopen a whole set of questions unilaterally).
I disagree that drawing "illustrative figures" or "complicated block diagrams" are problems "specific to academia or teaching" (see industry). On the other hand, the impact and utility of having (at least some) such questions is probably greater than that of the N+1-th instance of some common category of questions.
I do think we were a bit hasty and motivated by the pandemic when this guideline was made. We should probably review the quality control expectations on softwarerecs.SE and incorporate something similar going forward (see https://softwarerecs.stackexchange.com/help/on-topic and https://softwarerecs.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/336/what-is-required-for-a-question-to-contain-enough-information) since they have some more experience with "what works".
@BryanKrause I don't think we were too hasty: the pandemic just made more evident a discussion that was more or less happening anytime a user posted a question about software. And most of the software requests that we receive are well defined. Moreover, for this specific case, producing good diagrams for papers and presentations has become more and more important, and we should be able to at least give some advice.
I'll note that some similar questions, depending on phrasing, are closed for being "shopping questions".
So, Matlab questions will be on topic? I guess the point is I'd like to see you put a fence around this so it can be more meaningfully discussed.
@ScottSeidman No, they won't. We're discussing about software recommendations.
OK-- more accurately, software recs for data analysis, signal processing, greek translation, taking attendance in a classroom, ..... I don't understand the need to specifically carve out an exception for drawing. If the need to open up software recommendations as on-topic, let's do this once, and not in dribs and drabs.
Though I'm personally fine with leaving them as off-topic.
Yes, we should allow questions requesting recommendations for software which focus on completing tasks important in academia, including drawing software.
As Federico Poloni mentions in the linked Meta post
Using software to teach, do research and write papers is a part of our work....Suppose you need to find a good linear algebra book; would you ask a linear algebra expert, or a "book expert"?
To be considered on topic, such questions should be properly scoped as outlined by SoftwareRecs.SE. Questions should include:
A purpose — a task to accomplish, a user story
Some objective requirements — a minimum set of features
Manifest relevance to a large swath of academia -- i.e., questions about drawing figures generally would be disallowed (not specific to academia), as would questions about diagrams showing submerged baskets (only relevant to a certain subfield).
Opening up the site to things that are "important" to academia instead of "specific" to academia is a massive change. That would, for example, include most of politics.
To me the key point isn't that drawings are "important" for our work, but that we are the experts when it comes to making figures for academic talks/papers. If we don't know, who would? Using this criterion, making academic drawings on-topic does not imply that politics would become on topic. Since this is CW, I expanded the quote to include that part of the rationale.
But, I would maybe add a third criterion to the scope: applicable to a large swath of academia. Using the language above, I think questions about C++ or DocuSign would be on topic, which I don't imagine was your intent.
@cag51 Please don't hesitate to improve the answer. That's why it's a community wiki.
OK, took a stab at a third criterion.
The third criterion is not very clear at what is allowed ...
Improvements welcome….
This site should continue to be limited to topics specific to academia. Drawing, and drawing software, are part of academia, but they are also part of all other industries. Questions about drawing software should go where they have traditionally gone: https://softwarerecs.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/drawing?tab=Votes
I agree -- and point out that the most useful drawing tools are going to be field-specific, and not academia-wide. A list of drawing tools would also be just that -- a list. If we were to do this, why wouldn't we just make it a community wiki and have people keep adding to it, and then further questions would point to this as a duplicate.
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500 | Should duplicate questions be doubly linked?
Currently questions closed as duplicate are what I will refer to as singly linked. A link appears on top of the closed duplicate question pointing to the original question. Nothing is added to the original question. Sometimes the duplicate question has useful answers and comments. By definition, we marked it as duplicate because we think the question itself has useful terminology and wording that is helpful for future searches.
I propose that whenever a question is closed as a duplicate, a link should be added to the original question pointing to the duplicates. This would only be viable if it was an automatic process and did not require any suer intervention beyond simply voting to close the question as a duplication. Obviously some question may have a lot of duplicates so this list would need to be dynamic, realizable, sortable, and possibly searchable. The idea would be to allow a new user to easily find all the knowledge on the site about the question.
Maybe this is better for the main SO meta, but I haven't really thought about how this scales by a couple of orders of magnitude.
I think this is a Stack Exchange-level issue, not anything we can accomplish on our end.
@aeismail I agree, many feature requests are, but they need to be discussed someplace.
I agree. However, the issue is that anything involving automation is not going to get anywhere in this forum, because we don't have any means of making those changes ourselves.
You can absolutely bring this up here; just because it affects more than just your site doesn't mean you have to bring the initial discussion to Meta Stack Overflow. Individual site metas get monitored, too - sometimes things start out on a small meta, then get moved to MSO for a more high-profile discussion, but sometimes we implement things that were brought up on a smaller site without any broader community discussion.
Marking this as a bug; the Linked sidebar should provide this functionality, but as Charles points out it isn't doing so in some cases.
Fixed in build rev 2013.7.9.824
My first thought is "that sounds like a lot of work".
My second thought is, "what's the point?" The whole point of marking something as duplicate is so that all the answers are in one spot. If you see a duplicate that has a particularly good answer, flag it and we can merge it back to the original question.
I guess I'm missing why we would want to do this.
EDIT: I misread the question; it specified an automatic process.
I'm still on the fence about this request, as I'm not convinced of the added benefit. Questions closed as duplicates should not have answers. If there's a particularly useful answer, it should be merged in, but that should be the rare occasion. For all other duplicates, it's simply a rewording of the original question, left there to increase search term visibility, that's it. I don't see what value this would add to the user looking for answers to his question.
Sampling our top 10, by votes, duplicate questions reveals that there are on average 2 answers per duplicate (max of 5 answers) with only 2 questions not having any answers. I don't know how to quickly judge whether these answers are "particularly useful" or not but the quantity of answers suggests that useful answers will not be rare.
I am with Daniel on this. A lot of questions might get answers before they're flagged as duplicates, and the answers can be useful information, that might not fit so well in the "other" question.
@aeismail: I don't think questions have a definable equivalence relation; it's entirely possible that X and Y are sufficiently similar that it would be better to have one common question Z that answers both, and yet for good answers for X to be poor answers for Y and vice versa. Even if a good Z could be written so that good answers to Z would also be good answers to X and Y, unless or until that happens people are apt to write answers that are more suitable just for X or just for Y.
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4489 | Should we reject an edit that fundamentally changes an off topic question on translating books?
A user heavily edited someone else's closed question I want a book to be translated into my native language? to change the question from focusing on a popular fiction book (which seems clearly off topic) to a hypothetical academic text book. The edited question seems to be on topic to me and likely to receive the votes needed to be reopened. It also seems to stray vary far from the OP’s question.
I personally think we should reject the edit and keep the original question closed. If the OP wishes to edit the question, or if someone else wishes to ask the new question, they can do that.
Quick question: An upvote here means "we should reject the edit", right?
@user109129 The upvote is mine and just means "thanks for asking this question".
@user109129 nominally up/down votes on meta being yes/no only apply to feature requests and even then it is confusing. But yes, I wrote the title and question in a way that upvotes mean reject the edit.
I thought it was strange to edit a question that was clearly off-topic into something very different simply for the sake of "saving" it. It also introduces weird things, like the OP of the off-topic question gaining or losing reputation based on up/downvotes to a question they clearly didn't ask. I felt it would make more sense for the altered question to be asked as a new post.
I'm fine with any decision on the matter (I certainly wouldn't repeatedly revert).
Edits to questions by people who are not the author should never change the basic intent of the question. It's really, really rude to the author. If such an edit is proposed, it should be rejected.
I've been on the receiving end of such edits on another site, where my question has been changed into something different to what I asked, and IMHO into something asinine. I've had to contact moderators to get my name taken off it.
You should have reverted the edit, and flagged if an edit war statred.
@DavidRicherby by the time I saw it, the new question had a couple of answers...
Ah, OK. That sucks.
Let me note that there have been other questions here that have been edited to change (IMO) the intent as it seemed to be expressed by the OP. I think that such things need to be handled consistently. It was that memory, actually, that seemed to give me "permission" to make the change.
I won't speak, however, in favor of allowing such changes and generally don't favor them. And I've hesitated as well to roll back those changes.
I asked (and self-answered) a follow-up question on how to draw the line here.
I'll make no objection. I thought my edit made for an interesting on-topic question and also commented apologies in advance to the OP. Anyone with sufficient rep to edit could change it back as was done. Fine. I have no issue with it.
I deleted my answer, as it applied more to the edited question than the original, which I agree was off topic. Again, no worries.
Glad to hear you have an open mind, not that I was worried. If we reject the edit, there is no reason not to ask your version as a new question.
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4483 | New chat room for the HNQ list
Since we have had the ability to track the hot network question (HNQ) list, we have been doing this in a private moderator room. The idea being that it would help us stay on top of potentially problematic questions that need moderator attention before things get out of hand. It has helped, but we have a lot of HNQs and most of the things that need to be done can be done by regular users with enough rep (e.g., protecting the question, closing questions that are off topic, and flagging answers as low quality and comments as rude).
In the community moderation spirit of SE, I have created a public chat room that has the HNQs for Academia.SE. If you pop in you will see questions that are on the HNQ. Read them and enjoy or moderate them or just ignore it all together.
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5498 | What was the intention behind The Outreach Department?
I see that until recently, there used to be a room called The Outreach Department. It was created in April 2022.
It was frozen quite recently, in November 2024. (Actually, this room was frozen and unfrozen a few times in the past.)
Is the intention behind this room simply to gather HNQs? (The room topic simply says: "The Outreach Department: … where a feed of hot network questions gets posted so we can edit, close, and flag them (as appropriate)".) Or is this room for other things, as well? (The site already has one general-purpose room.)
If the room is worth keeping alive, perhaps one of the moderators could unfreeze it? The room was unfrozen again.
I don't know that there's a better answer to be had than the initial announcement: New chat room for the HNQ list
To answer the last subquestion: Nothing stops you from starting discussions there, if they are about (community) moderating HNQs.
@Wrzlprmft Could perhaps the tag ([meta-tag:chat]) be added to the duplicate target. (I actually checked this tag to see whether there was a previous discussion related to this room.) Thanks!
@Martin: Done …
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3582 | Has Academia Being Featured in Hot Network Questions Improved the Community?
Stemming partially from this meta thread: Why are we challenging the premise rather than answering the question (question on potential sexist remarks)?
And especially this comment by @Wrzlprmft:
"@Fomite: For whatever it’s worth, most of the problematic comments
and answers come from users attracted to the question via the hot
network questions and not directly from our own community."
Does the Academia community actually benefit from being in that listing? As far as I can see, the primary benefit is a sudden influx of users, but do we have evidence that they stay? Growth from that listing is only useful growth if the visitors go on to continue to be members of the community. I'd be happy to hear from individual users here who found us via Hot Network Questions.
As far as I can tell, the primary detriment is the questions that end up on the Hot Network Questions listing tend to drop fairly dramatically in quality, become more controversial, etc. I can say, as a fairly active user and contributor to the site that the questions and answers that have made me consider throwing in the towel have all been Hot Network Questions.
For the sake of "Meta-votes are Agree/Disagree" clairity, I'd suggest an Upvote is "HNQs are helpful" and a Downvote is "HNQs are unhelpful."
I can't remember exactly, but I suspect I discovered Academia.SE through the HNQ. Whether I improved the community or not, that's another story ;-)
"I'd be happy to hear from individual users here who found us via Hot Network Questions." I definitely did that; though I agree that I can't really be considered as a frequent user, I like to read the questions here, and I was happy to receive good answers to my (so far unique) question. I may very well post other questions (and perhaps even answers) in the future.
The by Shog9 admittedly just for his (and other StackOverflow user's) amusement created hot list is mostly a nuisance, in particular for serious research-level academic sites. Unfortunately, not even MathOverflow was able to opt out from this SE feature, see http://meta.mathoverflow.net/questions/1305/measures-to-separate-math-overflow-from-the-rest-of-the-stack-exchange-network/1307#1307 and related discussion ...
I wrote the same question last week after seeing a wave of users with no history on this site, and visibly no connection to academia whatsoever, creating accounts just to write confrontational comments. Then I ditched it because I thought I attracted enough junk with my last meta post. So, now I want to upvote because I like the question, but I voted down because I think HNQs are clearly detrimental to the quality of our site.
The problem is not necessarily HNQ, it's the fact that the visitors from other sites are likely to acquire association bonus and have site privileges without being site users. There are various proposals on Meta.SE to address this root cause (including mine - shameless plug)
From what I've seen: At best, they've been slightly helpful. At worst, they're a temporary nuisance.
Moderately helpful – As Massimo pointed out, he came to this site through the network questions. This isn't so terribly unusual; I would guess that for every fifty network questions, we gain one user who didn't know we existed. We've been on there a lot lately, so over time that sort of thing does prove useful to the community. It also gives people an exposure to what Academia is like, although sometimes the questions are slightly (often?) more inflammatory than they need to be.
Temporary nuisance – Network questions always bring a lot of people, who leave all sorts of often bizarre comments and answers. These people rarely, if ever, return, and don't really add much to the community, or even that question. They frequently cause all sorts of automatic flags to get set off (tons of comments, tons of answers, low quality new user posts) which are a stupid and a pain. These questions also often end up with a bunch of cruft (old useless comments, bad answers), which leads to all sorts of flags being raised on these questions months or years later.
Someone posted the following to Meta a while back: What is the Goal of "Hot Network Questions"? This was one of those questions where the question had a lot more upvotes than any of the answers. My theory is that this place is more like Facebook and Twitter than the admins care to admit, and the only goal of Hot Network Questions is to keep people entertained, thereby keeping them on the site, thereby showing them more ads, thereby making a profit. Whatever the reason, they're there, they're probably not going away anytime soon, and while pontificating is fun it's probably not going to change anything.
I'd suggest that, with the goal of SE answers being useful for more than the OP, that the HNQ rendering the occasional question in a very poor state is more than a "temporary" nuisance. We'll also never have numbers, but I'd be curious at the people who found us via HNQ and were turned off by what they found. The hypothetical anti-Massimo.
@Fomite - *shrug* You may be right, but we'll never really know.
It's been my experience that poorer quality questions tend to rise to HNQ list in general (NOT on Academia alone, but on other sites as well). A question that ignites controversy seems to feed into "hot" algorithm.
"keep people entertained" - very likely, on the other hand, is it a bad thing to keep people entertained with somewhat productive/educative questions/answers?
You probably won't like to heard that Academia is "Today's Featured Site". :D ;-)
Like Massimo, I probably came here via HNQ as well. I admit to using the HNQ as a source of entertainment, although my entertainment primarily comes from the "somewhat productive/educative questions/answers" of math, matheducators, academia, and workplace, with a smattering of money and travel, rather than movies, scifi, politics, or skeptics (not that those aren't entertaining in their own right).
I don't believe an objective answer to this question is possible. The system does not track information about hotness points, questions on the HNQ list, or the use of the HNQ sidebar: Add an audit log to record when particular question enters and leaves hot list
A number of times, one of our question has been featured on the HNQ list that I thought was neither representative of our community nor a particularly good question. This has happened enough that I proposed a feature be to prevent question from being added to the HNQ list: Allow mods or gold tag badge holders to prevent question from being on hot network questions list
Without the data, I am not sure how to quantify the affects on our community of these "bad" questions being featured on the HNQ list. I think that there have been "good" questions featured and that publicizing our good side is a good thing. What I would like to see is more of our good questions make the HNQ list.
Most of our meta-questions don't really have objective answers. And yes, while what you'd like to see is probably the ideal case, it's not what's currently happening.
@Fomite it wasn't a complaint. I would have loved to be able to show (or not show) a spike in new users who eventual became high rep or a prolonged bump in traffic or new questions or ... The data just isn't there.
Obviously personal anecdotes aren't a good way to make rules, but I can say without a doubt that I only found Academia SE through the hot network questions sidebar.
I was only ever engaged on Stack Overflow, which I think is a fairly typical gateway to Stack Exchange in general. In fact, it seems to me computer science, and fields that make a lot of use of computer science, are very heavily represented on Academia in proportion to other fields. This observation would fit that hypothesis.
So, I feel like it's a pretty solid positive despite the increased moderation necessary on the questions that become sacrificial lambs by ending up there. After all, closing the community off from the influence of "outsiders" doesn't sound like a desirable thing to do. Maybe the question can be addressed by improving moderation tools on protected questions?
Are there stats on what % of new users on Ac.SE were attracted by HNQ?
@smci How do you propose to define and measure "attracted by HNQ"?
@FedericoPoloni: the people who brought us HNQ can measure its impact. For them they know the referring URL, it should be trivial. And they have the capability to selectively disable it on those sites where it's causing grief.
So the definition is "an user was attracted by HNQ if, in the session in which they registered their account, they reached this site via a HNQ"? That is measurable, but it might not tell the whole story.
While I agree with the existing answers on and in particular that there should be some mechanism to avoid problematic HNQs, I would like to mention another advantage of HNQs:
They allow good posts (questions as well as answers) to get more attention than they normally would, which in turn results in upvotes and badges. And at the end of the day, this is one of the central mechanisms of Stack Exchange: You get to know how many people found your contributions helpful and are rewarded (with reputation, badges, and sometimes hats). When a post of mine gets massively upvoted due to being a HNQ or an answer to an HNQ, this does not only mean reputation and badges but also (well, at least most of the time) that a large audience learnt something from my contribution, be it some hard information or a way to look at things. And that’s extremely rewarding and motivating.
I actually see this as a disadvantage. It means a post can get massive upvotes not so much because it is particularly good relative to other posts on the site, but just because HNQ gave it disproportionate visibility. For instance, my top-voted answer is one that basically just says "No." It actually makes me feel less motivated when simple things like this get tons of votes, while posts that involved much more effort get less attention.
I agree with @NateEldredge - I'd rather a post get high upvotes based on quality rather than external volume. And it incentivizes the wrong sort of behavior.
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4025 | 2018 Moderator Election Q&A - Questionnaire
In connection with the moderator elections, we are creating a Q&A thread for the candidates. Questions collected from an earlier thread have been compiled into this one, which shall now serve as the space for the candidates to provide their answers.
Due to the submission count, we have selected all provided questions as well as two of our back-up questions for a total of 9 questions. We skipped one backup question because it covers similar ground as the submitted questions.
As a candidate, your job is simple - post an answer to this question, listing each of the questions, with your answer to each question given just below. For your convenience, I will include all of the questions in quote format with a break in between each, suitable for you to insert your answers. Just copy the whole thing after the first set of three dashes.Please consider putting your name at the top of your post so that readers will know who you are before they finish reading everything you have written, and also including a link to your answer on your nomination post.
Once all the answers have been compiled, this will serve as a transcript for voters to view the thoughts of their candidates, and will be appropriately linked in the Election page.
Good luck to all of the candidates!
Oh, and when you've completed your answer, please provide a link to it after this blurb here, before that set of three dashes. Please leave the list of links in the order of submission.
To save scrolling here are links to the submissions from each candidate (in order of submission):
padawan
Fomite
Massimo Ortolano
Wrzlprmft
What activities on the site suggest that you would be a good moderator? How have you used the moderation tools available to you at your current reputation level?
How would you deal with a user who produced a steady stream of valuable answers, but tends to generate a large number of arguments/flags from comments?
How would you handle a situation where another mod closed/deleted/etc a question that you feel shouldn't have been?
As a moderator, I find that comments are a tricky thing to deal with. Under what circumstances will you delete comments?
A user posts something you consider off-topic/not-an-answer/offensive and you close/delete/migrate the post. The user takes the issue to Meta and the question as well as answers supporting and opposing your decision get a lot of upvotes. How do you decide what to do next?
What question or answer of yours on meta best exemplifies your philosophy on moderation? Why do you feel this is the best example?
What is your field of study in academics?
In your opinion, what do moderators do?
A diamond will be attached to everything you say and have said in the past, including questions, answers and comments. Everything you will do will be seen under a different light. How do you feel about that?
What activities on the site suggest that you would be a good moderator? How have you used the moderation tools available to you at your current reputation level?
I've tried to participate to the life of this site by highlighting unclear points in questions, by suggesting duplicates, by proposing to close off-topic questions or reopen possibly on-topic ones, and by protecting questions when necessary. I'm an active participant of our Meta, and I can be found in the Ivory Tower chat for informal discussions.
I vote a lot because I think that voting is an important aspect of the Stack Exchange communities. And even though it is a kind of Lepreuchan money, which disappears in real life, it helps encouraging writing good questions and answers, and it can be attracting to new users.
I admit that I don't use too much the review queues because I frequently access this site from my mobile phone. Thus, most of my moderation activity (close/reopen/delete votes) is done from the front page. I'm aware that if I would be elected, I'll quite probably have to change this aspect of my participation.
How would you deal with a user who produced a steady stream of valuable answers, but tends to generate a large number of arguments/flags from comments?
I wouldn't deal alone: I'm convinced that problematic cases like this one should be discussed among all the moderators. I'd first propose to have a private chat with the user to convince them to avoid this kind of disruptive behaviour. I'd consider suspension as a last resort.
How would you handle a situation where another mod closed/deleted/etc a question that you feel shouldn't have been?
I think that for borderline cases we should leave the decision to the community. Therefore, I wouldn't reopen or undelete the question unilaterally, but I'd propose to the other moderator to agree on publishing a meta question to see what the community thinks about the closure/deletion/etc.
As a moderator, I find that comments are a tricky thing to deal with. Under what circumstances will you delete comments?
Comments are really a tricky point for at least two reasons. First, there is a clear discrepancy between the intended usage of comments from the Stack Exchange staff and the intended usage from many users. Second, it appears that moderators have limited tools to deal with comments. For instance, at present, comments can be moved to chat only once (there are suggestions to improve these tools, but we don't know if and when they will be implemented).
In principle, I think that comments should be deleted only when they are rude or offensive, or when they become obsolete. A long list of comments can be moved to chat, but I'd avoid deletion. However, for answers, I think that comments that point out significant technical, regulatory or legal flaws should stay attached to the answers and not moved to chat or deleted. Of course, this principles might not be fully applicable because of the limitations of the moderation tools.
A user posts something you consider off-topic/not-an-answer/offensive and you close/delete/migrate the post. The user takes the issue to Meta and the question as well as answers supporting and opposing your decision get a lot of upvotes. How do you decide what to do next?
I'd reopen or undelete the post, and then I'd open on Meta a broader discussion to see up to which point we can really extend the borders of on-topicness around that example, to achieve a wider agreement.
What question or answer of yours on meta best exemplifies your philosophy on moderation? Why do you feel this is the best example?
This one:
https://academia.meta.stackexchange.com/a/2027/20058
Even though at first glance it might not seem directly related to moderation, I choose this answer because I think it exemplifies well my understanding of people's way of voting, and the way in which complains about up or downvotes should be handled.
What is your field of study in academics?
I'm a metrologists, and metrology is likely the most underrepresented field in any kind of community, especially that of grammar-checkers. Along my life, I've actually worked in several different subfields of metrology: first that of fundamental constants, then that of time and frequency metrology and now that of electrical metrology, mostly resistance and impedance metrology.
In your opinion, what do moderators do?
I think that they do two essential activities. They clean up the mess and they actively gauge the community about critical topics, to better guide the direction of the site.
A diamond will be attached to everything you say and have said in the past, including questions, answers and comments. Everything you will do will be seen under a different light. How do you feel about that?
Certainly, a bit ashamed of a few things I had written, but conscious that I'm working to avoid making such mistakes again.
Re: question 1, you also raise flags! Over 300 helpful flags - you are already a big help to the moderators in terms of bringing things to moderator attention when the circumstances warrant it.
@ff524 Oops, thanks for reminding me about that! :-)
Did I only notice encouraging of plagiarism by this candidate? answer number 6 when you click on link, he brag about most upvoted comment, @ff524 ? How this is acceptable? in that comment is clearly stated that plagiarism is not big problem.
@SSimon No, I don't encourage plagiarism, and the comment has nothing to do with plagiarism. The linked meta question and my remark associated to the comment link provide more context.
@SSimon, perhaps there is an issue here with language comprehension? Massimo says, at the end of the answer you link to, "That said, as my most voted comment highlights, sometimes I'm puzzled too." When one reads the comment, it is clear that Massimo is not sympathising with plagiarism.
@SSimon In fact, once again you have confused ideas about what the word plagiarism means, perhaps due to language issues. Plagiarism is not the same as piracy; plagiarism is about failure to cite, not where one acquires sources that one cites. Perhaps you should spend more time trying to read carefully what people have written, rather than leaving "OMG how bad" comments based on knee-jerk reactions
@SSimon If you want to read an answer of mine which well represents my position on plagiarism you can have a look at this one: https://academia.stackexchange.com/a/79219/20058
@YemonChoi do you have any evidence that plagiarised or copyright infringed source is academically and ethically acceptable?
that is even worst link @MassimoOrtolano this is one of comment on it by other users "Plagiarism specifically has to be stolen, or taken, or pilfered, and claimed as your own"
@SSimon Are you blaming Massimo for something someone else said to mark disagreement with him?
@ArnaudD. no I am blaming him for incapability to communicate with users of this website. I am not sure how he will moderate.
@SSimon You ask "do you have any evidence that plagiarised or copyright infringed source is academically and ethically acceptable?" Please indicate where you think I have ever claimed this, or retract your implication that I condone these things.
@SSimon I have merely pointed out that you accused Massimo of condoning or encouraging plagiarism, and that the comment you seem to be referring to has nothing to do with plagiarism. You refuse to acknowledge this and now start talking about copyright infringement, which is distinct: see http://ask.lib.byu.edu/a.php?qid=230251
@Ssimon More generally: you continue, after two years on this site, to accuse people of things based on careless readings or hasty first impressions of what they wrote, and then you refuse to acknowledge your errors or back up your claims with specific quotes.
@YemonChoi are you a lawyer to Massimo? I am not only 2 years on this website, your stalking was unsuccessful. How is copyright distinct from the pirate version of the book? I am amazed that every user has his own impression about this important issue ( both legally and ethically )
Wrzlrpmft’s answers
What activities on the site suggest that you would be a good moderator? How have you used the moderation tools available to you at your current reputation level?
I performed a lot of community moderation such as reviewing, raising flags, and editing.
During this, I always aspired to do more than what is necessary, but salvaged posts that would likely have been closed otherwise, left comments that helped users understand and address problems, or identified problematic patterns, e.g., vote abuse.
Moreover, I contributed to addressing issues with site on Meta by adjusting our scope, providing guidance for new users, and similar.
Being a moderator on two other sites, I am familiar with the tools and capabilities, and I know what to expect from the job.
How would you deal with a user who produced a steady stream of valuable answers, but tends to generate a large number of arguments/flags from comments?
The contributions of a single member cannot be so valuable that they justify tolerating a disruptive behaviour.
Thus, I will start with a moderator message (without suspension) explaining why their behaviour is problematic.
Should this not work, I will resort to more drastic actions such as suspension.
During all of this, I will take into account what the exact problem is: It’s a considerable difference if somebody is rude or just likes to discuss a lot.
How would you handle a situation where another mod closed/deleted/etc a question that you feel shouldn't have been?
I’ll talk to the moderator to find out where exactly we disagree, if at all.
Should this not resolve the situation, I will consult a third moderator or the community on meta, depending on the situation.
As a moderator, I find that comments are a tricky thing to deal with. Under what circumstances will you delete comments?
I will not hesitate to delete comments that are rude or have become obsolete due to edits, answers, or similar.
I will also generously move comment discussions to chat that have digressed from the actual post, since this does not destroy any content but keeps the main site focussed.
As for the more tricky cases like answers posted as comments and single chatty comments, I will decide on a per-case basis, but usually act only upon flags as they indicate that some other user sees a problem (barring the occasional flag abuse).
Should I feel that general deviations from this policy are necessary, e.g., due to an epidemic of answers in comments, I will bring the issue to Meta.
I also may use my authority for general reminders on hot network questions (e.g., “please do not post answers in comments, they will be deleted without warning”) and act accordingly.
A user posts something you consider off-topic/not-an-answer/offensive and you close/delete/migrate the post. The user takes the issue to Meta and the question as well as answers supporting and opposing your decision get a lot of upvotes. How do you decide what to do next?
If the Meta discussion yielded a clear consensus for undoing my action and convinced me of it, I will act accordingly.
Otherwise, I will leave the decision to another moderator, as I cannot avoid being biased.
Should this not be possible (e.g., if time is of the essence) or when being the other moderator in such a situation, I would consider the arguments and votes on Meta, whether the decision can actually be undone without causing additional problems, and potential third ways.
What question or answer of yours on meta best exemplifies your philosophy on moderation? Why do you feel this is the best example?
Obviously insincere posts – how should users/reviewers react?.
When I posted this, Academia was being haunted by malicious posts by tenacious trolls as described in the question.
Since this was a new problem for Academia, many users were unaware of the general issue and did not know how to delete such posts efficiently without a moderator.
Therefore these posts caused some bad blood (and thus success for the troll) before moderators would even see them.
I am quite confident that my post helped to break this vicious cycle.
I chose this post for several reasons:
I took a quick and effective initiative when needed.
It employs and encourages community moderation.
It reflects parts of my general approach to problem users: Avoid public dispute, in particular if this what they appear to be seeking, and use existing mechanisms to get rid of problematic content.
What is your field of study in academics?
I am a physicist by education, but due to the interdisciplinarity of my research, I have ventured into mathematics, medicine, neuroscience, biology, and computer science.
I am aware that academia varies more than I think it does.
Thus I will be very careful before making moderation decisions based on what I believe to know about academia’s workings – but then I do not expect this to happen very often.
In your opinion, what do moderators do?
Moderators mainly handle issues that cannot be handled by community moderation due to privacy, extremeness, or time pressure.
They also act as a liaison between the community and Stack Exchange.
Finally, they can steer community discussions, which happens mostly through the authority of the mandate and the featured tag.
A diamond will be attached to everything you say and have said in the past, including questions, answers and comments. Everything you will do will be seen under a different light. How do you feel about that?
I am fine with that. Should I be elected, I do not intend to change how I speak except that I sometimes will speak explicitly as a moderator. The only possible exception for this is that I have a knack for asking questions where my intentions are misinterpreted and will try even more to avoid this.
I think your answers to questions 2, 3, and 5 are close to perfect and reflect your experience from being a moderator on other SE sites.
Which would best reflect your time commitments: Would you split the time currently spent as a moderator on other sites to include Academia, or would you add more time to include Academia?
@aeismail: I would add more time to include Academia, which in turn comes from the time I spend on community moderation and similar now (so it doesn’t come out of nowhere).
Seems like you're relatively active on SE.Academia, so if you're able to satisfy your commitments to the other two SE's you mod, presumably you'll be able to satisfy a commitment here, too. That said, I'm mostly just curious - do you find having multiple mod duties to be much of a time sink?
@Nat: Well, SE is a time sink, but it is also my hobby. I actually like (community) moderation most of the time. So far, my moderatorships never were much of an additional time sink but rather a shift of activities within a time sink.
@Wrzlprmft do you have an example for the very last point in your questionnaire, about "asking questions where [your] intentions [were] misinterpreted"? Did you think of advocatus-diaboli discussions or ironic statements? Just to clarify. Thanks and best luck for the election! :)
@nabla: 1, 2 (and some questions on other sites). In both cases, things were read between the lines that I know not to be there (which doesn’t mean that I am not to blame for these things being read into my posts) that resulted in accusations against me.
ah, I see. Well, if anything, I consider it another bonus point for you that you experienced this happening as a user, and drew the right conclusions for future posts, maybe then as a mod.
Why Wrzlprmft is not disqualified due to providing a false statement in nomination? Is academic dishonesty not applicable for moderators?
@SSimon: I ask you once more: Can you please tell me where you see a false statement and evidence why it is false? And please quote/link specific messages, not an entire chatlog.
I posted a link to the nomination, but I cannot find now.
@SSimon: Your post with the link can be found here, but it is just a link to the election chatroom.
@SSimon For the last time, please state which part of @Wrzlprmft!'s nomination you regard as a "false claim". If you cannot identify precisely what you mean, then once again you should stop creating noise.
@SSimon You are presumably a postgraduate student yourself; surely you would recognize that in your own studies or research one should justify one's claims and take an accurate approach to what one says
@YemonChoi what??? havent you seen link?
@SSimon Have to say that the discussion in the election chatroom seems to provide further evidence of the candidates' fitness. This election seems to have the happy problem of there being many fine choices.
actually, I don't know this person until he unethically behaved toward me but now @Nat he also links his real name with publications, so it is his choice to ruin a reputation, so I think to redraw my opposition since I thought the person in anonymous.
@SSimon if there is anyone here who is damaging their reputation, it is not Wrzlprmft or Fomite or Massimo ...
@YemonChoi do you have any proof for that claim? Why you think attacking user(one case), supporting intellectual theft (another one) and being unconsidered toward other culture as acceptable and good ffor reputation?
@SSimon as I have attempted to explain to you (but you refuse to listen, as usual) Massimo was not supporting intellectual theft. Moreover, in the other comment thread, you said he was supporting plagiarism, and when I corrected your use of the word plagiarism you chose to ignore me. It is high time you realise that one reason users are disagreeing with your claims about individuals, is that those individuals did not say the things you think they said. If you cannot parse people's statements it might be wiser not to comment so much and so vehemently.
@YemonChoi but who are these people who are disagreeing with me? are you forbidding me to use SE? Do you have any proof that he was not supporting that?
Fomite's Answers
What activities on the site suggest that you would be a good moderator?
There are three main activities I try to engage in as a regular user of the site that I think translate well to being a good moderator:
When possible, I try add comments that might encourage a question/answer to be more fleshed out. I think one of the first goals of moderation should be to render a question/answer suitable to the site before approaching the idea of removing it.
I try to make room for the idea that there are alternate opinions, different field-specific norms, etc. I think balancing "Academia is not homogenous" with the population of the site and the desire for general questions is one of the inherent challenges of Academia.SE
I make time to go through the review queues when visiting the site. Though I confess the new GUI indicator for this threw me for a loop for awhile.
How have you used the moderation tools available to you at your current reputation level?
I've earned a number of "moderation-esq" badges, and use the review tools to try contribute to the overall moderation workload as much as possible. Additionally, I try to use the flagging system fairly actively so the moderation team doesn't necessarily need to be combing through everything, and have what I'd like to think is a decent "Helpful" rate of 86%.
Beyond that, as mentioned in the answer above, I do my best to try and help users - especially new users - craft an answer that's suitable to the site, even if it takes a few iterations.
How would you deal with a user who produced a steady stream of valuable answers, but tends to generate a large number of
arguments/flags from comments?
I think the first order of business with a user like that is to try to engage with them to figure out where those flags are coming from. Is there a particularly hot button issue that provokes those reactions, or is it a more widespread problem?
That might help craft a solution - either the user just knowing this about themselves, perhaps engaging in a little self-moderation, etc.
Past that, I think one needs to figure out if this is merely creating more work for the moderators, or actively driving down the environment of the site. It's possible that heated discussions might not result in hurt feelings, users leaving the site, or otherwise productive comment chains being dragged down. On the other hand, it's entirely possible that, even if they are valuable contributors to the site, that their "style" is sufficiently detrimental to Academia.Se that some sort of more formal sanction needs to be considered.
How would you handle a situation where another mod closed/deleted/etc a question that you feel shouldn't have been?
I think there's a difference between "I wouldn't have done that" and "This is a hill I'm willing to die on" in terms of disagreeing with another mod. Generally, I've found the moderation team on Academia.SE to be excellent, so if anything for most disagreements I might try to gauge why they thought it should be closed/deleted/etc. to understand their reasoning, learn from their experience, etc.
For things where there's a genuine disagreement and I think the closing/deleting was a mistake rather than merely something I wouldn't have done, I think engaging with the other mod to understand why, and then helping the user of the question change things to address their issues is how I would approach it. But when it comes down to it, I think that a moderator - who is by definition a very committed member of the site - deciding something should be closed is a pretty reliable proxy for there being at least a reasonable argument that it should be.
As a moderator, I find that comments are a tricky thing to deal with. Under what circumstances will you delete comments?
I think the most important considerations for comments is that SE answers are supposed to be useful beyond solving the OP's original problem. I think comments that address things that have sense been resolved by edits, etc. are prime candidates to be cleaned up, because their context is now missing.
I also think rude and abusive comments fall under the category of not adding much - I think they're more likely to drag a conversation down than they are to improve the content of a question or answer. I'll admit, looking at what I've flagged vs. what's been accepted in that camp that I might have a wider definition than some of our current moderators.
On the other hand, I don't think moderately long comment chains, as long as their being productive, need to be removed.
A user posts something you consider off-topic/not-an-answer/offensive
and you close/delete/migrate the post. The user takes the issue to
Meta and the question as well as answers supporting and opposing your
decision get a lot of upvotes. How do you decide what to do next?
Try to take the answers opposing my decision to heart, reflect on them, and improve my moderation in the future.
For things that are genuinely split, I tend to err on the side of pruning over not pruning, especially for the latter category. A lot of votes on either side (for Meta definitions of a lot of votes) suggests that while this needs to be reflected on more, there's no inherent call to change my original decision.
On the other hand, if one of the opposing answers genuinely makes me rethink my logic (this has happened to me more than once), I'm perfectly happy to do what I can to reverse the decision, and avoid it coming up again.
What question or answer of yours on meta best exemplifies your
philosophy on moderation? Why do you feel this is the best example?
This is, for the record, a very good question.
I'm particularly proud of this question: Time to Expressly Ban "I want to do X, Here's My Life Story..." questions? which did start us down the road to a custom close reason.
I think this is my best example because I found myself at least growing somewhat impatient with the volume of "Lets talk about my specific edge case" questions that weren't answerable without being on the admissions committee of University X, and editor at Journal Y, etc.
Declaring those unanswerable and genuinely out of scope was, I think, a good thing. I also don't think it had the downstream consequences of closing some otherwise worthwhile question that people were worried about.
We still get some of these questions, usually answerable with a comment "Have you asked your advisor?", but I think it helped the signal-to-noise ratio of the site.
What is your field of study in academics?
I'm a computational epidemiologist. I make virtual people sick for a living.
Importantly, this also means I have a fair amount of exposure to both computational science and biomedical science. I think having diversity of fields in both users and moderators is useful because there are often answers on this site that are very field specific (see: anything involving LaTeX or arXiv).
Having a broad range of voices is, in my mind, a good thing.
In your opinion, what do moderators do?
Moderators gonna moderate.
There are, naturally, the administrative aspects of moderation. The "Super-Close", being able to migrate questions, etc. - but as noted, users above a certain reputation have many of those same tools. I think there's also an aspect of moderation that comes in the form of trying to be a guiding/calming influence on improving questions and answers, modeling behavior, etc. And in that aspect, I think the difference between a moderator and a user is one of obligation - it's non-optional for a mod.
A diamond will be attached to everything you say and have said in the
past, including questions, answers and comments. Everything you will
do will be seen under a different light. How do you feel about that?
While I post under a pseudonym, that pseudonym is pretty weak, and I try not to say anything I wouldn't be comfortable saying with my name attached to it. The same is true of the moderator diamond.
Somewhat related to this, from IIRC the CrossValidated election questions awhile ago, is the idea that a diamond might make one's behavior change. While I expect that, if elected, the volume of my moderating-type tasks will increase, I already treat things like voting to close a question as if they're the final say.
Padawan's answers
Question 1
What activities on the site suggest that you would be a good
moderator? How have you used the moderation tools available to you at
your current reputation level?
My comments on the ways to improve a question is usually received well. I have 203 comments, and a big portion of them is for other users' posts. Either for the purpose of improving the question or clarifying the answer. I am trying to edit and reopen as many questions as I can. Also, I am trying to omit unrelated details in long questions to make them more readible. I never hesitate to flag a discouraging comment, regardless to the total votes of the post.
Question 2
How would you deal with a user who produced a steady stream of
valuable answers, but tends to generate a large number of
arguments/flags from comments?
"Valuable" here is subjective. I cannot judge the value of an answer. I can only decide if it goes against some community rules, or not. Therefore, I would carefully examine every flag and comment, whether they are legit or not. If the user indeed posted an answer that is strictly agains community rules, then there is no option but banning the user.
Question 3
How would you handle a situation where another mod closed/deleted/etc
a question that you feel shouldn't have been?
If I feel that question does not deserve to be deleted, I first edit the question, and reopen. If it is deleted once more based on the flags, I then have no option to leave it closed.
Question 4
As a moderator, I find that comments are a tricky thing to deal with.
Under what circumstances will you delete comments?
Other than the clearly stated rules, these are the conditions for me to delete a comment is as follows.
a) The comment is just posted for upvotes, containing a pun or a joke that is slightly related to the question.
b) The comment is taking the micro-discussion to a totally different topic.
c) The user is ranting about the post because of some previous venom.
d) The user is discriminating another user because of their ethnicity/status/policital view.
Question 5
A user posts something you consider off-topic/not-an-answer/offensive
and you close/delete/migrate the post. The user takes the issue to
Meta and the question as well as answers supporting and opposing your
decision get a lot of upvotes. How do you decide what to do next?
As far as I have observed, the votes in Academia.SE are pretty reasonable. However, in some rare cases, people go with their own ideas instead of being objective about the matter. In these cases, I would first state the reason why I decided to delete the particular post, and ask for a clear contradiction in the rules. If one states a clear contradiction, also approved by majority, I would discuss undeleting the post with other moderators. Unless it is an argument like "this is a major nowadays" or "if this happened to you," I would undelete the post.
Question 6
What question or answer of yours on meta best exemplifies your
philosophy on moderation? Why do you feel this is the best example?
This is the one. Yes, this post of mine has -5 votes. However, I lay out my justifications to close a question clearly, one by one. Also, you can see that I am not judging a question by the OP, and I am eveluating the question by its last state because I have not voted for closing the question again.
Question 7
What is your field of study in academics?
Computer science and mathematics. Specifically, computational geometry.
Question 8
In your opinion, what do moderators do?
Moderators make this site a better, more readible and joust-free environment. They act to resolve the issues which do not add any value to the content of this site. Usually, there is an obvious solution according to most of the users.
Question 9
A diamond will be attached to everything you say and have said in the
past, including questions, answers and comments. Everything you will
do will be seen under a different light. How do you feel about that?
That is a big privilege for me. However, the things I write, or comment to hall not carry more weight than any other user. I humbly accept that I have a great responsibility, but I do not consider myself as a "god" like The Trainman in Matrix Revolutions.
As a side note I would suggest adding the options "Technical question about Google Scholar" and "This is a rant rather than a question" for the reasons of closing a question, as those are two of most common closing reasons.
Regarding your answer to question 3: Why do you ignore the other moderator’s decision and not seek clarification before acting?
Regarding your side note: If you feel that way, why do you not ask a separate meta question? That being said, in the last three months, we had only a handful of questions closed with a reason mentioning Google Scholar or rants explicitly, whereas we had more than hundred closures for each of the existing custom close reasons (source for 10 k users). I do not see a strong cause for replacing one of the latter.
@Wrzlprmft The same question might be asked to the moderator who closed the question in the first place: why did you ignore the other motertors' opinion and closed the question by yourself?
The ideal way, of course, is to have a discussion about the action.
why did you ignore the other motertors' opinion and closed the question by yourself? – In the scenario in question, the other moderator didn’t ignore your opinion but just wasn’t aware of it.
@Wrzlprmft So, I am not aware of that moderator's opinion on the edited version of the question. Maybe they will find it OK to be left open.
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3955 | Do we need a “borderline admissions” question for countries other than the US?
We already have a question that outlines the US admissions process for students with a weak background.
However, I’m beginning to wonder if we need a similar question for the UK and German systems as well. It seems we get a decent number of questions such as this one that it makes some sense to have a community wiki-type question available.
How much of this will actually be different? I ask out of ignorance, knowing little of the UK and German systems.
For starters, master’s degrees are part of the undergraduate curriculum, and PhD’s are formally jobs hired by individual professors instead of at the departmental level.
How much will it change the advice on how to selfevaluate and prepare? (Besides the obvious bits). Like research and letters and such...
it's more about the requirements being different, and the process for qualifying varying significantly. At least in Germany, there are multiple types of processes a school can follow. Also, for PhD's, the process is very different—first you get the job, then you apply for graduate candidacy later (potentially several years later).
I think a canonical question on how academic education after bachelor’s works in Germany would be a good idea, as we get many questions where basic knowledge about this is missing.
I don’t think there would be much to write about borderline cases, given that they are either decided by the hiring professor (and thus very individual) or the programme’s criteria, which in turn are either very clear or subject to grade conversions (and thus difficult to predict without knowledge about the specific grading system). That doesn’t mean that we cannot write anything about borderline cases (I just did after all) or that we shouldn’t use the canonical question as a duplicate for many such questions, but making borderline cases the focus (and title) doesn’t seem like a good idea to me.
I think we need more the tag "poor-performer" for the type of questions (What are my chances of being accepted for masters degree in German or Dutch universities?) you mentioned.
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4562 | 2019 Community Moderator Election
The 2019 Community Moderator Election is now underway!
Community moderator elections have three phases:
Nomination phase
Primary phase
Election phase
Most elections take between two and three weeks, but this depends on how many candidates there are.
Please visit the official election page at
https://academia.stackexchange.com/election
for more detail, and to participate!
If you have general questions about the election process, or questions for moderator candidates, feel free to ask them here on meta -- just make sure your questions are tagged election.
Where and when do we see who did nominate?
@user114084 They will be displayed at the election link above. You will also see their answers to the questions filter in at: https://academia.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/4561/2019-moderator-election-qa-questionnaire The typical nomination period is 7 days, and in my experience with past elections on other sites usually it takes a bit for candidates to shuffle in.
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4762 | Policy against questions making allegations against named individuals or organisations
Due to recurring problems with questions that contain allegations against named individuals or organisations, we moderators would like to implement a policy against these.
This should only affect a small fraction of questions that cause a disproportionate amount of trouble. In this post, we are asking if you see any problems with the proposed policy or whether there is anything else you propose to change. (If yes, please post an answer.)
Policy
Moderators will delete a question without warning if all of the following apply:
It contains allegations on an individual target, which can be a person, university, journal, publisher, company, or similar. As decided separately here, this includes self-allegations.
The allegations are severe, i.e., the reported behaviour is misconduct, criminal, or highly unethical or highly unprofessional. Honest mistakes, sloppiness, and quirks do not count. Neither do things like “Is Publisher X predatory?”, unless containing specific severe accusations, but they should still be closed as a duplicate of this or a shopping question.
The information in the question apparently allows others to identify the target or allows the target to identify the asker beyond any reasonable doubt without intensive research. This includes the asker’s username and thus all questions asked by users with what looks like a real name. This can be through explicit naming, a clear relation to the named author (e.g., their supervisor), a paper title, or similar.
The allegations have not already been widely reported or discussed (on news media, blogs, etc.).
Such questions can be re-asked when they are sufficiently anonymised.
However, anonymised questions may still be unsuitable for this site for several reasons.
When you encounter such a question, please:
Leave a guiding comment linking to this policy.
Flag it for moderator attention.
If you can additionally vote to close or delete it, do so.
Rationale
Going by experience, for almost every such question at least one of the following applies:
The asker soon regrets posting the question.
The question harms the asker.
The question causes a huge amount of debate.
The asker did not ask the question in good faith.
The question should be closed for being opinion-based, a shopping question, or depending on individual factors.
The question abuses this site as platform for public shaming.
As a result, such questions cause a lot of unnecessary grievance and moderation work, in particular through self-vandalisation, disassociation requests (an action requiring an SE employee) or redaction requests (an action requiring two moderators), or escalating comment debates.
In Cases 1–3, the question can be anonymised to avoid the issues and then re-asked.
Thus nobody is prevented from asking a valid question.
In Cases 4–6, no big harm is done by deleting.
Questions I would like to answer
Why doesn’t closing suffice? – Closing primarily prevents answers, which is not where the problems with such questions are. Moreover, these problems cannot be solved by editing the question as the information still sticks around. Deletion with a clear reference to this policy is the quickest way to start with a clean state.
Why does identifying information only count when it is in question or username? For example, what if I can identify the asker via their profile or similar? – We cannot predict every research angle at this and have to draw a line somewhere. Also the post content and username are the things which requests for moderator action usually are about – since those are the things that are within our control and only our control. (Note that while the username can be changed, there are restrictions on this and it can still be visible through comment replies and similar.)
Why don’t you give any examples for such questions? – Most previous questions matching the above criteria have already been deleted or redacted, so there will be strong survival bias in the selection. Moreover, I do not want to give them extra exposure. Here is a meta discussion about such a question.
I am an experienced user using my real name as my account name. Does this mean I am forced to make a sockpuppet to ask such a question? – Yes. This is a valid use of sockpuppets and it’s probably for the better. Just ensure that your accounts do not interact. Further reading.
This is censorship. The world must know the truth about … – This site is neither suited nor intended as a news platform. Even if your allegations are completely accurate and severe, they simply do not belong here. We can help you with how to deal with them, but we do not need names for that.
The only problem I see with this is that knowing specific information is often important for advising how to proceed in a given case. Like, if a university is in the southern US many things that are completely unethical, and moreover illegal in e.g. Germany, are both normal and not illegal. Full anonymization causes problems with those sorts of questions, but the benefits outweigh the costs at least on the individual institution level and providing a region is usually not enough to identify an institution.
@Pleasestopbeingevil: I think you addressed your own concern pretty well. In my experience, while some details are often necessary of course, it’s never so much to uniquely identify the target.
"Most previous questions matching the above criteria have already been deleted or redacted"... does this not mean that the problem already has a solution?
@Mowgli: Depends on what you consider the problem: On the one hand, we can already deal with people being unhappy about having publicly accused others or identified themselves and we can deal with posts getting out of hand. On the other hand, the problem of all of this causing a lot of unnecessary work, bad blood, and other trouble has no solution yet and is what the proposed policy addresses.
@Mowgli To me the usefulness of this meta post also extends to anyone questioning why any question is removed under this policy (theirs or someone else's) can be simply pointed here. That's one of the points of meta: to develop a community consensus for future reference. Moderators could just do it, too, by their own consensus and interpretation of other site guidelines, but that's generally not preferred.
I think this is a great idea. Such questions should be removed either way, but having a clear policy on it takes care of it quicker, clearer and with less hassle for those involved.
Has this proposed policy gone into effect? If not, what does the process look like from here?
@BrtH: There seems to be broad consensus for the policy, so you can consider it to be in effect already.
As Anonymous Physicist pointed out, it is not clear whether the proposed policy applies to self-allegations. Let’s decide this:
Suggested amendment
This policy shall also apply to questions making self-allegations, i.e., where the target and the asker are identical.
All the other criteria must still apply, in particular the self-allegations must be severe and not anonymous for the question to be deleted.
Rationale
There is nothing wrong with questions where people ask about dealing with their own mistakes (like there is nothing wrong with questions about how to proceed after being the victim of misconduct).
However, in the rare event that somebody asks such a question non-anonymously, this leads to a subset of the same problems listed in the question: They regret this, self-vandalise, request redaction or disassociations, or actually harmed themselves by asking. Additionally, applying the policy to self-allegations covers possible cases of impersonation and prevents any cumbersome need to verify identity. Therefore it is a good idea to expand the policy to capture self-allegations.
How to decide
Upvote this answer if you agree with including self-allegations; downvote if you disagree.
An additional reason to support this would be the possibility of impersonation. It is much easier to have a blanket rule than to have to decide whether a poster asking as Professor Heisenberg is truly wondering whether his extracurricular chemistry experiments could be considered academic misconduct or whether they are a rival chemist hoping to poison the waters of their tenure bid. A lack of a self-allegation exception lets this circumstance be handled without expecting moderators to drift into an identity-verification role they are not suited for.
Oops, I totally missed that @AnonymousPhysicist already made the impersonation argument already!
@BryanKrause: Yes, but still a good point since I somehow missed to include it.
I suggest explicitly excluding from deletion questions where the asker makes allegations about their own conduct. "Did I do something wrong, and what should I do about it?" is a helpful thing to ask, if sometimes embarrassing.
I admit that this might be problematic if the asker is impersonating someone else; presumably impersonation is already forbidden.
That’s a good point as I (and AFAICT none of the other mods) did not consider that this policy includes self-allegations. I totally concur that these questions are completely fine – when asked anonymously. When they are not anonymised, however, askers usually quickly regret this and this leads to a subset of the problems depicted in the question. I therefore actually consider it a good idea to explicitly include this case. Now, since there already has been some voting, I will handle this separately.
And here we go.
I have a concern with the use of "defamatory" in "The allegations are defamatory, i.e., the reported behaviour is misconduct, criminal, or highly unethical or highly unprofessional." Going by Meriam-Webster or typical use in US law, a defamatory statement is a false statement of fact (i.e. opinion does not count).
It'd be nice if we could avoid having the site be a venue for defamation, but determining whether a statement is false or not is often impractical, so having the rest of the clause resting on this meaning of the word is tricky. On the other hand, many will likely interpret "defamatory" as just "harmful to someone's reputation", which I assume is the intended meaning in the policy. Now, this is a clunky phrase, and I can't think of a precise synonym. However, in connection with "allegations", the word "serious" seems to have the right implications.
Hence, I suggest using "The allegations are serious, ..." instead of "The allegations are defamatory, ...". If there's a desire to keep "defamatory" in there somewhere, then "The allegations are serious or defamatory, ..." would work.
Good point; I followed your suggestion. FWIW, other dictionaries do not require falsehood for defamatory, but of course that does not avoid that somebody misunderstands it.
@Wrzlprmft Thanks. I think 'severe' is a good word choice.
Perhaps this passage
The information in the question (including the asker’s username) allows others to identify the target or allows the target to identify the asker beyond any reasonable doubt without intensive research.
ought to be modified to something like "appears to allow others to identify...". Presumably the mods will be applying this policy based on an assessment of whether usernames, etc, look like they're the names of real people, even if they're actually pseudonyms.
Thanks. I edited the wording.
I suggest removing "Unprofessional" from the criteria as it is very broad and subjective.
First note that I intended the highly to also apply to unprofessional and edited to clarify. This of course is still somewhat of a judgement call, but I do not think we can do without it as there are some cases where the other categories do not clearly apply. Also, please mind that for all of this we are usually rely on the depictions of the asker and they usually do not depict a grey zone as the asker is polarised (even when they have a point in their allegations) and probably wouldn’t have asked such an unanonymous question they weren’t.
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4710 | New audience-specific texts for our custom close reasons
Background
With recent changes to the closing system, we can now tailor the texts for custom close reasons to different audiences:
One text that informs close flaggers, voters, and reviewers when the close reason should be used.
One brief text that describes the close reason to everybody seeing the question. (It also gets shown in the two following cases.)
One text to guide the author of a question with improving it, getting help elsewhere, or similar.
One text to guide users with the close privilege how to improve the question or guide the asker.
For example, this is what the author of a question closed as not within the scope of this community will see:
I think this is great since we do not have to have a single text that works on all occasions anymore and have more room for tailored guidance and being more welcoming.
What happened
I worked together with the other moderators to make use of this system.
The new close reasons went active just now.
The changes retroactively apply to old questions closed with the respective predecessor close reason.
Why did you not ask us earlier?
The new texts should not contain any surprises; they reflect existing policy.
Since there is more room and the texts are more targetted, there is little risk of the result being accidentally worse than the status quo.
Also, it is rather difficult to grasp which text goes where without seeing the result in action; I got a few things wrong at first myself.
I therefore considered it better to have you review the result in place, and suggest changes if necessary.
This question
I’ll post one answer for each of our custom close reasons containing all the texts.
Please use comments to suggest improvements and similar.
Should any complex issues or disagreements arise, I will create separate questions as needed.
The hyperlinks are great.
I don't like the fact that there is text that is shown only to the post owner. How is that an advantage? Different people won't be on the same page if they see different guidance.
@FedericoPoloni: I fail to see your problem. The general information as to why a question was closed is visible to everybody (and in our case always links to an explicit FAQ). The part that is only shown to the post owner is about things only they can do (e.g., editing in information that only they have) or things only relevant to them (e.g., where they can ask their question instead). Can you point to a scenario where the actual texts (below) would cause a problem?
@Wrzlprmft Sure, here is a scenario: in a question closed as Not Within the Scope, OP starts a comment thread asking where it is more appropriate to post the question. OP mentions "the recommended sites" in the discussion. No one understands which sites OP is referring to, because they do not see the same message.
@FedericoPoloni: I see. The OP is shown which part of the guidance is exclusive for them (see my edit, note the “Private feedback for you”). This should make your scenario rather unlikely. Also, in most cases, all the relevant information is in the dedicated FAQ, a link to which is shown to everybody.
@Wrzlprmft I don't see which edit you are referring to. Anyway, it seems to me that this scenario (or a variant) is possible whenever the system shows different messages to different people, no matter how hard you tweak the messages to avoid it. So my opinion is that it's a bad idea to do it.
@FedericoPoloni: I don't see which edit you are referring to. – The one to this meta question. — Anyway, it seems to me that this scenario (or a variant) is possible whenever the system shows different messages to different people, no matter how hard you tweak the messages to avoid it. – Sure, you can never fully avoid this. However, with the prior system, we also had problems with close votes understanding parts of the close reason that should guide the asker to be directed at them. So, I think this is the lesser evil.
Strongly depends on individual factors
Close reason:
This text is shown when selecting a reason while flagging or voting to close:
Strongly depends on individual factors
The answer to this question strongly depends on individual factors such as some person’s preferences, some institution’s policies, the exact contents of some work or the asker’s personal values. Answers to this question would be far too speculative, broad, or would primarily consist of: “It depends on X.” See this FAQ for details. Note that questions on the rules of institutions that operate at national or international level are permitted.
General post notice:
This text is shown under a closed question to everybody:
This question was closed for strongly depending on individual factors. It is currently not accepting answers.
Post-owner guidance:
This text is shown under the general post notice to the author of a question:
The answer to your question strongly depends on the policies of some institution, the exact contents of your work, some person’s preferences, your personal values, or similar. Only someone familiar with them can answer this question and it cannot be generalized to apply to others. Importantly, only somebody who knows you very well can make life decisions for you. Please read: Why was my question put on hold for depending on individual factors?
Privileged-user guidance:
This text is shown under the general post notice to user with the close privilege:
Please explain to the asker why we cannot answer their question and who may be able to do so. If there is a suitable question the author can ask about their situation, guide them towards it or edit the question if you can.
Shopping question
Close reason:
This text is shown when selecting a reason while flagging or voting to close:
Shopping question
The answer to this question would be an individual university, academic program, publisher, journal, research topic, etc., or a list, an assessment, or a comparison of those. The question seeks help choosing or finding these. See this FAQ for details. Note that questions for software solutions are acceptable.
General post notice:
This text is shown under a closed question to everybody:
Closed. This question is what we call a shopping question. It is currently not accepting answers.
Post-owner guidance:
This text is shown under the general post notice to the author of a question:
If you can, please edit your question to ask how to make your choice in general and without naming any particular options. If you can, specify an aspect that you are concerned about. Note that simply anonymizing the choices usually does not make for a good question. Please read this FAQ.
Privileged-user guidance:
This text is shown under the general post notice to user with the close privilege:
Please consider whether you can edit the question to be about how to make the choice and without naming particular options. Otherwise please guide the asker and vote to reopen the question if appropriate.
Not within the scope of this community
Close reason:
This text is shown when selecting a reason while flagging or voting to close:
Not within the scope of this community
This question is about the content of research, education outside a university setting, or otherwise clearly outside our community’s scope. Note that questions on undergraduate education are within our scope unless about undergraduate admissions, life, and culture. — If you can, leave a comment to guide the asker to an appropriate site for their question and help them to improve it before reposting.
General post notice:
This text is shown under a closed question to everybody:
Closed. This question is not within the scope of this community as defined in the help center. It does not accept answers.
Post-owner guidance:
This text is shown under the general post notice to the author of a question:
If your question is about the content of academic research or teaching, there likely is a Stack Exchange site dedicated to your field. Please ask it there. Questions on math or computer-science education outside an academic setting may be suited for Math Educators or Computer Science Educators. Please familiarise with the guidelines of those sites before asking there.
Privileged-user guidance:
This text is shown under the general post notice to user with the close privilege:
If applicable, guide the asker to an appropriate Stack Exchange site for their question. If the question has other problems (such as being a homework dump), guide them to improve their question before reposting it.
"Please familiarise with the guidelines of those sites before asking there." Please make that as prominent as possible.
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4967 | Frame-challenge – guidelines proposal
Update: The FAQ is now live. Please do not make changes or discuss them here anymore.
This is a follow up to the idea collection, please see that post as to what this is about.
First of all, thanks to everybody who participated in the idea collection.
I tried to distill the results into a coherent set of guidelines, filling some apparent gaps here and there.
The result can be found below.
In general, we will continue to give wide latitude to askers, answerers, and commenters; this is not an attempt to introduce many new, confusing rules. However, introducing these guidelines will be helpful in order to mediate disputes or other cases where moderation action becomes necessary.
Please review the guidelines and do the following:
Feel free to edit minor issues directly. This is a community wiki.
Post an answer if you disagree with a point, want to propose an addendum, or similar. However, please refrain from simply re-iterating suggestions that were already rejected by votes in the idea collection.
How to deal with a question that contains a false premise?
Somebody posted a question that makes an assumption I disagree with or think might be wrong.
How do I best inform the asker of this?
Do I post a comment or an answer, or should I vote to close the question or do nothing at all?
What you want do is called a frame challenge:
You claim or suggest that the question is based on a misconception, wrong assessment of a situation, or similar.
The frame set by the asker is challenged by the answer or comment you want to post.
The following is mostly a set of guidelines that should give you an idea of best practices and avoid unnecessary confrontation.
There often is a lot of leeway, but drastic deviations will be moderated.
We primarily distinguish frame challenges by what they are about, with some general rules of thumb at the end:
Misconceptions about academic procedures, norms, or similar
These misconceptions concern the very topic of this site. For example:
Assertion: You must have a PhD to submit a paper to a journal.
These are mostly free game for frame challenges.
However, before challenging such an assumption, please consider that you may be wrong because academic customs vary a lot between fields, countries, etc..
Misconceptions about off-topic aspects
Typically this is about the content of academic research or teaching, but it may also be other off-topic things. For example:
Assertion: My newly developed method that makes a very good guess whether a number is prime topples modern cryptography.
Whether such statements are correct is off-topic here.
If you want to discuss this off-topic material, do it in chat; discussion in the comments or answers will likely be deleted.
If such an off-topic aspect is central to a question, the question should likely be closed or migrated.
Wrong goal (XY problem)
The asker wants to achieve X and thinks doing Y helps them to do this, so they ask how to do Y. However, Y is not a good way to achieve X.
Most often, we can only suspect an XY problem, since the asker doesn’t talk about X, but only about their outlandish goal Y.
In this case, we can only tactfully inquire what the asker wants:
Can you please elaborate why you want to do this, so we can provide better answers? I may be wrong, but this feels like an XY problem.
If X is detailed, you can suggest alternative ways to achieve it, as long as the focus is helping the asker.
Wrong assessments of individual experiences
Here the asker potentially wrongly assessed something that happened to them – as opposed to general facts.
For example:
Assertion: The student I supervise does not take my criticism seriously.
Assertion: My paper was cited for some claim it did not make.
In these cases, we almost always lack all the relevant information (or it would be off-topic) and cannot make a judgement.
The asker should know better than we do, and they are responsible to ensure that such an assertion is correct.
Therefore frame challenges about such situations are usually not appropriate.
However, there are some exceptions, where a short and tactful caveat is appropriate:
The misconception is common and applies to many people in a similar situation, e.g.:
Assertion: The referee did not thoroughly review my paper, as they misunderstood the key concept.
Caveat: Before proceeding please consider that you are very familiar with your work and thus may not have noticed shortcomings in your explanations.
The asker describes in detail how they arrived at an assertion and this makes it seem unlikely that they are correct.
For example:
Assertion: My professor is not satisfied with my work, because X, Y, and Z.
Caveat: What you describe are normal activities for a supervisor.
Just by your report I would not assume that your professor is dissatisfied.
If the asker’s judgement should be incorrect, it may have severe consequences:
Assertion: My professor asked me to fudge some data by applying X.
Caveat: Please be aware that this is a serious accusation. I am not saying you are wrong, but before escalating this, please consider consulting with an expert whether applying X is really inappropriate in this situation.
In all such cases, such a caveat should not be much longer than the asker’s description of the assertion and respect the asker’s assessment instead of directly denying it.
Mind that this does not apply to questions asking us to evaluate a situation, e.g.:
My professor does X, Y, and Z. Is this normal? Does this mean that she is not satisfied with my work?
Sexism, racism, discrimination, and other traumatic events
A relevant subcategory is when the asker experienced sexism, racism, discrimination, or similar behaviour, usually towards themselves.
Such events are often traumatic and denying what happened may easily add to the trauma.
Moreover, we almost certainly don’t know all the details (context, tone, gestures) and thus cannot judge the situation.
In this case, the above exceptions do not apply:
We can assume that the asker has already considered alternative interpretations of events and is aware of the severity of the respective accusations.
At best, you may very tactfully ask for further details or assess the details if relevant for the question, e.g.:
I am sorry for your experience. To better answer your question, can you please [edit] your question to tell us whether you have any evidence of this? I understand if you do not want to go into the details; it suffices to know how much evidence you roughly have.
General rules of thumb
Before you write a frame challenge, see whether you can answer all of the following with yes:
Is the misconception central to the question? If the question can be asked as well without the misconception, it’s better to edit it out or only address it briefly. If on-topic, you can ask or suggest a separate question about it.
Would you write a frame challenge if the question provided fewer details?
Are you confident that the asker did not already consider your frame challenge?
Does your frame challenge actually help the asker?
Does your frame challenge respect the asker, in particular their expertise, privacy, and problems?
I'd recommend editing this so the question has the "General rules of thumb" and a TOC which links to to the more detailed points in the answers.
@AzorAhai-him-: I can make a separate answer for each section with a TOC in the final question, but I wouldn’t put the general rules of thumb in the question in that case, since I expect this to be confusing. Of course, if this is the answer people tend to upvote the most, it will come first.
I didn't realize there was going to be another question
@AzorAhai-him-: At least there will be if this one gets any effective answers to separate the guide and the discussion about it. If everybody is more or less happy with this version, I might as well edit this question.
@Wrzlprmft This should have been posted as an answer, not a question.
@AnonymousPhysicist: Why? The idea is that answers criticise individual aspects of the proposal and not that they compete with it.
I tried to distill the results into a coherent set of guidelines, filling some apparent gaps here and there.
This has been unsuccessful. Your post does not accurately reflect the idea collection. It is also too long and disorganised. Further, it is redundant.
Can you make any specific suggestions how to improve things?
@Wrzlprmft I think we should stick to the existing rules, or make them simpler. I consider the entire discussion of "frame challenges" to be redundant, not just this post.
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4976 | How to deal with a question that contains a false premise? How do I make a frame challenge?
Somebody posted a question that makes an assumption I disagree with or think might be wrong. How do I best inform the asker of this? Do I post a comment or an answer, or should I vote to close the question or do nothing at all?
This is called a frame challenge: I claim or suggest that the question is based on a misconception, wrong assessment of a situation, or similar. The frame set by the asker is challenged by the answer or comment I want to post.
This FAQ is mostly a set of guidelines that should give an idea of best practices and avoid unnecessary confrontation. There often is a lot of leeway, but drastic deviations will be moderated.
It is mainly based on this discussion and was further discussed here.
If you want to propose changes, please ask a new question.
Table of Contents
We primarily distinguish frame challenges by what the false premise is about:
Misconceptions about academic procedures, norms, or similar
Misconceptions about off-topic aspects
Wrong goal (XY problem)
Wrong assessments of individual experiences including experiences of sexism, racism, discrimination, and other traumatic events
General rules of thumb
General rules of thumb
Before you write a frame challenge, see whether you can answer all of the following with yes:
Is the misconception central to the question? If the question can be asked as well without the misconception, it’s better to edit it out or only address it briefly. If on-topic, you can ask or suggest a separate question about it.
Would you write a frame challenge if the question provided fewer details?
Are you confident that the asker did not already consider your frame challenge?
Does your frame challenge actually help the asker?
Does your frame challenge respect the asker, in particular their expertise, privacy, and problems?
Wrong assessments of individual experiences
Here the asker potentially wrongly assessed something that happened to them – as opposed to general facts. For example:
Assertion: The student I supervise does not take my criticism seriously.
Assertion: My paper was cited for some claim it did not make.
In these cases, we almost always lack relevant information (or it would be off-topic) and cannot make a judgement. The asker should know better than we do, and they are responsible to ensure that such an assertion is correct. Therefore frame challenges about such situations are usually not appropriate.
However, there are some exceptions, where a short and tactful caveat is appropriate:
The misconception is common and applies to many people in a similar situation, e.g.:
Assertion: The referee did not thoroughly review my paper, as they misunderstood the key concept.
Caveat: Before proceeding please consider that you are very familiar with your work and thus may not have noticed shortcomings in your explanations.
The asker describes in detail how they arrived at an assertion and this makes it seem unlikely that they are correct. For example:
Assertion: My professor is not satisfied with my work, because X, Y, and Z.
Caveat: What you describe are normal activities for a supervisor.
Just by your report I would not assume that your professor is dissatisfied.
If the asker’s judgement should be incorrect, it may have severe consequences:
Assertion: My professor asked me to fudge some data by applying X.
Caveat: Please be aware that this is a serious accusation. I am not saying you are wrong, but before escalating this, please consider consulting with an expert whether applying X is really inappropriate in this situation.
In all such cases, such a caveat should not be much longer than the asker’s description of the assertion and respect the asker’s assessment instead of directly denying it.
Mind that this does not apply to questions asking us to evaluate a situation, e.g.:
My professor does X, Y, and Z. Is this normal? Does this mean that she is not satisfied with my work?
Sexism, racism, discrimination, and other traumatic events
A delicate subcategory is when the asker experienced sexism, racism, discrimination, or similar behaviour, usually towards themselves. Such events are often traumatic and denying what happened may easily add to the trauma. Moreover, we almost certainly don’t know all the details (context, tone, gestures) and thus cannot judge the situation.
In this case, the above exceptions do not apply: We can assume that the asker has already considered alternative interpretations of events and is aware of the severity of the respective accusations. At best, you may very tactfully ask for further details or assess the details if relevant for the question, e.g.:
I am sorry for your experience. To better answer your question, can you please [edit] your question to tell us whether you have any evidence of this? I understand if you do not want to go into the details; it suffices to know how much evidence you roughly have.
Misconceptions about academic procedures, norms, or similar
These misconceptions concern the very topic of this site. For example:
Assertion: You must have a PhD to submit a paper to a journal.
These are mostly free game for frame challenges. However, before challenging such an assumption, please consider that you may be wrong because academic customs vary a lot between fields, countries, etc..
Misconceptions about off-topic aspects
Typically this is about the content of academic research or teaching, but it may also be other off-topic things. For example:
Assertion: My newly developed method that makes a very good guess whether a number is prime topples modern cryptography.
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.
You can advise the author to ask about the subject matter on another site or comment why you flag/vote to close the question.
However, if you want to discuss this off-topic material, do it in chat; discussion in the comments or answers will likely be deleted.
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 impact of your discovery on cryptography is off-topic here, but you may be able to ask about it on Cryptography SE.
However, please do not write why you think that the asker’s statement is wrong as this will start a discussion.
This one's hard for me to support as-is. Is dealing/pointing out crank behavior impossible? Are there examples of this kind of issue that resulted in valuable answers?
@DanielR.Collins: Please see my edit. You are welcome to point out problems, but please do not discuss them in the comments. Experience says that it at best leads to something much better done in a chat room. This question is an example where discussions about the factual accuracy of an example cluttered an otherwise valid question.
Wrong goal (XY problem)
The asker wants to achieve X and thinks doing Y helps them to do this, so they ask how to do Y. However, Y is not a good way to achieve X.
Most often, we can only suspect an XY problem, since the asker doesn’t talk about X, but only about their outlandish goal Y. In this case, we can only tactfully inquire what the asker wants:
Can you please elaborate why you want to do this, so we can provide better answers? I may be wrong, but this feels like an XY problem.
If X is detailed, you can suggest alternative ways to achieve it, as long as the focus is helping the asker.
-1 I'm really not fond of XY-challenges, as in my experience they most frequently derail the Q&A process (into a discussion of issues the OP never even discussed initially). In many cases there are reasons of privacy, focus, generality, etc. that caused the OP to not detail motivation X. The XY analysis sort of made sense on the tech Q&A Stack Overflow, but I don't find it useful for other non-technical SE sites.
In many cases there are reasons of privacy, focus, generality, etc. that caused the OP to not detail motivation X – While that also happens, OPs who do this are usually aware of what they are doing and often state this, in which case the general rule “Are you confident that the asker did not already consider your frame challenge?” applies. However we get a good share of questions where there is no such awareness and the only way to make progress is that the asker reveals the X to their Y. […]
[…] For a blatant example, consider: How to publish eight academic papers quickly (one week)? (no further details given). With all that being said, if you want to propose that we do not do XY challenges at all, please start a new meta discussion, bearing in mind what has been discussed here. This FAQ is mostly supposed to reflect consensus and is not the best place to discuss it.
Well, I'm downvoting as a member of the community because I don't support such a finding, and explaining why. That linked example seems off-the-rails because (a) it's deleted, (b) no XY-frame-challenge answer was given, etc. Acting like a meta post that currently has one positive vote point is a "consensus" is disingenuous and downright damaging. And acting like explaining a downvote is out-of-bounds is completely nonsensical for this site.
@DanielR.Collins: As said in the answer, most frame challenges don’t specify the Y, so you cannot give frame-challenge answers, so I don’t see a contradiction here. Also, I intentionally chose a deleted question to avoid drawing negative attention to a live question here. Moreover, I expect that most questions based on XY questions get closed and roomba-deleted.
Acting like a meta post that currently has one positive vote point is a "consensus" is disingenuous and downright damaging. – This FAQ is the result of two iterations of discussion and feedback (1, 2), which it what I refer to as the consensus. — And acting like explaining a downvote is out-of-bounds is completely nonsensical for this site. – That was not my intention. I merely wanted to say that this is not the best place to further your cause.
You're sending me down a rabbit-hole of more and more meta discussions which you claim incorrectly to support an opinion that you wrote. The original/earliest linked "discussion" has literally no reference to XY problems whatsoever -- that's something you inserted into a "summary" which itself got no positive responses that I can see. It's extremely off-putting that you create these "policies" from whole cloth yourself and then claim they represent "community consensus".
I think that is a little unfair. Before this policy came out, Wrzlprmft wrote a proposal and left it there for a few weeks for public comment (and this proposal itself was based on several earlier meta discussions). The proposal got a few upvotes, no suggestions for improvements, and the suggestion that it be discarded completely (from Anonymous Physicist) was downvoted. I didn't see anyone who tried to contribute to this policy and was shut out.
I find it rather off-putting when people decide not to do any of the work during the lengthy process of brainstorming and writing policies, but then are full of criticism of the result. That said: our policies are always open to revisions; if you have a suggestion, the best place to propose it would probably be in a new meta post (since the policy has already been promulgated).
@cag51: Is this not the meta post with the policy discussion? This is the first time I've seen it. Should I have not downvoted, not left a comment explaining the downvote? Mods are taking enforcement actions pointing to here as the new policy, but now you're claiming this is not the place to evaluate the policy?
@DanielR.Collins: No, this is not the place to discuss or evaluate policy. Discussion and evaluation happened here and here to establish the status quo captured in this FAQ. The rationale behind this process is that otherwise we have a lot of case-specific discussions and other badly generalisable meta posts that make it difficult to discern the status quo of policy and do not cover some relevant aspects. This FAQ avoids this by capturing a clear status quo in single place. […]
[…] However, it is not a good point for discussion or voting on policy due to its format, being based on previous discussions, bad visibility, etc. Hence the request to use a new meta question to discuss changes to the policy reflected in this FAQ. — Should I have not downvoted, not left a comment explaining the downvote? – You are free to do these things and I would even consider this a good way to explore the arguments and clarify misunderstandings before making a new meta question. However, it’s not the best way to achieve a policy change.
@Wrzlprmft: But those posts you linked to are both now closed as duplicates with a link sending the reader back here. (!)
@DanielR.Collins: Yes, so nobody confuses those with the final result (this FAQ) or to start new discussions (which would be a bad place due to visibility, old votes, etc.). And this FAQ contains in its introduction: “If you want to propose changes, please ask a new question.”
@Wrzlprmft: The process you lay out seems Byzantine and a poor use of Meta. I've been active on SE for 6 years and never heard of the like. The essence of the SE interface is for voting, comments, and edits; and here you're telling me there's a special class of Meta posts where that's frowned upon. If a new Meta question overturns one of the policies you've created here, what do you do then -- create a new FAQ, delete an answer here, something else? Is there an example of that happening to date? Is there any page that clearly describes this many-meta-mod-question process?
@DanielR.Collins: It is common practice to host FAQs on meta and to not use those to discuss and establish policy. (Sometimes regular meta questions are elevated to FAQs, but you still wouldn’t challenge policies there.) Answers competing for votes over several years doesn’t work, in particular in sectioned FAQs. Often FAQs are proposed as they are by a user, but here we moderators wanted to collect perspectives first. I did not elevate the final draft to FAQ because it did receive other answers and there was a desire to make this a sectioned FAQ.
If a new Meta question overturns one of the policies you've created here, what do you do then -- create a new FAQ, delete an answer here, something else? Is there an example of that happening to date? – Usually, the FAQ would be edited accordingly. This happened here leading to an exception in the rules on shopping questions. — Is there any page that clearly describes this many-meta-mod-question process? – I am not aware of one and I don’t see a huge benefit of it since there is flexibility to this process. But if you want to discuss it, go ahead.
@Wrzlprmft: The process you describe is so Byzantine and convoluted you can't reasonably expect normal users to either be aware of it, or have time to interface with it. It's like a bad Kafkaesque joke. In this one comment thread it seems like you've demanded that I personally make at least 3 different new Meta questions to address things I've never heard of before.
@DanielR.Collins: you can't reasonably expect normal users to either be aware of it, or have time to interface with it. – The one procedural aspect a casual user needs to know at this point is stated in the question: “If you want to propose changes, please ask a new question.” If you ask me, it is actually one of the advantages of the process that users do not need to know all past meta posts on a subject and there is a clear agenda or function for each meta question.
[…] you've demanded that I personally make at least 3 different new Meta questions to address things I've never heard of before. – I only count two, and I did not demand anything, but only told you that a new meta question is the best way to reach your goals. I cannot do that for you, because I cannot represent your concerns. That you missed the previous discussions is fine, but I don’t see how this changes anything.
@DanielR.Collins - I think we have followed the normal "meta meta" process here -- we had a discussion (actually two) discussing a proposed policy with the community, and then we wrote the policy. Now that the policy is published, the old discussions have been closed. I did notice that one of the old discussions was just closed as a duplicate without an explanation; I have just added an explanation to hopefully clarify. Thanks for pointing out how confusing that was (and feel free to make the explanations clearer if needed; you don't have to be a mod to make edits).
As for downvoting / criticizing policies here -- it's not that we are forbidding you to do it, just warning that it's unlikely we will act on your criticism unless you open a new post. This is also the "usual process"; I can't think of a time anyone has ever amended a policy due to discussion in the comments months after the policy was published.
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4390 | Please vote for synonym suggestions
As I post this, we have ten outstanding suggestions for tag synonyms, some of them for more than four years. I therefore think it is more than time to urge a decision on these.
This is the first part of a small initiative to reach such a decision.
If you have more than 2500 reputation, please
Open the list of active synonym suggestions.
Click on the master tag for all the synonym suggestions with which you agree or disagree.
Cast the respective vote on the respective synonym suggestion.
(In a second step, I will subject the remaining synonyms to general voting.)
If you feel that any suggestion requires a more extensive suggestion, please ask a separate meta question.
Ow, that voting interface is outright bad. What was wrong with a vote button on the linked page already? These features are already almost invisible to start with...
@FedericoPoloni: Yes, it’s universally agreed upon that the tag synonymisation system is pretty bad. Still, as it stands, we got to make the best of it.
@Wrzlprmft Can a user who has less than 2500 reputation suggest tag synonyms by opening a question on meta? Or is this discouraged?
@GoodDeeds: Sure, you can suggest a synonym.
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4145 | Reorganising research-related tags a bit
Proposal
I would like to implement the following tag structure as already suggested and reasoned in this answer. An arrow means that the respective tags are merged and synonymised, with the right tag being the master.
research → research-process
research-publication, research-paper → publications
research-workplace → workplace
research-supervision → supervision
research-topic
research-misconduct
research-statement
research-undergraduate
This is not a big change. There will be a few synonyms that link to existing tags and research will be renamed. Questions that are mistagged with research will continue to be mistagged. There will be no merges of existing tags or burninations.
Note that in contrast to what I proposed in the linked question, I would not remove research in hope that the synonymisation would suffice to stop people from choosing this tag (in the tag-selection process, they would have to actively click on research-process).
This question
I am mainly bringing this up again, because the old post was, well, old and did not receive much feedback. If you have any objections or better suggestions, please voice them here and now. Otherwise, I will implement this in a week or so.
Currently, there is no question tagged [research-workplace], 51 questions tagger with [workplace] (at least one of them is about library workplace). I think I'll agree with [workplace]. But, I am still concerned with new users abusing it. (If I remember it correctly, there were at one user(or more) coming to our site using that tag for an industry workplace question). We might want to remind those users in the tag description. I am going to delete my answer below.
@scaaahu: We might want to remind those users in the tag description. – Well, feel free to suggest an edit.
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4454 | Moderators can now exclude questions from the HNQ list – when should we use this?
The mechanics
Hot Network Questions (HNQ) are questions shown in the bottom right sidebar featuring from other sites of the Stack Exchange network that are considered “hot” by a heuristic that takes into account recent visits, answers, and votes.
There can be issues when one of our questions becomes an HNQ because its increased exposure leads to considerably higher number of visitors – many of whom are unfamiliar with our site and our community standards.
Moderators can now remove individual questions from the Hot Network Questions list (announcement).
This process is irreversible.
After removing a question, we cannot decide that we want to allow it to go hot again.
How can we use this?
Having a meta discussion about whether a specific question should be removed from the HNQs is not a good idea, because by the time the discussion has reached any sort of consensus, the potential damage has probably already been done.
So, we moderators have to decide on relatively quickly and on a case-by-case basis whether a question should be removed.
If you feel that any question should not be an HNQ, please flag it for moderator attention and elaborate why.
This naturally makes the most sense for questions that are already HNQs (which you can now see in the revision history), but if you think it is likely that a question will become an HNQ, but shouldn’t, feel free to flag it.
Please do not do this for questions that you consider in need of editing, cleaning up, closing, or similar.
Instead perform or suggest the respective edits, flag the problematic comments or answers for deletion, or flag for closure.
What questions should not be HNQs?
Occasionally, we will remove a question from the HNQs, when there is a serious problem, and given their individual nature, some of these problems are unforeseeable.
However, we as a community can agree that we do not want certain types of question to be HNQs and try to remove them as quickly as possible.
Therefore I am asking:
Are there any categories of questions that we generally do not want to be HNQs?
If you think so, please suggest categories in the answers:
Suggest one category per answer.
Do not suggest categories of questions that should be closed or can be salvaged with an edit.
Provide a rationale why such questions being HNQs is a problem.
Remember that at the end of the day we have to decide on a case-by-case basis, by answering the question: "Do we have this kind of problem on our site?"
Therefore a good rationale is more important than precisely defining the category.
Use votes to indicate agreement or disagreement with proposed categories.
What I really don't like of the post above is the sentence "Occasionally, we will remove a question from the HNQs": Would you mind rephrase it in a way that leaves open the possibility that you won't remove any question, should the community decide in such direction?
@MassimoOrtolano: While this tool should certainly only be used in exceptional cases (unless we opt to ban certain categories), do you really want to issue a blanket ban on this for everything that may possibly come in the future? (Also see my comment on your answer.)
Why is this process irreversible? Is this just a bug or is there a meaning behind it?
@Hatschu: That question is better asked at the Meta SE announcement.
Do I have to register there? I tried to comment, but it did not work.
@Hatschu: You need 5 reputation to comment on Meta SE. You also have to make an account there.
Oh no:( Asking questions here feels like a Catch-22:(((
@Hatschu: Well, usually users that engage in site politics have enough reputation to have the association bonus, so it doesn’t matter. Also, since that Meta announcement is well, meta, you may post an answer about your concern (meta works differently than normal sites in that respect), which requires no reputation. Either way, here is the wrong place, since we did not make this feature. Unless somebody from SE pays us a visit, nobody can answer your question here.
Actually -- idea. A lot of people are saying "it would be great to be able to interact with users when they post the questions, but unfortunately we can't". Would it be possible (or, how difficult would it be) to have a list of tags which are strong de-HNQ candidates, so that when a user is about to post a question with the tag in question, he gets prompted along the lines of "Questions tagged with X have often received (unwanted, unexpected amounts of?) attention from other SE sites as they frequently make the HNQ list. Since the question might be of a sensitive nature, we are now
(contd.) pre-emptively excluding them from the HNQ list. If you wish for your question to be a candidate for the HNQ list, which might attract the attention from unrelated SE sites, please tick the box [BOX] before posting your question. ... basically... would it be possible for us to be there at "exactly the right moment" after all?
@penelope: If you want any technical changes, that’s something for [meta.se], though I doubt that you proposal will be realised. It is a lot to take in for an edge case of something that may happen to an asker’s question. Without technical changes, this is even more difficult as (most) people do not read tag descriptions.
@penelope: For a new user, this text would be defenitely to difficult to understand and evaluate the pros and cons of this HNQ thing.
Do we have stats about which questions (or general topics/tags) have hit the HNQ and become dumpster fires of bad answers/comments, frivolous flaging, etc.? Some sort of analysis of where the problem lies can help determine where the solution needs to be applied.
@R.M.: That data would be difficult to acquire because it requires access to flag data, deleted comments, etc.
I propose to remove all questions around the topic of suicide or severe psychic health problems from the HNQs.
Rationale:
For many HNQ visitors this is a dire topic they do not want to be confronted with, to the extent that it could trigger problems itself.
Non-HNQ visitors of our site implicitly accept a certain risk of running into this topic by visiting a site on social topics.
I strongly suspect that titles mentioning suicide and similar are filtered out anyway, so this is for the questions where these filters fail.
If the asker is suffering from such problems themselves, they almost certainly do not enjoy the extra attention HNQs give them.
Also there is an increased chance that some idiot leaves a hurtful comment.
As well as an increased chance of some idiot leaving a full-blown, deeply misinformed answer.
I propose to remove all questions where the asker is a victim of sexual discrimination or misconduct from the HNQs.
Note that this a more narrow category than what Strong Bad proposed.
For example, I would leave questions on how to battle sexual discrimination, avoiding conflicts of interest, and dealing with such issues as a third party.
Rationale:
While the topic of sexual discrimination and misconduct tends to attract trolling and other problems in general, I think this is a price we should pay for the positive effect of raising awareness on these issues.
Silencing the entire topic is exactly what some of the aggressors want.
However for questions by victim, the benefit of awareness is outweighted by the chance of hurtful comments that doubt the asker’s assessment, directly attack the asker, or even blatant trolling.
This is usually the last thing the asker needs in such a situation.
To clarify... you'd allow a question (just as an example) "How to raise awareness of discriminating behaviour in a male-only lab" if the asker was asking a hypothetical, or the asker was male, or e.g. a team-leader trying to implement preventive measures, but remove the question "How do I make my all-male colleagues aware of their mildly discriminating behaviour/atmosphere in the lab?" even though any answer to either of those questions would answer the other one? Where would such a question fall if "asked for a friend", or "asking after visiting a different lab for 4 days"? Seems... a bit odd
@penelope: I can understand that this seems odd if you think of this as denying somebody the joy of having an HNQ, but this is about protecting people who already went through some pain from more pointless pain. So at the end of the day, what matters is how likeley we consider it to be that the question being hot will hurt the asker. It strongly affects those odds whether the asker is the victim or just a third party (friend, team leader, etc.), so yes, I would take that into account.
@penelope: Now, I acknowledge that to some extent we are patronising the asker here by giving them a protection they did not necessarily ask for, and in an ideal world I would let the asker make this decision. However, this requires the asker to be present at the right moment, to know what is about to be unleashed unto them, and a moderator to be present to enact their decision, once made. In my experience, this is rarely the case. We may leave a comment along the lines of: “If you do not say otherwise, I will de-HNQ in fifteen minutes.”, but that’s about it.
@penelope: Finally, that’s a good example why drawing the lines for categories is less important than the rationale (see my penultimate point in the question). If we have are talking about a “mildly discriminating atmosphere” and the asker seems that they wouldn’t be hurt by the HNQ crowd or even has a bring-it-on attitude, I would probably not de-HNQ the question.
I was just trying to understand what you proposed. I can get behind your rationale much more than your proposed "category". I guess, in a sense, what I am thinking about is that many people at least somewhat familiar with SE purposefully anonymise or generalize their question to better hit the "lasting value" criteria. But, thinking about it, I guess who you are proposing to protect are mostly distressed, first-time contributors.
And actually I think I kind of agree with that - I would possibly even "despecialize" it further and say that de-HNQing candidates would be questions where the asker is distressed about an emotional or controversial topic (I'm not fully happy with "emotional" and "controversial" as my descriptors)... And I guess I'd extend the same to your bottom suggestion - e.g. I do not see a reason to de-HNQ a post-doc asking how to best deal with and support his (medically) depressed PhD student, as it is nowhere near as emotionally charged as if the student was asking it.
@penelope: I was just trying to understand what you proposed. – No worries, your question did provoke some (hopefully) good exploration of how we have to compromise between fairness, minimal intervention, protecting users, etc. in this case.
de-HNQing candidates would be questions where the asker is distressed about an emotional or controversial topic – I am not sure whether I agree. For many other topics (e.g., somebody whose paper got rejected, somebody who failed a course), askers are usually not subject to strong criticism or other hurtful comments from the HNQ crowd. Of course there may be topics I haven’t thought of, but for those you can write individual answers.
@penelope: And I guess I'd extend the same to your bottom suggestion – Please comment on that suggestion then to keep the discussion where it belongs. (Also note that bottom and top may change over time here.)
I think we should prevent gender and sexual-misconduct from being featured. While these questions are important for our community, I do not think they make for good advertisements. The answers often get the job done, but we don't have a user base that is expert in the nuances of these difficult questions. Further, they often attract poor answers from the HNQ that garner lots of up votes which makes them move from not good advertisement to poor advertising. Finally, they seem to attract a lot of discussion which eventually degrades into rude/offensive ranting, which becomes really bad for everyone involved.
Honestly, any *-misconduct question.
I think this is too much and would propose a more nuanced approach.
@Wrzlprmft I agree it shouldn't be a blanket ban on the tags and should be something like what you propose where we look at the question and use our best moderator judgment to decide if the popularity is helping or hurting.
"they often attract poor answers [...] that garner lots of up votes" - Could you provide a few examples?
This would be such a huge improvement to the quality of the site.
Any chance we could actually make this happen? It got a lot of upvotes!
Why not "all of them"?
I'm not sure myself that this is the perfect solution, but take this answer as a way to think about the benefits of HNQ.
What good comes to our community from a question being in the HNQ, usually? Most of the time, all that happens when a question enters it is that we get a bunch of votes and answers from people that are not very knowledgeable about academia. They tend to skew the votes, so that they do not reflect the opinion of university people anymore.
Also, the HNQ tends to promote click-bait questions and controversial issues, which (in my opinion) are not an effective way to advertise our site to new potential users. I'd see more value in a curated list of the best questions and answers, than in a contest on who can get the most clicks by attracting the attention of random users.
The HNQ benefits Stack Exchange more than it benefits us as a community, I believe.
Well, if it weren't for the HNQ, I wouldn't be here. Whether this is good or bad, I'll leave it to the community! ;-)
@MassimoOrtolano Are you sure? Maybe you'd have found the site anyway, since you seem genuinely interested in discussing these topics. For instance, by asking yourself "hey, maybe there is a SE site for academia, too". Maybe if we had a "curated list of the best questions and answers" instead of the clickbait ones, you'd have arrived here anyway, or even sooner.
Also, I'd tend to distrust anecdotal examples, because there is an inherent bias in this kind of comments: we can find examples of user who are here because of how things work now, but not examples of users that are not here but might have been if we had a different system instead.
This is now a possibility, but in order for it to be done we would need to have a separate meta question about it. Do you want to ask it?
@StrongBad Let's use this answer to test the waters; looking at its score, for now it seems like it's not going to be a popular idea.
@FedericoPoloni Yep! Even though I'm genuinely interested in these topics, I wouldn't actively searched for the site. At the time, I just used to search TeX.SE to solve LaTeX issues (but at the time I wouldn't have asked any question) and I've noticed an Academia question on the HNQ list. Actually, I joined all the communities in which I'm active now through the HNQ.
@Massimo Ortolano Opposite anecdote: I found some of the HNQ-popularized and politicized threads in another stack so off-putting, that I've actually deleted my account there.
@henning What generally keeps me away from a community are not specific threads but the general attitude of the community and the type of moderation. I'm a practical person and participating to SE is a hobby: if the attrition passes a certain threshold, I do something else.
Please, don't remove questions from the HNQ list at all
I think that the HNQ is a non-issue and we should not exclude anything, just leave the algorithms do their work (whether good or not). So, I add this as an answer because I think that we should give the community also the possibility to choose this option.
Agree -- not clear to me why certain questions would be worse than others (regardless of the question, the potential problems are the same: answers/voting by unqualified people, spam, etc.), and I don't think we want to opt out of HNQ entirely (lots of SO users find us that way). I'll follow this discussion, maybe someone can give an example and I'll see that I'm missing something.
My guess is that a large percentage of our huge comment chains are on featured questions (maybe we can pull data to see if that is true). There seems to be a class of HNQs that attracts garbage (see my answer).
I do not think that this pre-emptive blanket answer is needed or a good idea.
If you or the community disagree with every single category proposed for a general ban, that’s fine, but it does not need this answer to reach that conclusion.
On the contrary, if this answer gets a high number of upvotes due to being posted early and later somebody suggests a category that meets broad agreement, how shall we divine the community consensus?
As for per-case decisions:
If in the future we moderators come to the conclusion that there is a pressing and urgend need to remove some individual question from the HNQs due to issues that are very individual and not foreseeable, should we refrain from doing so because the community decided we should not use this tool at a time where nobody had thought of this individual problem?
@Wrzlprmft and StrongBad The problem is upstream: too many people post on the internet troublesome issues without thinking at the consequences, for them or for the others. Whether something goes or not on the HNQ list is totally irrelevant, the post is already "out there", and those who are interested in the case usually do their best to find it (I tell you this by experience). Even dissociating a post from an account is largely irrelevant, especially if you take into account the latency time that these kind of actions require.
@StrongBad and Wrzlprmft: If you want to reduce the consequences of problematic post, you should work with SE to limit the problem upstream, by educating people to not write posts too hastily and by having tools that allow to act in very short time. So, yes, even if this answer is not going to be popular, I think it should stay.
Users and moderators across the network have been working with SE to limit the problem. The best solution they can come up with right now is to let us remove questions (IMO, this is way better than protecting, closing, and /or down voting questions to minimize the impact). It doesn't solve the underlying problem, but you are saying don't use the tool. I think the tool can still be useful in a lot of cases (but that is what this question is about).
@StrongBad "I think the tool can still be useful in a lot of cases": I think not, that's my point, or it's usefulness is just illusory, in the sense that it doesn't prevent the real damage.
@MassimoOrtolano: too many people post on the internet troublesome issues without thinking at the consequences, for them or for the others. – This not a case I have been considering when writing the question or any of the answers. I did not suggest that removing something from the HNQs solves problems of this kind, and neither did anybody else as far as I can tell.
@Wrzlprmft Then I don't understand what kind of damage you're referring to in the OP.
@MassimoOrtolano: For example, see this this answer of mine: We deleted a lot of inappropriate comments and answer directed towards vicitims of sexual abuse or discrimination in the past coming from users who almost certainly found the question through the HNQs. Also problems with HNQs do not necessarily have to be about the asker at all.
I disagree with this answer. "the post is already "out there", and those who are interested in the case usually do their best to find it" - maybe, but numbers matter. A sharp influx of visitors with reduced investment in this site and the civility of its discourse (let alone familiarity with academia) is an excellent way to increase the proportion of trolls and other less-than-helpful visitors. It's a given that deHNQing a question isn't a silver bullet that will protect it from every troll on the internet, but that doesn't mean it doesn't help.
I'll also point out that trolls don't pick their targets uniformly. I feel like I draw considerably more obnoxiousness than other people who express similar opinions but who have an identifiably male username. Fewer low-investment trolls is much better from my perspective.
Anything that's a soft interpersonal or sociopolitical issue that doesn't require any academic expertise to answer.
As a Stack Overflow user who is neither an academic nor a user of Academia Stack Exchange, I find Academia's presence in HNQ consistently frustrating. Pretty much all from here that currently reaches HNQ is soft questions about interpersonal interactions that require no particular expertise to opine on. Yet when we users of other sites click through to them, we usually find ourselves pre-emptively silenced by the question being "Protected".
It's bad for us, because we suffer the frustration of not being permitted to answer with differing perspectives; on these broad questions about how to decently interact with other human beings, only the (disproportionately left-leaning and otherwise atypical) views of actual users of this site are permitted to be voiced in the answer section. That leaves us with only comments as a permitted way to engage with the issues, but those comments get nuked seemingly capriciously by the mods.
And it's bad for you, because it channels users into precisely the interactions you don't want. You end up with a horde of users who are just as qualified as you to answer the questions they're reading, but who you only permit to use comments to do so, turning every such squishy interpersonal question into a brawl in the comments section that your mods need to clean up.
Assuming that you're unwilling to simply stop using question protection on these questions, the other way you can stop this dysfunction by simply not letting these questions be in HNQ. If there's no particular expertise that someone who works in academia can bring to a question compared to a random member of the public, nuke it from the sidebar. Then you guys get to have the controlled discussion of social issues amongst yourselves that you seem to repeatedly want to have, free from disruption by the rest of us, and we get to go about our lives in blissful ignorance and with slightly lower blood pressures.
If your blood pressure is affected by what goes in the HNQ list, you may want to rethink at your priorities in life ;-)
@MassimoOrtolano That may well be true.
I disagree with many of your premises: 1) The point of HNQs is not to solicit input from people all over the network. 2) Answers from HNQ visitors that completely ignore the intricacies of academic culture (or just troll) are a common thing. Protecting questions reduces this problem. 3) Answers in comments from users that cannot answer a protected question are not a huge issue. Most answers in comments come from users who are not affected by protection. Most comments by users that are affected by protection would not be valid answers (often they are not valid comments either).
4) Whether we like it or not, academic culture and relations are special (e.g., a supervisor–supervisee relation differs from an employer–employee relation in many aspects). This inevitably permeates almost all of our questions. Sure, sometimes you arrive at the same result when ignoring the academic context, but that does not mean that the way is the same. Only a posteriori one can decide that the context does not matter.
@Wrzlprmft The point of HNQ may not be to solicit input from outsiders, in theory, but in practice that is one of its main effects. And this "input" comes not only in the form of answers (where it is mitigated by protecting), but also in the form of votes (where it is not).
@FedericoPoloni: but also in the form of votes – Well, this answer’s argument is particularly about answers, not about votes.
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4062 | What to do with questions asking to evaluate commercial online services?
We have at least one old unclosed question asking to evaluate some commercial online services: Is Academia.edu useful?
This was cited in favour of questions going into the same direction: Is Peer.us useful? The latter question in turn has attracted a controversial answer originating from the operators of that platform. Both questions have received close votes in the past.
I think it’s time for a general rule how to deal with such questions and thus I ask:
Shall we allow all such questions, only some of them, or close them altogether? If only some, where do we draw the line?
If we allow all or some of such questions, how shall we deal with opinionated answers and comments, i.e., answers not focussing on objective observations but mainly on bashing or praising the platform? In my experience, it is almost inevitable that such posts will happen, no matter how objective answers the question seeks.
(Note that I explicitly exclude services without commercial goals, such as the Arxiv.)
Reminder: The existence of other un-closed questions with similar issues is not evidence that a question is a good question. Argue that we should accept these kinds of questions, not that we do.
Historically, this community has had a strong policy of staying away from assessments of (most) specific organizations, commercial or otherwise. I believe that this is a good policy for several reasons:
Assessments are often highly relative and based on perspective
There is a temptation for advocacy, whether for personal ("Go Tech! Beat State!") or financial ("Buy our widgets!") reasons.
Complementarily, people are likely to become upset if others place harsh judgement on an organization that is important to them.
Many organizations (especially new entrants to a field) will change quickly in their nature, impact, and significance, and answers will tend to become rapidly obsolete.
Allowing any assessments of organizations opens the door to a potentially unbounded flood of requests to assess other organizations.
I think that this should apply no matter how large the organization, when the question is about assessing the organization.
Instead, I notice that most well-regarded questions about organizations seem to fall into two classes:
Questions about established places like LinkedIn, ResearchGate, Facebook, Google Scholar, IEEE, etc., which already assume that organization is notable and legitimate but which are asking advice about how to manage some aspect of one's interactions with it with respect to some aspect of academia. Thus, we take the organization for granted and ask for experts in it to share their experiences.
Questions about whether to trust a possibly sketchy organization. These are often something that can be generalized to a class of organizations, like how to assess whether a conference or journal is predatory.
In neither of these cases do we need to assess an individual organization, and thus we avoid the tar-pit of associated problems.
Thus, if a question cannot be edited into one of these two classes, I think that it should be closed. I think the Academia.edu question might be able to be turned into a question in the first class, but I don't think the Peer.us question can be.
TL;DR: Evaluating an organization is not OK. Evaluating a class of organizations is OK.
"Many organizations [...] will change quickly in their nature, impact, and significance" In fact, if we look at RG, in contrast with a few years ago, it is now explicitly mentioned by some publishers as one repository where you can store their preprints.
I think the Academia.edu question might be able to be turned into a question in the first class – I consider this answer consensus now. Please see the post notice on that question.
Research Gate is reputable, they try hard to improve their quality, they are for real, Facebook for researchers. omitting questions about them is shot in the leg.
@SSimon: Nobody says that we should omit questions about them. We just should omit questions that are asking whether Research Gate is reputable or similar. (Sidenote: Facebook is not exactly the yardstick for reputability right now.)
@jakebeal: As the interpretation of this meta post causes confusion, can you add a clear summary? I would do it myself, but then I may be misinterpreting the answer myself.
@Wrzlprmft fb is not reputable bcs of privacy, on the other hand academic publishers are vulchers and cannot be compared with fb. we need those website since they are becoming more relevant
@Wrzlprmft Done.
@SSimon Please read carefully; you are arguing against a position that nobody is advocating.
@jakebeal why evaluating publishers and media is not OK? it should be essence of academia SE
@SSimon In my post, I have given five reasons why I believe doing so does not fit well with the model of this site. If you disagree, I would invite you to write your own answer clearly explaining your position and justification.
Note that we have allowed questions about a specific possibly predatory journal, e.g. How is publishing in JoVe (a "video journal") perceived?.
What I see in this particular question that seems to me to make it well posed is
How do they compare with similar services; and how they want to monetize their product
Furthermore, I think the deleted controversial answer can easily be edited and restored, as it answers the business plan aspect.
Where to draw the line? This will be easier to figure out if and when we start getting more of this type of question. (Right now we have a total of two, if I understood right.)
How to deal with opinionated answers and comments, i.e., answers not focusing on objective observations but mainly on bashing or praising the platform? In the same way we deal with other opinionated answers that are presented without documentation or specific support for the position being presented.
The business side of academia is starting to change, as business models in the modern world are changing. Let's not put our heads in the sand and refuse to question and understand these changes.
Edit: Responding to the question in the comment (To what answer are you referring?) -- in the question post, I read
This was cited in favour of questions going into the same direction: Is Peer.us useful? The latter question in turn has attracted a controversial answer originating from the operators of that platform.
When I go to the link, there is a notice at the bottom of the page about a deleted answer.
How to deal with opinionated answers and comments […]? In the same way we deal with other opinionated answers that are presented without documentation or specific support for the position being presented. – … which would be leaving them as they are and decide upon them by voting. This would very likely turn voting into a popularity contest.
Let's not put our heads in the sand and refuse to question and understand these changes. – Understanding something is fine to me, but that’s not what this is about. We are also happy with question asking to understand “old” journals and platforms (in fact, this is one of the main points of this site), but that does not mean that we do not close questions asking to evaluate universities, journals, etc.
@Wrzlprmft - Please see screenshot. // Just because a question has an inappropriate answer that has to be edited or deleted, doesn't mean the question is no good. That would be throwing the baby out with the bath water. We can edit or delete a bad answer without condemning the question.
Please see screenshot – A link would have sufficed, but thanks. — Just because a question has an inappropriate answer […] – it’s not just one answer. Most answers to the example questions contain some very subjective parts (which are still there right now because it’s more or less what the question asked for). Now this still does not mean that we have to ban such questions altogether, but if we don’t, there have to be clear criteria for what we want to see in answers and how they should be enforced.
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3657 | Why was my question put on hold for shopping?
My question was put on hold for the following reason:
This question is what we call a shopping question. It is currently not accepting answers.
What does this mean?
Why are shopping questions not welcome here?
How can I salvage my question?
What exactly is a shopping question?
A shopping question is a question that appears to seek help choosing, finding or assessing
an individual journal,
an individual publisher,
an individual university,
an individual academic program,
an individual field,
an individual research topic,
an individual funding agency,
a commercial online service,
or similar,
but not a software solution.
for “buying”, i.e., submitting (a manuscript), enrolling, applying, etc., respectively.
It does not matter if help with a choice is only requested implicitly or if you need the information in question for other reasons than buying. What matters is that answers to the question could be used for making such a choice. Note that questions about how to make such a choice in general – that do not involve naming any of the above – are not considered shopping questions and may be welcome here (see below).
In most cases a shopping question can be identified by fulfilling one of the following criteria¹:
Naming one or more of the above would be an answer to the question.
Evaluating, criticising, or comparing one or more of the above would be an answer to the question.
Examples for shopping questions are:
Do graduates from slavistics or anthropology have a higher average income?
Is there a university in Liechtenstein which offers a degree in llama wrangling?
Which is the most-cited journal that covers underwater basket weaving?
(Note that these examples were chosen to be only shopping questions and not also opinion-based.)
Why are shopping questions disallowed?
Shopping questions tend to suffer from at least one of the following issues:
They attract answers that are primarily based on opinion. Even if the question is asking for objective criteria (e.g., existence, citation counts, position in some ranking), people will offer opinions as answers. They may even attract rants or bashing as answers.
There is no objective way of deciding whether one answer is better than another. Therefore votes tend to be dominated by personal preference and the question will turn into a popularity contest. Again, this also applies if the question is asking for objective criteria.
They attract a lot of answers.
There is a huge amount of analogous questions and answering all of them would turn this site into a database – which we do not want it to be and which it is not suited for. Also, keeping the information up-to-date would be a problem.
We want to stay neutral in such matters. If we don’t, we may become subject to accusations of unprofessionalism or even libel.
No single person can compare the alternatives in life-changing career decisions (such as choosing a field), because everybody only has one life. At best you could statistically evaluate the experiences of people who made a similar decision a decade ago. However, during such a long period of time there will likely be changes that invalidate the comparison.
How can I salvage my question?
In most cases, the closest, on-topic question would be on how to find a journal, university, topic, or similar or how to decide for one of them. Note that the latter question may still be not suited for this site due to being too broad or depending on individual factors. In particular it usually does not help to anonymise the choices when you are asking for a comparison.
Can I ask my question somewhere else?
For almost every question, you will find some place on the Internet where you can ask it and often even get somebody to answer it.
However, please consider whether the answers that you are seeking are really what you need.
For many questions, the above problems still apply elsewhere and asking random people on the Internet is simply not a good approach to make your decision.
For example, the one person enthusiastically recommending the Journal of Definite Articles for your publication is very unlikely to have a broad, representative, and up-to-date experience with that journal (because almost nobody has), doesn’t know your manuscript, or may even be astroturfing.
¹ If you wonder what the exceptions may look like, here is one:
Which journal was the first to use an online submission system?
Please feel free to [edit] this answer to make it more informative, friendly or intelligible.
I reverted your edit because I do not feel the linked question shows any kind of consensus. If users liked the policy change, there should be loads of votes for it.
@AnonymousPhysicist: The answer in question has +9|−1, which is a pretty strong consensus for this meta (and most other sites). You can also turn things around: There is clearly no consensus for banning such questions. (Of course, then it depends on what you consider the status quo.)
@AnonymousPhysicist The participation on Meta is generally quite limited and 9 upvotes can be considered a fairly reasonable consensus.
It doesn't bother you that shopping for software is okay, but shopping for journals is not, on a site about academia?
@AnonymousPhysicist: There are reasons for this distinction, but this is not the place to discuss it. This post describes the status quo and serves as guidance. If you honestly want to allow journal shopping and have good arguments for this, please create a new Meta question.
"If you honestly want to allow journal shopping" Quite the opposite.
@AnonymousPhysicist You proposed in this answer to close software recommendation questions. Your answer has a negative net score, whereas the here linked answer has a sufficiently positive net score. If you want to further push your idea, modify that answer of yours to be more convincing, not by editing this FAQ: that discussion is the right place.
It seems to me that "seeking a software solution" is quite different from "seeking a software product". The latter seems clearly to be shopping if the word has any meaning at all.
Maybe I misunderstand "shopping question", but I do not find the examples in this answer very clear: (1) Do graduates from slavistics or anthropology have a higher average income? --> this could be answered with basic statistics, (2) Is there a university in Liechtenstein which offers a degree in llama wrangling? --> this is not a request for a recommendation, but a request for information, (3) Which is the most-cited journal that covers underwater basket weaving? --> can be objectively answered with statistics.
The way I see it, shopping questions would be: (1) What university should I choose to study slavistics? (2) What university in Liechtenstien offers the best course in llama wrangling?, (3) I weaved a couple of baskets under water, where should I publish my results?
@Louic: Those examples were particularly chosen to be perfectly objective, but still shopping questions (which I noted now). While they may not explicitly be about “buying” something, experience shows that they are almost only asked by those who want to buy something and come with almost the same problems as typical shopping questions – in particular people volunteering their opinion on the candidates and this site not being a good place to host a database for such information. Hence: “What matters is that answers to the question could be used for making such a choice.”
Would this typically be considered a shopping question: "How can I find Academic Funding?"
@Connor: No, as long as you stick to the how and do not solicit individual funding organisations as answers (or lists, comparisons, assessments, etc. thereof). — I would have hoped that the FAQ makes this particular aspect abundantly clear. I would appreciate any hints as to where or why it doesn’t.
I think it's clear, however, I feel like there are times when a how and what/where question are so similar that the difference between them is ambiguous. For example both "How can I find Academic Funding?", and "Where can I find Academic Funding" could produce lists of places to search and both would be equally useful to the community. I guess what I'm asking is, what do you see as the fundamental difference between two questions like this?
@Connor: lists of places to search – It depends a bit of what you want the answers to point you to such a list or to be such a list. In the first case, it would not fall under this FAQ as it stands. Curated lists are not a thing you can shop for as you do not have to “buy” one of them: Instead you can look at multiple lists and combine the results. In the second case, you get many of the problems listed above, in particular that this site is not a good place to host curated lists (and they need to be curated because things change)
@Wrzlprmft I think I'm starting to understand the scope of this Stack Exchange. It seems to be for advice on office politics, standards/ ethics, culture, and support - nothing wrong with that. But as standards and culture change also doesn't that mean questions such as: https://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/80110/should-a-lecturer-be-friendly-with-students and https://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/160734/what-should-one-do-with-his-her-manuscript-after-some-sort-of-academic-misconduc will necessarily have to be updated or curated? Are these not purely opinion?
@Connor: While the answers reflect some opinion, they are mostly based on argument, academic standards and similar – and can be disputed on that basis. Almost everything on this site is opinion-based to some extent, but not to the point where personal preference dominates. Standards and culture do indeed change, but gradually and on a much larger time scale. By contrast, e.g., a funding agency can change its system, scope, etc. in an instant.
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3406 | Why was my question put on hold for depending on individual factors?
My question was put on hold for the following reason:
This question was closed for strongly depending on individual factors. It is currently not accepting answers.
The answer to your question strongly depends on the policies of some institution, the exact contents of your work, some person’s preferences, your personal values, or similar. Only someone familiar with them can answer this question and it cannot be generalized to apply to others. Importantly, only somebody who knows you very well can make life decisions for you.
What does this mean?
Why is this a problem?
How can I salvage my question?
General
The answers to many problems depend on individual factors to some extent and you (or the reader) has to be the final judge whether an answer really applies to their problem. This is inevitable and not a problem per se. However, if we expect potential answers to be dominated by such individual factors, we put the question on hold. There are two main cases of such questions:
There are so many unknown factors that covering all of them is beyond the scope of what we can cover in an answer. Such questions have similar problems as those put on hold as too broad: Answers are either overly long or make assumptions on your circumstances. In the latter case, there tend to be many answers based on different assumptions that are not really comparable, and answers based on assumptions that do not apply to you may even be harmful to them if you do not notice it.
In the unlikely case that you manage to specify all or most of the unknown factors, answers would only be of use to you and not helpful to any future visitors.
The answer almost completely depends on a single factor. In this case, we can answer little more than:
It depends on [your university’s regulation / your supervisor’s opinion / your personal preferences / …].
This is not very helpful to you and we got tired of posting answers like this. If you specify the institution, we may answer the question, but in most cases only by looking it up – which is something you can do as well as we do.
Unfortunately, most such questions are not salvageable, as specifying the unknown factors would make the answer too specific for this format.
Sometimes a related question may be suited for this site, e.g., what factors affect a situation or how to approach making a decision. Be aware that these questions may still be too broad.
Some common cases
Questions that ask us to make a career decision for you
Many important career decisions eventually boil down to how important you weigh your academic career, money, ethics, job security, family, and so on. In some cases, you can ask us what aspects to consider when making a decision, but eventually you have to decide upon your priorities and make the decision yourself.
While it is possible to receive guidance for making such decisions, it requires an intensive back-and-forth and is more about helping you becoming aware of your own goals and identifying the key information you lack to make a decision.
A question-and-answer site is not suited for this.
Moreover, decisions often also depend on factors that fall in other categories listed here. Finally, we are not good at evaluating the impact of certain choices on non-academic careers (and questions pertaining to those are generally off-topic on this site).
Questions on a university’s, course’s, or similar’s rules
In most cases, academic institutions make their own rules and they tend to differ a lot. We therefore cannot tell you the character limit for your thesis or term paper, whether you can be expelled for one offense of plagiarism, or whether you can enter a specific graduate program with your specific undergraduate degree. We can only tell you, e.g., what is typically considered plagiarism, as this is mostly agreed upon.
Fortunately, these rules are usually written down and published, so they can be looked up. We can theoretically search these, but so can you. Moreover, this site does neither aspire nor is it suited for being a database for this kind of information.
If you cannot find the desired information at those dedicated places, there are either unwritten rules or your case is so exotic that it has to be decided on a per-case basis.
Either way, only somebody familiar with that specific university, program, or similar may be able to answer your question, e.g., the student union or the examination or admission office.
Often, however, you just have to wait or ask for the decision to be made.
Note that questions on the rules of institutions that operate on a national or international level are permitted.
Questions on research and publishing decisions
No matter how accurately you describe your work or research situation to us, we cannot know what is typical for your particular subfield. For example, a more accurate measurement of some quantity may be a breakthrough in one field while it is a common occurrence in another.
Therefore only somebody who knows your particular field and usually also your work (such as your supervisor or colleagues) can decide, for instance, whether your work is suited for submission, whether you should invest time in that interesting side result, or whether that review of your paper was unfair. At best we may tell you how to find somebody who may able to give you this feedback.
Also note that questions on the contents of your research are generally off-topic on this site and belong on the Stack Exchange (or another platform) pertaining to your field.
Questions on your supervisor’s or teacher’s preferences
We do not know your supervisor or teacher¹ and thus we cannot know their preferences and attitudes regarding such things as the layout of your thesis design or citing a work by their arch-enemy. We can only inform you about common standards, ethical considerations, or similar. Only that person or somebody who knows them very well can answer such questions.
¹ And please do not tell us who they are.
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3722 | Defining Shopping again
Recently, my question was closed for shopping. However, how shopping is described on meta does not seem to match my question. The meta question I link to outlines three possible characteristics of a shopping question, each of which my question does not satisfy.
It seems like there are two very different types/interpretations of shopping questions (1) asking for a list of objective facts related to academia [such as my question on #of attendees at academic conferences] and (2) asking for a subjective list of rankings for comparison.
"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
Note that the word "shopping" applied to (1) is a bit offensive, it implies the question asker didn't simply google the question and is asking for an opinion, which is simply not correct. There seems to be a lot of disagreement as to whether questions of type (1) are shopping. For example, this question, which is nearly identical in flavor to mine was reopened on Academia Stack Exchange after a meta conversation which classified it as not shopping.
If we are to say that any question that asks for an answer in list form, regardless as to the reason one would want a list, the close reason should be more explicit and include a "for any reason in it". Should we have two close reasons list asking and shopping. The description of the list asking close reason could go something like as follows
"List asking" questions which seek a list of objective facts, with entries of the list each likely contributed by a different community member, are not well suited for this site. This is because each answer would be an equally valid yet incomplete part of the complete list. Questions of this form are unlikely to receive a complete list/answer by a single user. Therefore it is difficult to upvote and downvote the partial answers to such questions. While such questions may be well researched and on topic, other formats are more appropriate for this type of question.
I think shopping has too negative of a connotation if we are going to use it to close questions of people who have demonstrated considerable research behind their question.
Also relevant: Proposed FAQ: Why was my question put on hold for shopping?
I agree that this question is not a shopping question as no reasonable person would choose conferences by that criterion and hence the close reason was badly chosen. Note that I consider it irrelevant that the criterion for answers is objective; “What is the most visited conference for theoretical underwater basket weaving?” still is a shopping question. (The phrasing of the respective close reason was chosen with exactly this in mind.)
However, the wrong choice of close reason is about the only problematic thing about this. In particular:
I do not see that we need to redefine shopping. Just that a close reason was misused in one case, does not mean we need to redefine it.
We need no new canned close reason. Bearing exceptional cases, sites can only have three canned close reasons. These should be used for the most common cases and mainly exist to prevent close voters from having to type/paste/script-insert a custom close reason every time they are closing such a question. Questions that ask for lists and that are not shopping questions are very rare.
The question should not be reöpened. As you already noted, the problem is that every answer matching the criteria is equally valid. While this can be solved by having a single community-wiki answer, this does not solve the problem that this platform is not suited to provide the required maintenance.
Agreed - I think "too broad" would have been a more appropriate close reason.
I think is a broad sense, the question is a shopping question. In my mind shopping questions come in two flavors:
The first asks for help choosing between a list of potential "products". In general, for these type of questions, the criteria for defining "better" are undefined or personal. In the presence of an objective set of criteria, these questions might be a good fit. For example, a question with a back story involving a desire to be taught by Fields Medal winners could then aspect the objective question "Is MIT or Cal Tech better in terms of number of classes taught by Fields Medal winners". This would be an okay question in my mind with a small number of potential answers (someone might answer the total number of classes, another might be number of professors, one might include cross listed classes, etc). It also highlights the fact that shopping questions are not necessarily because the asker is lazy, sometimes the relevant information is hard to find.
The second asks for products that meet a given list of criteria. These tend to lead to lots of answers with a single "product" or a community wiki answer with the complete list. An example of such a question would be "Which universities have classes taught by Fields Medal winners". While not asking for an opinion about which is better, these still feel like shopping questions since compiling the options is part of shopping. Your question falls within this category
The question you link as a counter example is slightly different in that it is not asking for individual "products", but rather if someone has already gone through the effort of compiling a list of "products".
So if I were to ask if someone has compiled a list of such conferences, that would be considered on topic at SE?
@WetLabStudentWe I think so, but my guess is that it would go unanswered for a bit and then eventually get answered with academia is diverse and it isn't likely that such a list exists. Then again the Google fu of the collective might be better than yours.
Also, just to clarify, I think you'd consider the question "what conferences have sexual harassment policies?" shopping, correct.
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3799 | Let’s specify our scope with respect to undergraduates
Proposal
Currently the definition of our scope with respect to undergraduate questions is:
[do not ask questions about]
Undergraduate-specific issues that could not apply to graduate or post-graduate academicians
I propose to replace this by:
[do not ask questions about]
Undergraduate admissions
Undergraduate life and culture (sports, nightlife, dorms, leaving the nest, etc.)
Close reasons, other help texts, etc. shall be changed accordingly.
This includes the outcome of this proposal of mine.
Rationale
The current definition is difficult to grasp and a source of dispute.
The current definition often leads to questions being voted to close for no other apparent reason than containing the word undergraduate.
Going by the outcome of this Meta question, there is no difference between the two definitions.
The separation between undergraduate and graduate students is not universal and thus not generally understood.
For example, there do not even exist accurate translations of the words undergraduate and graduate student to the German language.
While the proposed wording still contains the word undergraduate, it only requires a very basic understanding of the underlying system.
For most question, even that isn’t needed to see that they do not fall into this category.
This question
Use votes on the question to indicate your indicate your agreement or disagreement with the proposal. Use answers to suggest amendments or elaborate your disagreement.
Additional clarity is always good. However, we should make sure that we revisit this from time to time—someone may always try to come back and say: "But it's not on the list!"
And even for adding or removing aspects, a more specific list a better starting point.
If you want to cover "not on the list", then include the current bullet point as a third one with a slight alteration: "Other undergraduate-specific issues that could not apply to graduate or post-graduate academicians"
@Jeutnarg That sentence is exactly what this question wants to avoid.
I think ",etc." covers the "It's not on the list."
@Fomite Not really, because it's inside the 'life and culture' point. This doesn't rule out the 'what happens if I get X% in a class at Y point in my studies?' questions, or similar.
@JessicaB I'd argue that "Getting graded" is part of undergraduate life.
@Fomite That's not the way I understand 'undergraduate life'. Otherwise everything an undergraduate does would be covered by that. To me the phrase suggests the parts of university that are not directly about (the content of) the academic curriculum.
@JessicaB I guess my problem with your example is that "What happens if I get X% in a class at Y point in my studies" could apply to graduate students, and as such it's not entirely clear to be that it is off-topic.
@Fomite I believe it should be off topic.
@JessicaB But should it be off-topic if it's about graduate school as well? If so, it's out of scope for this particular discussion.
@Fomite: I don’t see how such a question is undergraduate-specific and getting graded is certainly nothing I would categorise as undergraduate life (graduate students get graded too). However, I do think that it’s not a good fit for this site due to depending on individual factors (it depends on the programme’s regulations). There are many reasonable questions about dealing with getting graded on the site.
@Wrzlprmft I realized by objection was, as noted above, actually that I think it's "on topic" in terms of not being undergrad-specific, but likely then off topic for the individual factors off-topic reason. Basically, I think it's a bad example of something that's not covered by ", etc."
@Fomite Yes, I think it should be off topic even if applied to graduate school. And I've seen the 'but it can also apply to graduates' used to justify keeping questions I think should not be accepted.
And I've seen the 'but it can also apply to graduates' used to justify keeping questions I think should not be accepted. – Assuming that the argument is valid (the question can also be applied to graduates), then there should be another argument/reason for which they can be closed.
I don't believe those two "definitions" are the same. I'm not sure how seriously people tried to give complete answers to What kind of undergraduate questions are not really generalizable to graduate education? (An "Academia varies more than you think" perspective)
but it seems to me there are various other issues specific to undergraduate education (at least in the US) that would be very different for graduate education. For instance
general education requirements
changing majors (while it can be done at the graduate level, the process is quite different)
minors
That said, I am all for clarifying what's in the help center. So my suggestion would be to amend what's currently in the help center to something like
[do not ask questions about]
Undergraduate-specific issues that could not apply to graduate or post-graduate academics such as undergraduate admissions, undergraduate life and culture, etc.
(I don't know what kinds of undergrad specific questions tend to get asked on this site, but if someone has a sense of this, that should inform the sort of examples we give.)
Your suggestion would keep the problematic condition of “could not apply to graduate or post-graduate academics”, so this means little progress in terms of the problems I would like to address with this proposal. Hence my question to you: 1) Are questions that are neither captured by my proposal nor any other close reason actually a problem? 2) If yes, can you suggest a phrasing that captures them explicitly (rather through the aforementioned condition)?
In addition to what @Wrzlprmft has said, note a difference between his phrasing in the question and yours. In the question, there are examples of things that will be considered related to "undergraduate life and culture", whereas in yours these have been removed, leaving people wondering what constitutes "undergraduate life and culture". The point, again, is that in a worldwide context the concept of "undergraduate" is too fuzzy, and we cannot base the wording of the Help Center just on the US perspective.
@Wrzlprmft I don't know because I haven't payed attention to what questions have been getting closed for being undergrad specific, but I don't want to get into situations where we close questions that appear to be allowed from reading the help center. (I personally have no strong feelings on what kind of "undergrad questions" should be allowed, and am just trying to follow what I perceive as the current site consensus.)
@MassimoOrtolano I would be happy including the examples Wrzlprmft as well---I was just trying to write a brief sample, and I didn't know how often people asked questions about those specific topics like dorms. (Actually, grad students can live in dorms, and I have as a grad student, so I don't see why dorms are automatically out.) Feel free to edit my answer if you want to change the wording to be more specific with examples.
I don't want to edit your answer because I'd prefer to completely get rid of the phrase "Undergraduate-specific issues that could not apply to graduate or post-graduate academics" because I see it as problematic (see also this answer of mine).
@Kimball: My questions were aiming at this: I see how the points you mention are captured by the old reason but not by the proposed one. However, I don’t see how, e.g., questions on majors and minors are a problem per se. Sure, there are many potential questions on this subject that are not a good fit for this site due to being shopping questions or depending on individual factors, but we don’t need a specific clause to close them.
Oh, and did I mention that majors and minors in the US sense don’t exist in my country?
Are there countries where graduate degrees have majors and minors? Some US graduate degrees have "specializations" that are suspiciously close to the concept of a major - e.g. an MS in Information Technology with a specialization in Cybersecurity.
The scope "Undergraduate-specific issues that could not apply to graduate or post-graduate academicians" can be interpreted as allowing questions that can relate both to graduate and undergraduate issues, but that might be asked by a person who is facing, or has faced, the issue from an undergraduate perspective. Questions for and answers to these kinds of issues should be written from a perspective that could apply to both groups.
E.g. Instead of asking:
I am having trouble in my Freshman math course. How can I ask for help?
Ask:
How can I communicate with an instructor and ask for specific help?
Instead of asking:
I have been accused of plagiarizing on my Senior thesis. I didn't plagiarize. What can I do?
Ask:
How can I handle allegations made against me of plagiarism that I believe are unfounded?
Instead of asking:
Undergraduates at East Northern Outer Podunk University are required to maintain a 2.0 GPA. How can I ensure I keep a 2.0 GPA?
Ask:
How can I understand a minimum GPA requirement and comply with it?
The following topics could clearly be in scope for both undergraduates and graduates, and should be allowed, regardless of whether the question asker is an undergraduate student or not:
Study habits - how to study, take notes, understand a syllabus, etc.
How to communicate with instructors.
Basic research techniques - how to collect data, locate articles, etc.
How to cite sources.
How to handle allegations of cheating - founded and unfounded.
How not to be a cheater.
Understanding grading systems - GPA, quality points, percentage scores, etc., how they are determined, how to convert between them, how to compute averages, etc.
And how do your elaborations relate to the proposal in the question? Do you disagree do you want to change something?
Sidenote: Your rephrasings of the questions do more than just removing the undergraduate aspect. Also, what’s the point of requesting askers to remove any hint of them being undergraduates for its own sake? That’s just making them jump through hoops.
I think in my mind the distinction wants to be between questions about being a student versus questions about being a trainee researcher/academic(/uni teacher?). So I would prefer to make questions about undergrad research (or even classes on presentation skills), or describing your work well in a scholarship application, on-topic, but questions about filling in forms for graduate finance off-topic.
While I see your point, I don’t think this makes for a good criterion, as it is too open to interpretation: Where exactly would you draw the line? — I am not exactly sure what you mean by questions about filling in forms for graduate finance as this is not a thing where I am from, but I strongly suspect that this would be captured by depending on individual factors or undergraduate life. Can you name any topics that would not be captured by another clause / close reason?
@Wrzlprmft I don't see a need for close reasons to be mutually exclusive. I think it's important that the statement allows people to get a good idea, in advance, whether their question is on-topic. I don't think there is a clear consensus of where the line is, and I don't think it will be possible to specify it precisely. My aim is to set out what the spirit of the rule is, so people can both see whether a question is suitable and also why the distinction is where it is. I think that would help more with the 'but it isn't on the list' complaints.
I don't see a need for close reasons to be mutually exclusive. – Sure, but here we are talking about an example that is supposed to provide an argument for a definition of our scope. And to that all I can say so far is: Yes, we don’t want that kind of question, but I fail to see where undergraduates come into the equation. This doesn’t help to find a better definition or way of communicating our scope.
My aim is to set out what the spirit of the rule is, so people can both see whether a question is suitable and also why the distinction is where it is. – Honestly, I think this is even more fuzzy and prone to misinterpretation than “cannot be generalised to the graduate level”. The more I think about it, the more unclear areas come to mind: What about the process of learning a field’s contents? What about tutoring?
@Wrzlprmft To me those are part of training to be an academic, and also suitable areas to ask about. I have seen very very little excluded on the basis it is only relevant to undergraduates, because there is not that much that could never apply to any graduate student in any situation.
To me – Fine, but do you expect everybody to arrive at the same conclusion just from reading your proposed criterion? — I have seen very very little excluded on the basis it is only relevant to undergraduates, because there is not that much that could never apply to any graduate student in any situation. – So have I. Hence the attempt to explicitly list that very very little instead of having a rule that is difficult to understand and prone to misinterpretation.
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3783 | Replace “undergraduate” with a more general out-of-scope close reason
Statistical background
The following is extracted from the question close stats (10 k only).
In the last three months:
the undergraduate close reason¹ was used 18 times (that’s only about 3 % of all closures).
84 questions were closed with a custom close reason (i.e., typed by the close voter). This includes:
21 close reasons that indicate that the question is about the subject of an academic discipline and not about academia itself
at least 39 instances of blanket close reasons like: “This is not about academia.”
Proposal
Let’s replace the undergraduate close reason¹ with a more general out of scope reason.
Instead of the standard phrasing for such a close reason², the latter shall also explicitly mention common cases and provide helpful links (as possible within the 400 available characters), for example:
questions about the subject of an academic discipline,
questions about non-academic education,
questions specific to undergraduate students.
The detailed phrasing shall be addressed in answers to this question.
Note that we have only three slots for custom close reasons available.
As all of these are currently used, introducing a new close reason requires abolishing an existing one.
Does this mean a change of our scope?
Canned close reasons mostly exist to streamline close voting and to leave helpful information for the asker.
They do not define our scope.
Should this proposal be accepted, the kind of undergraduate questions that is off-topic now will still be off-topic – close voters may just have to type this reason themselves.
¹ which is as follows:
Questions about problems facing undergraduate students are off-topic unless they can also apply to graduate or post-graduate academicians as described in What topics can I ask about here?
² which would be:
This question does not appear to be about academia, within the scope defined in the help center.
I don't have hard data to back me up. But, I do know that people(others and myself) sometimes voted to close questions like, Which university should I choose ... as shopping questions. They probably should have been closed by undergraduate only reason. Also, there were some question, like my SAT score is ..., can I go to MIT? I remember we closed them as individual factors. I think 3% is a bit too low for the actual number. But, in general, I support your proposal.
@scaahu Good points, but I think in addition to your personal support for the proposal, the points you raise are also in support, because it suggests that a lot of the types of questions we get here that are undergraduate-specific also already have other appropriate close reasons, which further suggests that undergraduate-specific need not be a specific close reason all by itself. The 3% seems valid after all.
As a wording for the new close reason, I propose:
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 problems only faced by undergraduate students.
Note that unless I am very much mistaken, this can be implemented adhering to the character limit (400) by replacing the help-centre link with [help].
If anybody has better suggestions for Meta posts to be linked, I am open to them.
I don't like "non-academic education" - "education outside of a university setting" is better (I think), although I don't know if that takes us over character limit
@ff524: It would work, but how about non-university education?
It's OK, but personally, I prefer the emphasis on setting, because with "non-university education" it is not clear whether questions about learning university-level content outside of a university setting is on topic. (e.g. "I am teaching myself university-level physics at home, and...")
@ff524: Good point; edited.
As I argued in the question What kind of undergraduate questions are not really generalizable to graduate education? (An "Academia varies more than you think" perspective),
the boundary between problems faced by undergraduate students and those faced by graduate ones is not universally well defined.
About a year ago I wrote that question because I had the feeling that the undergraduate close reason was frequently misused without really taking into account the variability of academia and the advice given in the highest voted answer to the question Why does AC.SE exclude undergraduate students?
As shown by the stats reported by Wrzlprmft, the undergraduate close reason is now a small fraction of all closures: for this reason and for the risk of misusing it, I propose to remove the undergraduate close reason altogether.
By slightly shortening Wrzlprmft's proposal, I suggest:
This question is not within the scope of this site as defined in the help center. Our scope particularly excludes the content of research and education outside of a university setting.
Further, I suggest to change the text in the help center, by removing the sentence
Undergraduate-specific issues that could not apply to graduate or post-graduate academicians
and substituting it with a short, more specific, list of undergraduate-specific issues that we consider not generalizable (at the moment, the only proposal was Strong Bad's).
I think you should the last part (beginning with further) as a separate suggestion.
I now asked that question myself: Let’s specify our scope with respect to undergraduates
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4230 | Why do the moderators move comments to chat and how should I behave afterwards?
On highly visited posts, one often finds a comment:
Comments are not for extended discussion; this conversation has been moved to chat.
or a post notice:
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.
What’s the reason for this, and how should I deal with this as a user?
This is a FAQ that primarily exists to be linked in moved-to-chat comments and on the controversial post notice.
The mechanics of moving comments to chat
If a post received twenty comments in three days, an automatic moderator flag is raised.
Moderators can move comments to chat only once. After this, they can only delete comments.
Comments moved to chat are not deleted, just less visible. Chat is public and permanent¹. Information is not lost there.
Chat allows for everything that comments do and more. In particular chat allows for replying to specific posts – which comments don’t.
¹ There is an automatic deletion of chatrooms, but moved-to-chat chatrooms are almost never affected by it.
What are the advantages of moving comments to chat?
The vast majority of comment threads moved to chat fall into one of the following categories or a combination of them:
A collection of unrelated things comments are not for, like expressing agreement or sympathy, answers in comments, etc.
A discussion that began with addressing problems with the post and slowly digressed to another topic.
An long and intensive discussion about an answer, which clearly will not lead to the answer’s author changing their opinion and where the dissenting opinion could be summarised in a valid answer to the question.
A long discussion, which has mostly been addressed by edits to the question, but only mostly.
While such comment threads are often not completely without value, single comments with high value for future readers may drown in them (even despite comment voting), e.g.:
Pointing out errors that cannot be addressed in an answer, e.g.: “What you suggest in your answer is illegal in the asker’s country.” (Note that this may very well be the starting point of a lengthy discussion.)
Linking relevant material, e.g.: “You may also want to take a look at at this question.” or “I summarised my disagreement with this answer in another answer.”
Comments arising from (community) moderations, such as: “Possible duplicate of …”, “This question should be closed because …”, “Comments moved to chat.”
Really good jokes, e.g.: “28.7 kiloGhandis.”
Moving comments to chat while keeping the important ones solves this issue:
Most viewers can digest the remaining comments within a short time.
If they have a strong interest in the post, they can read the entire discussion in chat.
This in particular applies to the author of a post or the asker of the respective question.
Should I comment after comments have been moved to chat or the post notice has been added?
Moving comments to chat can only happen once.
Therefore new comments that would deserve being moved to chat will instead be deleted without warning.
On the other hand, your comment could be one of the relevant ones for which moving comments to chat made room.
First of all, read the moderator’s notice when moving comments to chat.
While it is a canned comment, it is often modified to include a specific guideline.
As a rule of thumb, you can post as a comment if at least one of the following applies:
There is a realistic chance that your comment will become obsolete with a valid edit to the post or a (community) moderation action, such as closing or deleting.
Note that authors fundamentally changing the direction of their answer does not qualify as realistic (or a valid edit).
Your comment highlights a major problem with an answer that was not remarked upon in a previous comment (including those moved to chat).
You do not expect anybody to reply to your comment, e.g., because you were posting a relevant link.
The chatroom for the post has frozen.
Do not post a comment if:
You reply to another comment. Instead post the reply in chat. To alert the author of that comment and to direct the discussion, you may post a comment along the lines of (do not even hint at the content of your chat message):
I posted a reply to your comment in chat. Let’s continue the dicussion there.
You are posting along the lines of a discussion that has already been moved to chat.
Your comment on an answer or question would be a valid answer to the question.
Why has my important comment been moved to chat?
Moderators face two difficulties when moving comments to chat:
They have to assess a lot of stuff: certainly the post and all the comments; possibly the question, other answers, the revision history, etc.
It is easy to miss some important comment hidden in the middle of a lengthy discussion due to this (which is why we move comments to chat in the first place).
They have to draw a line somewhere.
There is a huge grey area when it comes to moving to chat, in particular when a discussion slowly digresses.
If you have reason to believe that there was an error when moving comments to chat, you can raise a flag (please do not post a comment), but before you do, please consider:
Does having a comment instead of a chat message significantly increase the chance that you reach those who need to read your comment?
If somebody visits the post in a month, will your comment be amongst the first things that they want to read?
Is this a worthwhile use of the moderator’s time?
Chat allows for everything that comments do and more. No it doesn’t - there is no upvoting of chat comments, which makes them (considerably, IMO) less useful.
@DanRomik: there is no upvoting of chat comments – there is starring, which is essentially the same. Also, given the way comments are voted upon for HNQs, it’s not a feature I would miss very much.
interesting, thanks - that’s the first time I’ve heard of starring of chat comments. It’s a very well-hidden feature, and quite difficult to access from within the app (I had to login a second time from within the chat modal view to be able to access it). I’m guessing if I wasn’t aware of its existence, the same is true for many other people. Of course, if you don’t miss it then maybe you see that as a feature rather than a bug.
@DanRomik. It's news to me that chat is accessible from the app at all.
@DanRomik Which app is that? AFAIK the Android app has no chat - chat links open a mobile browser.
@Qsigma the iPhone app.
Shame that a second block of comments can't be migrated to the same chat as an earlier block.
@Criggie: I am not so sure about that. It increases (possibly relevantly) the incentive for some people to stop commenting and go to chat.
@Wrzlprmft I thought that was part of the goal? Or is this just a way to de-clutter the question page ?
@Criggie: Maybe that was unclear: The fact that comments can be moved to chat only once may be a good thing, because it increases the incentive for people to actually stop commenting and go to chat. If this weren’t the case, some people would just continue commenting because moderators can move to chat again and then their creation is not deleted.
How does one recover the upvote patterns on comments once the comments have been moved to chat?
@goblin: It’s not possible, but then again, see my first comment.
A comment section where replies are kept in their own separate thread (e.g. Reddit) would likely solve many of these issues.
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1725 | "Can I apply to field X with an undergraduate degree in Y" type questions
We seem (to me) to be getting more and more question of this general form. Recent examples:
I have a Bachelors and Masters in electrical engineering: Is pursuing a PhD in computer science possible?
Can students from Materials science background apply for sports engineering?
We seem to have agreed to close these as duplicates of How does the admissions process work for US Ph.D. programs, particularly for weak or borderline students?, which we expressly created as an omnibus answer to "I have a low GPA, can I get into field X" type questions.
Unfortunately, people do not necessarily see the relevance of our omnibus question to their original question. Which is understandable, given the difference in overall thrust.
Request: Could someone with a better understanding of the US system than I edit the answer to our omnibus question to expressly discuss "Can I apply to field X with an undergraduate degree in Y" type questions?
I think you are correct that the GPA and major/background sections could be split and potentially make it easier for people to see that their questions are really duplicates.
They really aren't the same, splitting seems obviously the way to go.
My inclination would be to create a new question, rather than using the omnibus question. A special-purpose question allows the space to go into more detail, gives other people a chance to write competing answers, makes it much easier to find the answer (someone searching for this information is unlikely to look under "How does the admissions process work for US Ph.D. programs, particularly for weak or borderline students?"), and makes it clear to people why their question is a duplicate.
I see at least three different aspects of this general question:
If I've taken plenty of advanced courses in X in the process of completing a degree in another field, can I apply to graduate school in X?
What if I haven't taken many courses in X, but I have acquired a good grasp of X through self-study and working in a related field?
What if I've never studied X, but I have done very well in an unrelated field? Could I be admitted to graduate school in X on the basis of general intellectual promise, and then make up any missing background after enrollment?
I think all three could be addressed in the same question/answer.
Please do this, and I will vote it up!
Done.
Awesome! This makes me very happy.
Should we make the question CW so all answers are CW and people will edit to improve?
@StrongBad: Sounds good to me. I made my answer CW but there was no option to do so for the question (as far as I could see).
@AnonymousMathematician making a question CW is a mod only feature.
Thanks for posting the question, and the first answer!
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5429 | Is a trivia about a university or academic institution considered as off-topic?
I wonder if not-so-academic questions about academic institutions are allowed here.
For example, there are such questions like:
Why is the logo of DBLP (a computer science bibliography) written in Cyrillic letters?
or
Why is the nickname of Stanford sports teams written singular 'Cardinal' rather than Cardinals?
Trivia are unimportant pieces of information. Often when you are asking about something, its importance is part of the answer. Therefore we cannot say whether the question was about trivia before there is a generally accepted answer.
To take your first example, I don’t know the answer and thus from my perspective the usage of Cyrillic letters may be an irrelevant quirk or it may reveal something non-trivial about academic history. Conversely, we sometimes receive questions where the answer would reveal that the question was about trivia, but it was by no means obvious from the beginning.
Thus, irrespectively what we think about the value of trivia, I do not think that we can base a reasonable criterion of closure on it.
On top I don’t see anything wrong with questions about trivia as long as they do not disturb the site and this community is the best to answer them.
All that being said, I consider your second example off-topic, but not because it’s about trivia, but because it is about the English language or perhaps sports instead of academia. Our community simply has no expertise on this particular matter. Sports teams being attached to universities are a historic oddity in some countries. That question is as much about academia as a question about Bayer Leverkusen is about chemistry.
Based on the on-topic page in the Help section, I see:
If you have a question about ...
academic careers,
requirements and expectations of students, postdocs, or professors,
inner workings of research departments,
academic writing and publishing,
studying and teaching at institutions of higher education (universities, colleges, …),
the academic research process,
... then you're in the right place!
I don't see how the examples above fit in here. This site is about being a human in academia, not trivia about academic institutions. I would vote to close as not in scope for the site.
| Stack Exchange | 2025-03-21T12:54:48.911627 | 2024-03-25T02:25:51 | {
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2206 | Removing emphasis from blockquotes
Currently, quoted text (paragraphs starting with > in Markdown) is displayed with a wider margin and a very visible yellowish background in the main site. This has led some users to think that it is a form of emphasis and that it can be used as a way to emphasize a full paragraph.
In my opinion, the root cause of this misunderstanding is the color scheme. I would suggest to change the CSS for blockquotes to something less flashy; for instance, the scheme currently used on Meta (black text on grey background) looks fine to me.
This misuse happens regularly on other SE sites as well AFAIK (tex.se most notably), but I am posting it here rather than on meta.stackexchange because in my view it is a CSS issue and CSS are site-specific.
I support this. Also, I would like to have another "block" environment which would be perceived as some blocked text and not as a quote. You know, like some textbooks put boxes around theorems and such or like https://terrytao.wordpress.com/ who use boxes to emphasize theorems (ironically, with blockquotes which is the way latex2wp.py translates environments like theorem and such). But, as far as I, see markdown does have the capabilities to provide such thing…
Note that while site-specific, Academia SE’s blockquote style is used by the vast majority of sites, in particular all beta sites.
It seems like the network-wide formatting change a little while back effectively solved this problem for blockquotes - SE initially removed the background color entirely and made the text color of blockquotes identical to regular body text, and now seem to have made the font color of blockquote text slightly lighter than regular body text. @Wrzlprmft should this be tagged as [status-completed] or some other status tag?
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4424 | Is there a way to change my review decision?
Just now, I clicked on the wrong button in the reopen review queue (I intended to vote for reopening, but instead I clicked "leave closed"). Irresponsible and thoughtless as it may be, this is the first time something like this happened to me. I immediately went back and tried to undo, despite remembering that I never saw an undo or revote option, but naturally couldn't do anything about it.
Is there a way to change my review decision once made?
In general, review decisions cannot be undone per se, i.e., they will stay on record and influence review completion as you made them.
However, most review decisions are also not unilateral and single mistakes are no problem.
Moreover, you can often remedy the consequences:
Close and reopen votes can be cast independently of review and be retracted.
Flags can be cast and retracted outside of review.
Edits can be rolled back and you can almost always edit. Also see: Hit approve instead of reject on a suggested edit
First-post and late-answer reviews can be completely made up outside of review.
In your case, you can just cast go to the question in question and cast a reopen vote by clicking on the respective button. In that case, the only lasting consequence your mistake has it that it takes one leave closed decision less to dequeue the question from the reopen queue.
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4722 | Moderator said I can vote to close, but I cannot due to bounty
How can we close questions with bounties?
The meta discussion says that to close a question with a bounty, you should raise a flag. I did that. The flag was declined. This question is not about why it was declined, but rather about the moderator's statement that "You can vote to close if you like." How?
Moderators can unilaterally close bountied questions, and refund the bounty, as explained in the linked meta question. However, I would use such a heavy intervention only for blatantly off-topic questions or egregiously problematic ones. I don't see, at the moment, any such case.
For all other questions, I suggest to let the bounty follow its cycle and then vote to close, so that other regular users can vote on it.
Am I supposed to see recently completed bounties somewhere?
@AnonymousPhysicist No, there isn't any direct way to search for questions that had bounties (there is just a SEDE query). If you just want to retrieve the one you flagged, you can look at the flags' page on your profile.
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4162 | Are questions asking technical issues on academic services on-topic?
The question Is there a way to change preprint service within OSF system? is about to closed and I suspect the reason is that it's a technical question. Perhaps the close voters think that it's better on Web Applications. But I've seen another question that is purely technical issue and is well-received: Is there a way to follow particular authors on arxiv?. And basically technical questions fill the entire scopus tag, and some of reference-managers.
What should we do with questions about preprint services? Are they academical enough? If no, what about the questions about whether the color of slideshow, CV or board should be black or white? If yes, should questions about other services like Academia.edu or ResearchGate on-topic? And surely we don't want questions about LaTeX or creating PDF of slides with audio to be here, right?
So what do you think?
Related:
• Case in point: Drawing the line for tech support in Graphic Design. Maybe our beloved mutual mod have some insights on this?
• Should we be more welcoming of "technical" questions? But it's about study design.
• What to do with questions asking to evaluate commercial online services? But it's about evaluation, not using them.
Moderator’s notice: Featuring this question, as it seems to considered important by the community, but none of the answers have received sufficiently many votes to be considered a consensus. Please consider voting on the answers or posting an answer of your own.
Based on the received responses, I guess that we want to keep them, for the reason has been discussed in the question? I think it's the unheard of OSF that make it sounds like off-topic. If needed, a sentence explaining what it is is enough. So I'd say this type of question is on-topic.
However, I don't know which point in the question doesn't say that it's not a preprint service?
I think it's the word "system" that made people think you were asking a pure technical question. I never heard people say arXiv system. People always say arXiv preprint service (or server).
I think the bit "make people think" is the root of the problem, not the word itself. If they are familiar with it, any word can work. If they don't, no word can erase the doubt. It all comes back to the reputation
I agree. I had no idea what OSF system was until I saw the question. I had to Google it to find out what it is. For people who are outside your field, they may not have this much time to look for what it is and then "think" it is an application system.
Then you used the word "change" which would even further made people "think" it's about how to change an application system. Most users on this site don't have much time. They have their own busy things (study, research and teach) to do.
I didn't vote either way on closing this question, and don't know about the reasons of the people who did, but my first guess would be the question doesn't sound like it will be of interest to too many people. What is on topic is certainly subjective, but the most important thing is that it is of interest to other people on the site.
To me, the question sounds like it may be a reasonable question for this site in terms of topic based on other questions I've seen, but I have never heard of OSF, and apparently it hasn't been mentioned too many times on this site, compared to things like arXiv or Google Scholar, so I'm not sure that many users of this site know what it is. Possibly the people who voted to close don't know what it is either, and it is hard to ascertain this from your question, so one thing you could try is to give a little more background and detail in your question. (Of course, if no one here uses OSF, you're unlikely to get an answer anyway.)
And yes, I would say in general we don't want questions about how to use specific software/applications on this site, that doesn't mean questions involving specific software is necessarily off topic (e.g., if you should post on the arXiv or use LaTeX in such and such a situation).
ResearchGate or Academia.edu are well known, but I think they would also be closed
@Ooker I don't know, there are a couple technical questions about academia.edu and researchgate: https://academia.stackexchange.com/q/71699/19607 and https://academia.stackexchange.com/q/102958/19607 but I do think that one difference is those sites are neither as well regarded nor as highly used as the arXiv by people on Academia.SE.
I am going to ignore the big-picture question posed in the title and focus on the issue of wether or not Is there a way to move a preprint from one service to another within the OSF system? should be opened or closed.
To me this is a clear cut case of a question that is too specific and should be
(left) closed. The exact answer depends on the specifics of the generic OSF preprint service and MindRxiv. While it might/might not be possible to move a preprint between two services, that may not hold for all services. Maybe there is an edit that can be made to make the question more general, but it is not obvious to me.
But what about the Scopus or arxiv tag?
I think questions about working with OSF are on topic if similar questions about arXiv are allowed.
No. A question about a product (free or not) which is marketed to academics is not a question about academia. Questions about individual products are similar to questions about individual research problems in that way.
Example: "What color should an academic CV be?" is on topic but "How do I change the color of my academic CV in LaTeX?" is not. "Why do academics use preprint services?" is on topic but "How do I submit to ArXiv?" is not.
The degree of technicality of a question is subjective.
So you think that all the technical questions linked above should be closed altogether?
@Ooker no, "Technical" is bad criteria. Questions about products should be closed.
I'm confused. If they should be closed, then the answer to my comment should be "yes", not "no", right?
It's not really a yes or no question, but if the question is "Are they on topic?" the answer is "no", but not because they are "technical." The CV question you linked is on topic. It's technical but it's about academic processes and not about a products.
I see. But what about the now-opened questions about product such as [tag:scopus] or [tag:arxiv]? In your opinion they should be all closed, is that correct?
OSF is one possible academic process/system to produce and archive research. It's also the backend for a number of academic communities and services, like socarxiv. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Center_for_Open_Science#Open_Science_Framework
@Ooker Some of those questions could be edited so they are generalized so they are good questions which are not specific to particular products. Others cannot be generalized and should be closed. There are a lot of awful questions there.
I think questions about working with OSF are on topic if similar questions about arXiv are allowed.
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3752 | Is this kind of retaliatory behavior allowed? Is allowing it, in effect, discouraging questions?
In this question, How to withdraw an under review manuscript from a journal when you decide you want to submit to another journal with a higher impact factor?, the asker is told pretty clearly—in multiple ways—that it's totally unacceptable to withdraw your paper for this reason. Indeed, some might think the answer apparent, but the OP obviously didn't, and came to the Academia Stack Exchange to seek some help.
One of the responses' fist paragraph was the following:
Editors are reading these sites too. Like me and the editor who posted this link on a large editor list serve I'm included in. I'll be keeping an eye out for your papers (as will they) and save you the trouble of wasting me and my reviewers' time by desk rejecting your papers as they come in.
Is this type of thing... allowed?
If so, why? I think this sets a pretty crappy precedent.
(There are also some good points mentioned in the comments to that response that I won't replicate here; I flagged the post, but will [reluctantly!] unflag it if the consensus is that this is allowed, and ok.)
Note that the issue was a now deleted answer that is now only visible to 10k+ rep users.
This is pretty blatant doxxing / blackballing. I feel like something more serious then just deleting the answer needs to be done about this.
@Magisch if the OP wants something more done, although I am not sure what that could be, they can get in touch with the SE team with the contact us link.
@StrongBad I would not be against something more being done—but I'm also not sure what it could be (and I'm not a very frequent Academia SE user, much less its Meta). The offender's account looks new, too, so even if something more could be done I get the feeling he made the account exclusively for that post.
@StrongBad We can probably assume that OP (who it seems made this account to ask the question) has been scared off academia SE for good now. The problem is with what this represents. OP asked an unethical (ignorantly so though) question a beginner might have and got thoroughly shafted for it, especially since they used their real name. IMO SE needs to heavily crack down on this to avoid it happening ever again - This kind of stuff is what makes people afraid to ask questions.
I'm slightly guilty of this, in that I said something similar in a not-quite-so-threatening way: as an editor/reviewer, I really hope that this person doesn't submit to my publications, because I would worry I would end up wasting my time. (This led to a lot of back-and-forth with another member arguing that journals take advantage of authors so there's nothing wrong with authors taking advantage of journals. I disagree.) But to the extent that I expected OP to be able to reason that it might be wasting people's time, rather than ask, I may have been overly snide, and regret it.
I do not consider this answer acceptable because it violates be nice, in particular:
Be welcoming, be patient, and assume good intentions.
Don't be a jerk. These are just a few examples. If you see them, flag them: […] Harassment and bullying. If you see a hostile interaction, flag it.
Threatening or scaring users, in particular with consequences outside of this site, clearly violates this. This answer should be deleted as soon as possible.
Is allowing it, in effect, discouraging questions?
Sure, but there are far better reasons to delete this post.
So what if they would not have had referred to themselves in their answer, but would have written it in a more "Imagine someone posts this in an editors mailing list. Some of them might be inclined to not accept your future submissions anymore." Then it would have been okay?
@skymningen: Assuming that they are not obviously being hypothetical only to avoid making explicit threats (“Nice restaurant; shame if anything happened to it.”), yes, that would not be violating be nice anymore. I would not consider this part necessarily good though, as it is overly pessimistic and not addressing the question.
If they are just masking the fact that it actually happened with a more nice/polite formulation I can't see how that is overly pessimistic. (They are only being hypothetical to avoid being impolite. Actually, it could be seen as a polite move to inform the OP, that their question actually was posted on the mailinglist.)
@skymningen: I am not talking about masking reality; I am talking about masking a threat/bullying. If the question was actually linked on some mailing list and somebody on that mailing list announced that they were blacklisting the asker (which strongly I doubt, by the way), this information could have been communicated in a neutral manner. By contrast the author of the answer in question endorsed those actions and claimed to take part in them. There’s a long way between “be careful, bad things may happen to you” and “bad things should happen to you; I took steps to make it more likely”.
The threats were inappropriate and definitely a violation of our be nice policy. I have deleted the answer. If a 10k+ user thinks they can salvage the answer, please edit and flag for attention so it can be undeleted.
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4451 | Closure while writing an answer – can it be delayed?
I have fairly frequently been in the situation of being in the middle of providing an answer to a question when it is closed, leaving me no option but to discard my contribution or hope that the question can be re-opened.
It can be very frustrating to put in the mental effort to prepare an answer only to have it summarily rejected. Of course, this affects frequent contributors more than others.
I wonder if it is possible to let such "work in progress" be entered into the record when this happens.
At the very least, you can still post the answer for 4 hours after the question is closed by bypassing the client check
The single direct effect of closing questions is that it prevents answers, for reasons such as:
To give the asker the opportunity to clarify their question before existing answers get invalidated.
To prevent the inevitable endless discussions answers to some questions provoke.
To avoid the broken-window effect, i.e., new users getting the impression that they can get answers to certain questions here.
To avoid redundant content, voting, etc.
To avoid that askers commit pointless real-life mistakes by blindly heeding the inevitable wrong answer certain questions will attract (applies to many questions closed due to depending on individual factors).
…
In short, we close questions because we think that answers to them would be bad.
Circumventing this defies the entire point of closure.
These questions should not be answered on this site, in the comments, and at times nowhere on the Internet.
Closure needs the five votes of high-reputation users (or one vote of a diamond moderator).
If it happens, there usually is a good reason for it.
So, the best way to avoid your problem is: Do not answer questions that should be closed! Roughly 16 % of your answers were on questions that were later closed. This is a rather high number, among the highest for high-reputation users on our site. (For comparison, it’s 6 % for me. Here is a Stack Exchange Data Explorer query for this.)
That being said:
If you think that a question was wrongly closed, you can argue against it (on Meta Academia if it takes longer) and vote to reopen.
If you think that there is a valid question buried under a question, edit it and vote to reopen.
If you think there is a valid, relevant question to which what you just wrote is the answer, write that question and self-answer it.
If the asker needs to clarify something, comment to let them know what and wait for them to do it.
While this happens, just save your answer in a regular file.
While this happens, just save your answer in a regular file. – I propose OneNote. I can't imagine how my life could be without it.
I agree with Wrzlprmft's analysis, particularly for very "off-topic" questions (too broad, about content of research, etc.). But as another user with ~16% of answers on closed questions, let me offer another viewpoint.
Consider a question like "I'm worried I ruined my life and could really use help, let me post my super long, specific-to-me question" (example). Such questions should obviously be closed as they violate our community norms; on the other hand, it is very unwelcoming to just downvote and close after someone took the time to ask for help. There is really an opportunity to help someone here, even if we know the question will likely be closed and we won't get much reputation in exchange for a good answer.
I know it's a bit heterodox, but in such cases, I have no problem with answering a question knowing it likely will (and should) be closed. As such, I would not be inclined to interrupt users who are in the middle of answering such questions.
These are probably the cases where we should direct users to chat. Even an offline discussion can work if there is someone willing to help.
@StrongBad - can very-low-rep users participate in chat? If so, I agree that might be an option; my hazy memory is that chat required ~50 rep though.
@cag51 I think the requirement is for 20 points, which is still more than many of the users posting such questions have.
Sorry, but the question isn't at all about when or whether to close questions. It is about not interrupting a user who is writing an answer at the moment of closure and letting them enter it.
@Buffy - actually, if you read the discussion, I think the logic chain is clear. Wrzlprmft says it's wrong to answer questions that will be closed and therefore we should interrupt users who are doing so. My viewpoint is that it is occasionally useful to answer questions that will be closed, and so we should not interrupt users who are doing so. Still, have added a sentence to make this clearer.
I am not quite sure about that because I've seen different behaviours on the site: Is it a goal to help people? Or only to answer interesting questions?
@Hatschu there is a split between people on this network. Some think that we should focus on the benefit of the future visitors, while other think that we should focus on the benefit of the OP first. This is basically an art of balance.
This post on the main meta explains why during the next 4 hours of being closed new answers can still be submit, and how to do this. This can be a good balance point for the disciplinary - flexibility issue, because we want two conflict things at the same times.
Not intentionally want to advertise, but I happen to discuss about the way to find the balance point in my article A theory of perspective:
The secret to be flexible without having to compromise stability (e.g. violate rules) is to notice the struggle of others, because mitigating others' struggles is the reason why stability is born at the first place. Instead of worrying whether a behavior is moral or legal or not, we should check its ability to reduces the cognitive dissonances of everyone in long term. In the case of having conflicts, no one will feel that they have to compromise, but sees how their worry is maximally satisfied before it is actually satisfied.
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5379 | Can we improve advice to those asking questions?
Quite a few questions asked generate comments that the OP doesn't answer.
Let me suggest adding a bit to the Help Center advice on asking questions to say that responding to such comments will likely improve both the number and quality of answers. A short paragraph in one of the existing points is probably enough.
Timeliness of a response can also help the flow. This might be part of an update.
I find myself wanting to say this to the OP fairly frequently but also want to avoid cluttering up the comment stream.
NOTE that this has been sitting around for almost a year without action.
Where do you suggest to put this advice and will it be specific to this site? Mind that the only help-centre site we can edit is this one.
@Wrzlprmft, in Final Remarks would work. Or a new heading.
@Wrzlprmft, I've added an answer with some suggested text for that page.
@Wrzlprmft and other mods. Is there any chance this can be made to happen? If so, when?
@Wrzlprmft, I don't believe this was ever settled. I was just about to add a new question with this content.
Sorry, this fell through some crack. I implemented this now with some minor changes.
What follows is suggested text to be added to this page, which is under the control of this site. I may have to edit it a few times and you should feel free to do so also. I think the addition could come just before Final Remarks:
Follow up your question.
Questions asked often generate comments asking for additional information. The comments can come quite quickly as there are a lot of users here.
It is advisable to respond to such comments, preferably by editing your question to add the additional information. You can also add comments of your own but that is less useful as comments can disappear. Responding and making your question more complete will improve both the likelihood of answers and their quality. Some users will wait to answer until you respond in some way.
Eventually, you may want to accept one of the answers that you find especially valuable. It is suggested that you wait a bit (days, at least) before doing so as some users hesitate to answer questions with accepted answers.
There are quite a number of new users who don't know how to edit the question or how to write comments. We might need to point them to where to learn how to edit the question and how to write comments.
@Nobody, there could be screenshots showing them how to do it under this explanation. After all, its just a button you need to click.
@Sursula, and Nobody, I've added links to relevant pages for commenting and editing.
@FedericoPoloni, see the edits. Enough?
Looks good, thanks!
My biggest issue along these lines is that to answer many questions accurately and in-context, you need to know what part of the world the asker is in, and what part of the world the asker is trying to go to. That info is usually not provided with the first attempt, and sometimes there's no response to a query along those lines.
I'd like to see more routine use of jurisdictional tags.
Mind that we already have advice on this on that help centre page. Of course, the problem is that many askers don’t read it.
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4590 | How should we handle answers in the comments?
I have never understood why some answers-in-the-comments (or partial answers, or empirical data) are apparently allowed, while others get deleted. As I practice swinging this hammer, I find myself confronted with this more and more.
StackExchange's guidance is that comments should "ask for clarification on, suggest corrections to, and provide meta-information about posts" and warns that comments are subject to deletion.
In this discussion, the upvoted posts explain why answers-in-the-comments can be good, while the downvoted posts suggest that they should be deleted.
In this discussion, it is suggested that our mods currently delete comments-in-the-answers if, and only if, they are flagged by other users (rather than proactively finding-and-destroying all instances).
In a comment to this answer, it is suggested that mods should do "what the community wants." So my question is: how does the community want its mods to handle answers-in-the-comments?
Update: Thanks for the discussion. We've decided to move forward with Wrzlprmft's suggestion to structure this discussion a bit more so we can produce a well-defined policy. Please participate in this discussion here
Stack Exchange has a fairly clear policy on this I think - flag answers-in-comments, ask the poster to write an answer instead, destroy it after some time (days?).
If anything this community has historically been too lenient on answers-in-comments, not too harsh.
I actually feel pretty strongly about this. Answers-in-comments are sometimes witty and to-the-point, but rarely high-quality (they can't be, there isn't enough space in a comment). Yet, if you post a snippy (hence highly-upvoted) "answer" as a comment to the question, it's the first thing a user sees, even before the accepted / highly upvoted actual answers. This breaks the Stack Exchange model where highly upvoted answers should float to the top.
And this isn't even to speak of the other problem with comments, namely that they can't be downvoted, so a controversial comment is never kept in check by downvotes the way an answer would be. I truly think this trains people to write controversial and/or offensive stuff in comments rather than actual answers, which, again, breaks the way Stack Exchange is supposed to work. Kill them with fire, and kill them hard.
All that said, I am myself (very much) guilty of writing too many comments and too few answers. It's just so much easier to write a quick comment than a full answer, and the fact that one does not have to "fear" any downvotes for a terrible take only exacerbate this. The only way to combat this, in my opinion, is to more strongly implement the "comments are ephemeral" idea of Stack Exchange. In an ideal world, comments would be auto-deleted after a few days, but since we appear to not be getting this feature, the mods at least have my full support to aggressively delete comments (including my own, which, again I know I am writing way, way too much).
Having just spent some time going through unanswered questions---many of which were effectively abandoned after receiving a comment-answer---I am coming around to this point of view.
I don't think the question here is as clear as you present it. This is because the site itself is more than just "ask a question - get some answers". Many of the "questions" are actually pleas for help in very difficult situations. Some of them are career ending situations. People "asking" these "questions" need advice and the advice they need isn't really question-answer amenable.
I think that as long as we accept that characterization of the site then some comments that "might be" answers need to be retained, though suggestions to the writer than they convert them to answers is usually good. I often do this, actually.
Another issue is that a lot of people, myself included, don't like to write single sentence "answers", even when a single sentence is all that is needed. But, often enough, that is all the writer of the comment has to say, given time and other constraints. Such answers are likely to be deleted in any case.
One other issue is that I sometimes vote to close a question as off topic for some reason, but the writer still desperately needs advice. I don't think voting to close is consistent with answering and seldom do it. But a bit of advice to the writer is still a proper (humane) thing to do. So, I'll write a comment - even a fairly extensive one.
People here need advice, not just answers.
I think the mods should use judgement, not a fixed rule. Some comment-answers are fine. Others should be converted to answers. Some should be deleted. But that is why the mods are people with experience in academia, not machines, and not mere administrators.
Thanks for your answer. Yes, I completely agree that answers-in-the-comments are an appropriate way to help someone when their post is closed or likely to be closed. Also agree about applying judgment. Perhaps a good example of what I'm asking about is this: say there is a highly-upvoted comment (concise but reasonable) that overlaps with one or more well-written answers. Should users flag - and mods delete - this comment as it is no longer needed? Or should we keep it, as it's not harming anyone? Having a "general guideline" for this case could make deletion decisions much more transparent.
While I welcome your initiative, I do not think we should answer the question how diamond moderators should act on this in isolation. If we want to act stronger on answers in comments, this must be encoded in a clear policy on when answers in comments should be deleted and how both, users and moderators, should act upon them.
I therefore propose to postpone this question and first decide whether we want less (or no) answers in comments in general. More specifically, I propose to ask first:
What kind of answers in comments do we want to keep on the long run?
… and then see how we go about realising the result.
Completely agree -- particularly given the different views expressed here already, I think a clear policy (whether stronger or weaker) would be worthwhile. This page won't lead to a clear policy, but it could provide some useful background. Raising the question you posed also seems like a great idea.
Insofar as I can see, the only real cost to "answers in the comments" is questions that go effectively unanswered---in any question receiving significant attention, equivalent material from the comments typically quickly makes it into at least some answer.
Answers in the comments are also often good for people who want to be helpful anyway to a person whose question is off-topic and should be closed.
For on-topic questions that have their answers in the comments, I have often encouraged people to transform "answer in the comments" into an official answer, often saying that I would like them to do it so that I can vote for them. Many people respond well to this. When this fails, sometimes I add my own answer expanding on the comments.
My suggestion to moderators, then, would be:
For recent questions, don't worry about it. The situation will often resolve itself without moderator intervention with the aid of other users.
For older questions, add a comment suggesting that the comment transform to an answer---and maybe see if other long-time users will help with this as well.
But I don't see any particular reason to bother deleting them.
Thanks for your answer. To your first paragraph: other possible costs I have seen discussed are that answers-in-comments (1) may be more visible to casual users than actual answers, and (2) cannot be down-voted, leading to an apples-to-oranges comparison with real answers.
This is my point of view too. I sometimes wrote answers in comments when I didn't have the time to write a complete answer. The point is that of giving at least a hint of solution that can be helpful. @cag51 The quality system based on votes is so skewed anyway that the fact that an answer in comment cannot be downvoted is seldom a problem, especially on our site.
Moderators should leave answers-in-the-comments alone unless there is some additional reason why they should be deleted.
Moderators should destroy all answers-in-the-comments they come across, perhaps after posting a reminder and inviting users to convert their comment to an answer. Perhaps there can be a grace period when there is no overlap between answers-in-the-comments and true answers.
This is by far my prefered solution.
Moderators should destroy answers-in-the-comments that users flag, but should not proactively seek them out.
This seems to be the status quo, though it does lead to some confusion when some are deleted and others are not deleted.
I think rpg.SE has a good policy here. Quoting an answer by mxyzplk:
https://rpg.meta.stackexchange.com/a/6534/3263
You should not answer in comments. Not partial answers, not full answers. Not "leads on" an answer. Not "I would answer but I'm tired/just woke up/am drunk so I'll just say this..." Not answers that you think aren’t good enough to post as answers. Not little helpful tips, not helpful suggestions, not useful anecdotes. These will be deleted. Answer in answers.
And if your answer isn’t even good enough for you to want to put it in an answer post, just don’t post it at all then.
Answering in comments does the following things.
It bypasses question closes. They're closed for a reason.
It provides an answer that can't be marked as an answer for future people's knowledge.
It contributes to long comment debates as you can comment on an answer, but it's unclear what you're commenting on in a comment thread.
It is "cheating" by locking your answer to the top. Answers with higher votes/accepted answers should go to the top to indicate their quality. Bypassing that by sticking your answer in a comment on the question is unacceptable.
It bypasses all our quality control mechanisms: we can't downvote your "answer", edit it, or comment on it to request clarification or improvements. Answers also bump a question to the top so that people will scrutinize the answer; comments don't do this.
It gets in the way of people who are busy using comments correctly to improve the question.
The long and short of it is, every part of how how the site functions, all of which have lengthy justification as being part of the process of SE - rep, answers, accepts, edits, votes, etc. - is obviated by using comments for answers. So every good goal of all that functionality is nullified by this practice.
Now, "but the hapless questioner could use that info!" In nearly all cases someone posts the same information in a (much more comprehensive) answer. Or take the time yourself to write a real answer. We don't like crappy questions or crappy answers, and we'd rather not have the Q or A than to have one that doesn't meet site quality (hence closes/deletes, part of the standard SE functionality). If you don't care enough to write a real answer don't, the likelihood that you're the only person in the world/on the site that knows that bit of info is very small.
While users are welcome to steal the info in the comments to generate answers of their own, that will not slow the pace of dealing with the answers-in-comments via flagging and deletion.
I completely disagree with that post about partial answers and leads. If I have partial information (or some speculation) about the (sometimes multiple) question(s) asked, that I don't think is worthy of a full answer, should I just stay quiet? Unlike RPG, this site has some very specialized questions that it's impractical to "take the time to write a real answer" for. Sometimes the best case scenario for these cases is that another user arrives 2-3 years later and can write an actually good/authoritative answer, at which point such comments can be removed...
@Anyon If you only have a partial answer and leads, you can write them as an answer. They will be upvoted if they are useful. If a better answer appears, then it will be eventually voted above yours, maybe bountied etc.
For some partial answers I do indeed do that (especially when I think I can address one aspect of the question well), but in other cases I don't think what I know or have qualifies as an answer. Certainly not a good one. I guess I just strongly dislike the idea of setting out to intentionally write a low(er)-quality answer.
@Anyon: There is nothing wrong with posting a partial answer as an answer. For some questions, it may be the best we can do.
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5225 | Automatically generated text is banned on Academia.SE
Do we have a firm policy on questions, answers, or comments that are automatically generated using a tool like GPT-3?
This post follows a previous request for Academia SE community input: Should this site take an official position on answers generated by ChatGPT? See also the related discussions on StackOverflow (see also here) and network wide.
Policy: Questions, answers, and comments may not be auto-generated on Academia.SE.
While the technology is impressive, these answers are not based on references or personal expertise in academia. Rather, our experience is that they only contain contain common sense advice that is often off-topic. There is also significant potential for harm since the AI might produce plausible-looking answers to difficult questions; these might attract upvotes and give the impression of credibility when in fact the answer could well be incorrect.
If there is some reason why you feel that you need to auto-generate text, it's probably best to seek pre-approval on meta. Note that simply citing the AI model used or disclosing that the text was auto-generated is not sufficient under this policy (though it's a step in the right direction).
What should I do if I see something that I think was written by a chatbot?
Flag it! Good-faith flags on questions or answers will usually be marked "helpful." Good-faith flags on comments are also appreciated, but mechanically such flags are always marked as "declined" unless the comment is deleted.
How will you know if someone has used a chatbot?
We deliberately don't reveal our entire bag of tricks. It is possible there will be some false positives. However, answers that are sufficiently low-quality as to be indistinguishable from a chatbot are also not really desirable, so we don't see this as much of a problem. False negatives are a bit more of a problem, since an answer may seem okay but actually be harmful.
What if I'm asking a question about dealing with chatbots in an academic setting?
The question itself may not be auto-generated. However, if quoting the exact words that the chatbot used is important for your question, you may provide a brief quote from the chatbot.
What if I have a suggestion for improving this policy?
Make a new meta post to propose any changes.
If we find an old answer to an old question that is way before the official start date (11/30/2022) of GPT-3 (I might be wrong about this date) and it looks very suspicious, can we flag it? I asked a question in another Chat room that someone could use SE to test an AI product?. The answer I got was that we don't know one way or another. So, what's our policy on the old stuff? Retroactive or let it ago?
I would say that the bar on the old stuff is a bit higher -- e.g., we probably won't hammer reasonable-looking, well-received answers months after the fact unless there's very good cause to do so. But if you find something that you think might meet this high standard, I would certainly want to take a look! So, my recommendation would be to raise a "custom" flag and make it clear in the text what your concern is.
I don't like using plagiarism as an argument because it is prone to this objection: what if I write an AI that registers to a website and posts answers without human intervention? Then, arguably, the account belongs to the AI, and there is no plagiarism issue. ("AI in its current state produces tons of plausible-looking answer that are incorrect but hard to spot and waste everyone's time" is a much better one.)
Yes, I hesitated at that as well -- whether this is considered plagiarism at all may change in the coming years (e.g., we probably wouldn't consider evaluating an integral on Mathematica to be plagiarism). Took a stab at an update.
@FedericoPoloni There are two concerning aspects of plagiarism. One is with regard to attribution to e.g. ChatGPT - this is solvable by being open that an answer is generated by ChatGPT. The other is a problem inherent in statistical language models which is that nothing prevents them from lifting wholesale from their training material.
@BryanKrause True. Before the edit (version 1 of this answer) I think it was more clear that my comment is about the first of the two problems only.
This does not seem to actually set any policy since it does not say what action moderators, stack exchange, or the community will take as a result of the undisclosed "bag of tricks."
Does this change anything other than changing the flagging process from "available" to "encouraged?"
This seems like an arbitrary objection; I don't think any of our past policies have codified the punishments for policy-violators. Moreover, the punishments are well known: we usually remove content and give public warnings, and in more serious cases we give formal, private warnings or suspensions. As for what the policy changes: the change is that we now disallow content that was written by an AI even if it otherwise meets our quality standards.
How are answers like this one treated under the policy? On the one hand, it contains autogenerated text (at least it is declared as such). On the other hand, that only makes up part of the answer, and is arguably relevant since the question is about ChatGPT and similar AIs. Personally I am in favor of keeping that answer (and answers like it) around, but it is unclear to me whether the current policy agrees or takes a harder line.
I agree, I think that answer is fine. Perhaps we should clarify the policy on this point.
I am not sure I need to ask another meta question. Anyway, here you go. To the mods, if we see a post which looks like an AI-generated text, provided by a low rep user (not a new contributor), which way would the mods prefer us to flag the post? A custom flag or an r/a flag? Please advise.
@Nobody: Either is perfectly fine. With a custom flag, you can explain your specific concerns and a diamond mod will definitely take a look. So I would personally use a custom flag in most cases. If a post is just manifestly unacceptable, then an R/A flag becomes an option -- these will also attract our attention, and in the (very rare) case that no diamond mod is paying attention, posts with multiple R/A flags might be deleted by AutoMod.
In light of recent events (https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/389582/what-is-the-network-policy-regarding-ai-generated-content) is there an update on what one should do when seeing a suspected chatbot post?
@GoodDeeds - good question. At a minimum, the guidance will change to something like "flag it, but don't mention ChatGPT, just say 'low quality' or some other euphemism." At a maximum, this policy may be overturned completely; there is no point banning ChatGPT if we're not allowed to delete things that are consistent with being automatically generated. We'll follow up soon; at the moment, we are still reeling from the terrible policy being dumped on us, and the resulting resignation(s).
Given that OpenAI (which made ChatGPT) has stated that it "sometimes writes plausible-sounding but incorrect or nonsensical answers", we evaluate based on the answer being incorrect and/or nonsensical as we always did before.
We have never deleted incorrect answers before, that would be a huge change. In the past, incorrect answers have somewhat-reliably been downvoted...but as the chat-GPT answers are plausible and well-written, and more people (with less knowledge of academia) are given the upvote privilege, this may not hold true in future.
@anonymousm: done
While there may be background, even automated, solutions, I suggest a user-facing change to some of the user dialogs.
Adding "Seems to be auto-generated", or similar, to either or both the flag and site-specific close dialogs would let users help keep things out as needed.
This is, perhaps, fraught if it would flood the mods with false positives, so consideration/thought is needed.
If SE overall makes a policy then such might be added to the more general close dialog, of course.
I don't know how difficult it is to change these dialogs and how much power the mods have to do it on their own. A "feature request" might be needed.
Added: It might be useful to add something to the help center advice.
For now the custom/"in need of moderator attention" is fine; it's a good help to the mods if you include whatever evidence you have though I'm nervous to point out examples of the types of things that would be useful. So far it's a relatively minor influence here, I suspect updates to flag reasons, etc. will primarily be motivated by the needs of StackOverflow which is dealing with quite a lot of these posts.
@BryanKrause, yes, I understand.
@BryanKrause, I found the following slashdot story interesting: What does ChatGpt say about itself?: https://slashdot.org/story/22/12/10/060229/what-does-chatgpt-say-about-itself. In essence it says it is just a parrot.
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3919 | My answer on “Writing ads to attract female PhD candidates” was deleted; why?
I posted an answer to this question: Writing ads to attract female PhD candidates, which boiled down to "How do I write job ads to attract female PhD candidates".
My answer was as follows:
Don't bother trying. Your ad is unlikely to make a difference either way; in order to do a post-graduate degree in Computer Science, one would presumably need an undergraduate degree in Computer Science. Since men who complete said undergraduate degrees significantly outnumber the women who complete said degrees (and the ratio gets worse the more developed your nation is, as the women are more free to pick the jobs that interest them, rather than the jobs that might be more economically viable), the number of potential female applicants is already too small to make a significant difference.
It got upvoted up to +11 votes, and was then deleted by Wrzlprmft and StrongBad. Since there doesn't seem to be any method of privately messaging them on here that I can see, I have to ask them publicly like this instead.
When I click the Help Centre link, I get the following list of reasons for answers to be deleted:
commentary on the question or other answers
asking another, different question
“thanks!” or “me too!” responses
exact duplicates of other answers
barely more than a link to an external site
not even a partial answer to the actual question
My answer fell into none of those categories. As I said in the comments of that question to another user, "Don't bother trying" is a valid answer to "How do I [do thing]"; it conveys useful information to the person who asked that question (namely, that attempting to [do thing] is a waste of time and effort, and that they would be better off not attempting to [do thing]).
As far as I can see, neither of the moderators who deleted my answer even made any comments explaining what problems they had with it; they just unilaterally deleted it without explanation.
FYI: Here is the pertaining review task.
Also note that the answer was at +15/−4 and this.
Okay, thanks, but that doesn't answer why it was deleted. What was wrong with my answer? It didn't seem to be breaking any of the rules.
Well if StrongBad was involved we know why. (I'm referencing https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Strong_Bad) in case someone gets offended.
"Don't bother trying" is a valid answer to "How do I [do thing]"
In general, I agree with you. An answer that questions the premise of the question is a valid answer.
But that’s not what your answer does.
The question does not aim at fundamentally changing the gender ratio in the field of computer science, but just at making ads more encouraging for women.
A valid (but likely wrong) answer that challenges the premises of that question would be:
Don’t bother trying.
While there might be an impact of the wording on the gender-specific appeal of job ads, Doe et al. showed that it is strongly field-dependent and least prominent in the field of computer science where women are at most 5 % less encouraged by typical job ads than men.
Yes, your answer also starts with don’t bother trying, but the following elaboration makes clear that this refers to something else than the asker’s goal (with this question).
Your answer addresses the question:
Should we bother to increase the gender ratio of computer scientists at the PhD level?
This is considerably different from the question in question. (It would also be too opinion-based for this platform.)
Hence, I considered your answer to fall in the category not even a partial answer to the actual question.
The question was how to increase the number of women that responded to their job advertisements; my answer was "Don't bother trying because the return on investment will be too small to make a significant difference". I'm not sure what the difference between my answer and your suggest answer is, in practice? It seems like hair-splitting to me.
The suggested answer says “don’t bother trying because the effect that you assume is negligible”; your answer says: “don’t bother trying because it’s not worth the effort”. The first answer may provide relevant information to the asker; the second is just challenging ethical decisions they obviously already made. It’s like suggesting a career in industry to somebody asking about the technicalities of graduate admissions.
@Hosea: Edits are not supposed to change entire lines of argument. Moreover, I doubt that you can find any evidence or reasonable argument to back the suggested post up (not that the original post contained good arguments, IMHO) – it is really just an example to illustrate what a “Don’t bother trying” answer would look like.
Well, there was this rather excellent documentary suggested in the comments, that I'd seen years ago and forgotten the name of.
@nick012000: I will not watch half an hour just to check your argument, but going by the title and first minutes, this goes along an entirely different argument.
Some cited academic references exist. I'm not taking sides on the deletion issue, but http://kifinfo.no/en/2016/05/bigger-gender-gaps-rich-countries and https://scholar.google.com/scholar?cluster=2353793478921969282&hl=en&as_sdt=0,5&sciodt=0,5 are places to start.
@Fuhrmanator: Unless I misunderstand this, this at best provides evidence for a claim that is similar to one sentence in the original answer in question. I see no apparent connection to the answer I “suggested”. Anyway, the question is not whether the original answer or the “suggested” answer are correct or backed up but whether they address the question or should be translated into each other whether editing.
The interpretation of the question as "how to balance the gender ratio in CS" is a reasonable guess based on the OP. It is considered acceptable on the SE network to look for the question behind the question -- see the "Giving Answers to XY problems" (no pun intended) part of https://meta.stackexchange.com/a/269222/ .
It is considered acceptable on the SE network to look for the question behind the question – If you have to and to some extent, yes. However, In this case, you do not have to as there is no XY problem: The asker clearly describes what they want to do and why, and it is by no means bizarre. Also the answer digs too deep: The question it presumes is too opinion-based for this site and several layers below the actual questions. As I already said before: It’s like suggesting a career in industry to somebody asking about the technicalities of graduate admissions.
@Wrzlprmft: "The suggested answer says 'don’t bother trying because the effect that you assume is negligible'; your answer says: 'don’t bother trying because it’s not worth the effort'." - I am having a hard time seeing the effective difference between these two answers. Both can be interpreted to challenge whether attracting female applicants is a worthwhile goal as such, and both can be seen as explaining why the suggested targetting of ads is not a way the answerer would recommend to choose.
@O.R.Mapper: Both can be interpreted to challenge whether attracting female applicants is a worthwhile goal as such – I don’t see how the “suggested” answer does this. It does not challenge the goal at all, just the method. — both can be seen as explaining why the suggested targetting of ads is not a way the answerer would recommend to choose. – The deleted answer does not talk about methods or job ads at all, but just challenges the goal of trying to change anything at the PhD level.
@Wrzlprmft: The suggested answer says the effect aimed for happens only to a negligible extent, thereby possibly challenging the idea that even what you consider only a negligible effect could be worthwhile to the asker in some way - just like the deleted answer can be interpreted to ignore the asker's idea of a worthwhile cost-performance ratio. On the other hand, both the deleted and the suggested answer conclude that in order to change things at the PhD level, adjusting the application process at the PhD level is not a promising method. Thus, they are basically the same.
@O.R.Mapper: The suggested answer says […] – There is a considerable difference: The “suggested” answer would provide new information that is actually about what the asker wants to know. Modulo rephrasing, it would be “there isn’t” to the asker’s “Is there a list […]?” — both […] conclude that […] adjusting the application process at the PhD level is not a promising method. – Again, there is a difference: The “suggested” answer is about the specific adjustment that the asker wishes to make; the deleted answer is only about the level.
@Wrzlprmft: Both answers respond to "Is there a list (...)?". One says "None with significant enough effects.", the other one "None with a sufficiently good cost-performance ratio." One answer points out just how small the effect of the proposed method is, the other one shows an inherent limitation of the method. Both are equally valid ways of showing that the proposed method is not a promising way to achieve the goal. I still don't see why one answer would be better than the other, but it seems we won't reach an agreement on this one :)
This difference is arbitrary and not a reason to delete. I don't understand how this got any upvotes.
The way the SE system works is we like to have our discussions about moderation in public so everyone can participate since we are really a community moderated site and so there is a level of transparency.
In general, regular users cannot delete an answer with a net positive score. They are forced to flag the answer. It then gets reviewed by other high rep users, and based on that review gets brought to a diamond moderator's attention. As a diamond moderator I have extra tools and privileges that allow me to delete up voted answers. The review of you answer is here: https://academia.stackexchange.com/review/low-quality-posts/57451
Basically, a high rep user raised a flag on your answer (it is not public who raised the flag, but they are a respected, trusted and valued member of the site). Then 7 additional high rep users reviewed your answer and 5 of them recommended it be deleted. Another user flagged your answer as rude. Basically 7 users voiced support of deleting the answer and 2 suggested it was ok.
Based on this review, I looked at your answer. I agreed with the first comment to the answer
Sans the first sentence, this is a poignant comment
And could see how the 7 users might be agreeing with the idea that your answer is not even a partial answer to the actual question.
Overall, the decision to delete the answer was a real struggle for me. My personal preference would be to keep the answer. In other words, if I had a non-mod vote the review would have been 7-3 instead of 7-2, even factoring in your presumably positive vote, only gets us to 7-4. I deleted your answer, because the evidence at the time was that is what the community wanted. If the community thinks the answer is worth saving (and I might even write an answer arguing it should be), I will happily undelete it.
I suggest you either provide an answer to this meta question arguing why the answer should be undeleted because in fact it is more than just a comment and provides at least a partial answer to the question. If the community agrees (by up voting, since votes on meta are interpreted differently), we will undelete the answer.
One difficult aspect of judging the community wishes is the net vote count does not always reflect the wishes of the community. Questions that make the HNQ list attract a lot of attention from SE users whoa may not be active members of academia.SE. These users lack the reputation to down vote questions and answers, but can upvote. This bias is a known problem: Prevent questions on Hot List from being upvoted by casual visitors (only rep is from association bonus). There is also the issue of down votes costing rep, so there tends to be an upwards bias. In general, 4 down votes is a lot for the main site. It is also a lot on meta, so this answer (and my actions) has clearly struck a nerve.
I'm not really comfortable with the idea that any content is deleted just because the community wants it to be. Such an approach leaves too much room for drowning out less popular points of view. This seems antithetical to the goals of SE. If your deletion was based not on community opinion but on less arbitrary criteria, I recommend deemphasizing the notes about community opinion being a deciding factor and putting greater emphasis on the actual criteria. (You do mention that you felt this answer was more a of comment, but you don't unpack that thought at all.)
@jpmc26 I am not sure your views are consistent with a community moderated site, but you should probably ask this as a new question.
I think they clearly are. Even though the community moderates the site, we're still given instructions and expected to follow them. (This is why we have review bans.) Our votes are supposed to be based on applicability of the rules rather than our desires. Yes, we trust users to exercise their moderation abilities according to the rules, but a diamond moderator has an even greater responsibility to be as objective as possible. Note that I'm not saying your actions were wrong (or right), merely that your answer here does not emphasize the rules to which all users are supposed to adhere.
As a procedural point, it's worth pointing out that the linked review would have straightforwardly deleted the answer had it been negatively scored. Similarly, that answer's score needs to be considered carefully: the question was on the Hot Network Questions sidebar for a substantial period, and those are well-established to attract upvotes (but not downvotes!) from a much wider cross-section of the SE network userbase (including many users with a much smaller investment in this site) than regular posts.
"I deleted your answer, because the evidence at the time was that is what the community wanted". The community? 7 vs. 2: p-value = 0.84 ;)
@Orion along with a strong prior based on the content and who was voting. Based on the answers and votes on this question, makes it seem like I understood what the community wanted. Also remember that we close and delete questions with only 5 votes and ignore up votes completely.
One thing I would like to point out: flags are anonymous to the general public for a reason. Even stating that the flagging person was a respected, trusted and valued member (implying that they had way more than the 15 (!) rep needed to flag) is too much information in my humble opinion. Please ask yourself: If a 15 rep user had flagged the post and the review result was the same would your choice have been a different one? I hope the answer is ‘no’.
@Jan the reputation, and past actions, of users can play a role in decisions. As for the review of this answer and the actions, the review was clear enough that it didn't really matter to me that it was high rep users voicing their opinions. As for leaking too much information, I disagree, but you should ask that as a separate question.
I was specifically asking about the person who raised the flag. The reviewers are, per definition, relatively high in rep as they can only review from 2000 rep upwards. I also don’t really consider the flagger’s reputation and trustedness ‘leaking’, only irrelevant.
I find it strange you'd delete any answer with a net positive score of >10 based on the "wishes of the community." The wishes of the community are most represented in the answer score, not in the review queue with its extremely small sample size.
@user168715 see edit, voting tends to be more biased and less reflective of the community than reviews. This is especially true of questions that make the HNQ list.
The 7-vs.-2 figure doesn't make sense; flags can't be counted since users can't flag things as okay. The review process itself is biased (I mean, when we see a post flagged for review, we're going to start from a place of skepticism about it), so even 5-vs.-2 would be overstating the signal. Not to take a position on this Meta thread, just the signal analysis doesn't follow.
Or, I guess users can kinda flag things as okay by up-voting them, and this post did get a lot more up-votes than down-votes. But that's also a biased signal. So, again, not to take a position on this Meta thread, just trying to correctly qualify the signal. It's actually kinda neat to think about the modeling phenomena that go into this situation. There're interesting phenomena like social inertia in both the voting and flagging processes, etc..
If I understand correctly, the question had +11 votes, as such it seems that the "community" valued this answer. In addition, even if that was not the case, as @jpmc26 said, "I'm not really comfortable with the idea that any content is deleted just because the community wants it to be. Such an approach leaves too much room for drowning out less popular points of view".
Regardless of the last statement, 15 people liked the answer, 4 did not, it means (to me) that those 15 people thought the answer did provide some value. So, while I appreciate the point of view of the moderators that the answer did not answer the question, it seems that at least 15 people did find some value in the answer.
I am just a lowly user, but, for what it is worth, these are my 2 cents, and I would vote for the answer to be re-instated (if I had the opportunity).
To summarise: why do I believe the answer should be undeleted?
It was up-voted by 15 people.
The answer does answer, at least partially, the question asked. In other words, people reading that answer (who may have the same question) may still get some feed-back (they might agree with @nick012000 that it is useless to bother trying).
The reason I go to SE is to read different answers, and I would not want that particular answer deleted.
The answer is not completely off-topic, nor is abusive or insulting
For what it's worth, votes on posts that end up on the "Hot Network Questions" list and get a lot of views through that, tend to be very skewed. These get a disproportionately large number of views from users who are not regular contributors and have only the association bonus (100 points). Those who want to upvote can, but those who want to downvote can't because they don't have enough rep. (See this meta post for more details.) This post was on HNQ list and got lots of views, so I wouldn't read too much into the vote ratio.
@ff524 That is something I had not considered.
This is your opportunity to vote to get the answer undeleted. You need to provide a clear reason that convinces enough users that the answer should be undeleted, in which case I (or another mod) will undelete the answer. That said, the other answers, and the support for them, suggests that the community is okay with the answer being deleted.
I am not directly involved in this, just an interested user in how SE works. I offered my reason on why I believe the answer should be undeleted: it was up-voted by 15 people. The answer does answer, at least partially, the question asked. In other words, people reading that answer (who may have the same question) may still get some feed-back (they might agree with @nick012000 that it is useless to bother trying). This is why I go to SE, to learn about different answers, and I would not want that particular answer deleted.
Don't you know that moderators are executive, legislative, and judiciary all in one? Don't you know that the SE moderation is also winner-take-all? Don't you know that moderators determine what "rule of law" is?
Since you can't be pro-law today anymore without people assuming that you're being pro-opposite-party when the "law" doesn't match with popular opinion, I do lean liberal.
Math (my community) has the same problem. I would be thrilled if math gained more venerable women mathematicians. Math needs as many brilliant minds as possible. However, attempting recruitment at a PhD level seems to be misdirected. There's research that suggests women tend to lose interest in the sciences between middle and high school. This needs to be researched more.
The way I interpret nicks answer is that you can't fish a dry pond; rather the people upstream controlling the dam need to think more downriver. And this is a perfectly acceptable answer to the question.
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4245 | Why do we redirect all "what is happening to my paper" questions?
We commonly redirect questions such as "Manuscript status changed from Review in progress to Ready for review" to "What does the typical workflow of a journal look like". However they are not similar in essence at all. At best, the answer in the community question is only tangentially related; it doesn't say anything about status changes for example. This question is by no means unique either; see all the questions that are already linked to the community question.
Redirecting everything to the "typical workflow" question is similar to redirecting "How to nail a Ph.D. interview?" to "How does the admissions process work for Ph.D. programs in the US, particularly for weak or borderline students?", country tag notwithstanding. Admissions processes in different countries is probably no less different than journal workflows in different journals + fields.
Are the redirects overdone?
Would you rather them be closed as too specific and go ask the journal? If the answer depends on the specific journal, it is not a good question for us. If it is more of a general question, then the canonical question provides the answer. If there is something missing from the answer on the canonical question, let's fix that.
Why wouldn't what you wrote apply to the admissions process too then? Take the "how to nail a PhD interview" question - why can't we redirect that to the canonical one?
@Allure The differences among admission processes are much larger than those among journal workflows.
@Allure if you want to add an interview section to the admissions question, I would say linking it makes sense. We just don't get too many questions about PhD interviews.
@MassimoOrtolano I'm not convinced - there're plenty of books on how to deal with graduate admissions, and those deal with the process as a whole not just a single country / university. If it's possible to treat the process as a whole, it's also (arguably) possible to answer everything in the canonical question.
@StrongBad the canonical question already has an interview section actually, it's just blank right now.
@Allure I haven't read any of those books, but I very doubt that they can have a general validity.
@Allure Were you talking about this question when you said the section is blank right now? I am curious about how common is PhD interview given that Skype is popular in these days. Job interview is one of the main topics on Workplace SE.
I would categorise “What is happening to my paper” questions as follows:
Questions which are directly answered by the canonical Q&A¹. These should clearly be closed as duplicate.
Questions where the asker tells us little about what happened and what they already know. Your example question is typical for this category and leaves us with the following questions:
Did another instance of ready for review precede review in progress?
Is the asker aware of how the peer-review process generally work?
Did the asker already make the guess that the peer reviews did not happen or were disatisfactory and either excluded that option or just wants a third opinion?
Voting to close or closing such a question as duplicate of the canonical Q&A¹ prompts the asker to clarify why their question is not answered by the canonical Q&A.
If it isn’t, this will ideally allow the asker to clarify all of the above and leave an interesting question, where we do not need to reiterate the typical workflow – something we did again and again before we had the canonical Q&A.
Questions where the asker makes clear why the canonical Q&A¹ does not answer the question, but which can be answered by a slight addition to the canonical Q&A, usually by adding some name used for some stage in the process. In that case, there are two options:
Answer the new question and perform the respective edit to the canonical Q&A, linking back to the new question.
Close the new question as duplicate, perform the respective edit to the canonical Q&A, and leave a comment that it is now addressed.
In most cases I would lean to the latter option, but if the answer was difficult to obtain, I would clearly prefer the former one.
Questions which do not fall within the canonical Q&A’s scope, e.g., questions about an atypical case. These should be left open.
My impression is that we mostly get the second kind. However, I also observed users voting to close questions of the fourth kind as duplicate of the canonical Q&A.
Some sidenotes:
[the community question] doesn't say anything about status changes for example.
I beg to disagree. There is an extensive diagram how statuses change into each other and text explaining how and when this can happen.
If you ask me, the main problem with How to nail a Ph.D. interview? is that it is too broad. Interestingly, nobody voted to close as such yet.
¹ What does the typical workflow of a journal look like?
The statuses in the canonical question don't deal with "reviewer in progress" into "ready for review" however. I also notice that once a question is closed it's seldom reopened.
@Allure As one of the active participants on this site, I observe that closed questions rarely get re-opened because the high rep users are seldom to review the re-open queue. Thanks.
@Allure For example, as you can see in https://academia.stackexchange.com/review/reopen/64754 , there was not enough re-open votes in time, the re-open votes expired, therefore it stays closed although I think it should not be closed. What a pity! Did you do Re-open Review lately?
@Anyon: Fixed. Thanks for spotting.
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5474 | If I "contact support", who do I actually contact?
If I submit this, do I reach the mods of this site, or Stack Exchange staff? If this reaches SE staff, can I get a private chat room with Academia.SE mods?
You reach Stack Exchange staff.
If you want private chat room with the mods, this can be arranged. I recommend to use a flag (which can only be seen by mods) and give us some detail what you need to talk about. However, since this takes some effort, this should be an exception: We won’t be doing this for somebody with little activity in this community or frequently (although once a room is created, it can be re-used indefinitely).
Mind that whenever I refer to something only being accessible by mods, staff may access it as well.
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4400 | How to deal with the "research at highly productive institutions" question?
Why is research at highly productive research institutions better than those at not-so-highly productive research institutions?
Unfortunately the answers to that question focus on critiquing how the rankings came about, which are not really relevant to what I want to ask. Clearly I worded the question poorly. I've already tried to focus the question by editing out the mention of Zhejiang University (depressingly this still led to responses about the anglosphere and whatnot even though I'd left in a note that I'm not interested in cultural factors), but it's evidently not good enough and people continue to interpret the question in a different way.
What I really want to ask (as I wrote in a comment to Thomas's answer):
Assuming you are an academic, you'll have some idea where the best research in your field is performed. If you next compare where that is versus where the top universities in the world are, you should see a positive correlation. The question asks why there is a correlation.
I don't think this question is salvageable unfortunately. What should I do now?
Start another question with "is research at Oxford in general better than at Southampton?" If the answer to this is yes, then I can start another question after that linking to this question. However this seems like an overly narrow question since it explicitly names two universities only.
Start another question with "why is research at Oxford in general better than at Southampton?". Same issue as the previous option: it's narrow.
Start another question picking universities by THE reputation rankings, which might sidestep objections based on ranking methodology; however it's not apparent to me that the universities with the best reputations also do the best research (looking at the list itself, they should, but in a vacuum there does not have to be a correlation between the two factors).
Do nothing and accept paul garrett's answer.
Something else?
I think the problem with the original question, as well as all suggested modifications, is that there is not really a meaningful question. You seem to be asking why there is a correlation between a university doing research that is perceived as "good", and a metric that is based on how good the research at a university is perceived to be. It's really quite circular.
Thanks for answer. I see where the circularity is coming from now - will need to think about how to edit the question.
I am not sure what you mean by best universities, but for the UK you could ask if there is a correlation between REF ranking (research) and student satisfaction rankings, and if so why they are correlated.
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3725 | Is time of submission of a question or an answer associated with more or less views and votes?
I have submitted several posts to Academia and received very variable feedbacks in terms of views and votes.
It seems to me that choosing a specific time of submission (typically working hours in US time zones) leads to more views and votes.
Is this true?
If you're game for some statistical analysis, the data is available.
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3789 | Can I post an ad for a postdoc position blurring the name of uni and person, to point out illegal activity?
An ad that one of my advisors shared contains a sentence that is against law and working ethic, and I am surprised to see an associate professor request from a postdoc to stay more than 10 h per day.
I need advice how to report this behavior and what legal consequences this professor can face. Is this a suitable place?
Do you want to avoid legal consequences or cause them?
@Wrzlprmft cause!!!
@SSimon, what is your agenda?
I just returned from a postdoc in China where I was officially requested to work 6/12. Is that technically illegal in China?
I agree with Wrzlprmft's answer, but to expound on his last point: what goal will your question serve? If you suspect/know that some researcher somewhere is doing something wrong, contact that university's legal department, or graduate student ombudsman, or department chair, or any of the many people in that school who are there to ensure that stuff like this doesn't happen.
We can provide opinions and insights, but oftentimes you'll get a better answer by simply taking advantage of university resources.
my advisor didnt do anything wrong, it is an add from other university.
@SSimon - Thanks, updated answer to address. Doesn't change much of what I said.
Likely this was in China, and in my experience there are no university resources nor local true support to worker rights
In general, parts of this question (“I need advice how to report this behavior”) are on-topic. However, before asking, please consider:
Except for blatant cases, we cannot judge whether something is illegal and what consequences it has. Therefore it is usually better that you assume it as given that the sentence in question is illegal and only briefly describe its nature – instead of quoting the advertisement. If I understand your question correctly, it should suffice to say something along the lines of the following:
The advertisement requires the postdoc to work more than 10 h per day, which is clearly against the work laws of the respective jurisdiction.
Even if you anonymise all names and similar, the sentence in question may be specific enough to find the actual advertisement, connect it to your question, and identify you as the whistleblower.
Please specify what your goal and motivation are: Do you want this to cause high or minimum noise? Do you want to stay anonymous? Do you want the consequences to be high or low? Why?
high noise......
What does "high noise" mean?
| Stack Exchange | 2025-03-21T12:54:48.918863 | 2017-07-31T02:29:12 | {
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3944 | I have anxiety and hard time asking questions because I am concerned that I can be identified
This is not my first question about privacy at Meta. In the recent year, I got more paranoid, but the following question where a user asked something, and literally, everyone can find out who he is, returned my fear of being exposed. I am so afraid that people can do even with me, that I hide my real name.
What should I do to release this stress, since my first point of joining here is to liberate myself from fear?
Or maybe SE is not for me?
where a user asked something, and literally, everyone can find out who he is
Yes, but this user clearly gives away identifying information. That’s their own responsibility.
what should I do to release this stress since my first point of joining here is to liberate myself from fear?
You can:
Avoid an account name (or any personal details) that bear a connection to you.
Make an account for the sole purpose of asking your question.
This way you avoid that somebody can deduce your identity from your other posts on the site.
Note that if you do this, you must avoid any interaction between your two accounts, such as voting for each other (see this Meta post for details).
After you drafted your post, check it as follows:
Imagine yourself in the position of a stranger reading the post, and see if it’s possible to discover the identity of the poster with the information from the question and what’s generally available on the Internet.
Even better: Ask somebody you trust to do this for you.
Remove all irrelevant details that are irrelevant to the question or swap them to obfuscate your identity.
For example, swap the gender of a person involved if you are sure that gender does not pertain to the question.
Note that this is a bit risky, as you may not know which details are actually relevant to the question.
Ask somebody you trust to write (not post) your question for you to avoid being identifiable by your writing style.
Or maybe SE is not for me?
As long as you use a separate account for your question, I would say that you are as safe from identification as anywhere else on the public Internet.
Oh, so cloning is allowed on stak exchange? @wrzlprmft?
@SSimon: The technical term is sockpuppetting, but: yes, as long as you do not do anything that you could not do with a single account (see the linked post on Meta SE).
I don't understand "Try to uncover your identity from the question you wish to ask. Even better: Ask somebody you trust to do this for you." I can't edit it to make it clearer because I can't figure out what you mean with that bullet point. Could you explain your idea in a comment, please?
@aparente001: See my edit.
Thanks. Check my edit, please -- did I understand your idea right? (At first, I thought when you wrote "uncover," you meant the opposite -- "cover up"!) // If my edit is correct, I will separately write a comment about that part of your answer -- but first I'd like to be sure I understood your idea.
@aparente001: Yes, I updated a bit, but you got it quite well.
OK, I like the addition of what's generally available on the internet. I guess I'm not as concerned about this bullet point as I was. (I was imagining the effect on a person with a lot of anxiety, to get instructions on how to obsess even more about the intrusive thought. But now I think I'm okay with this bullet point because it gives an objective procedure to follow.)
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4879 | Reopening this question on MDPI
I've not voted but I'm thinking of doing so: Is MDPI a reputable Academic Publisher?
Reason is that MDPI has grown really big. It's roughly the fifth biggest publisher overall now, which is incredible considering that it was much smaller (~17th in 2015). It's arguable that How to identify predatory publishers/journals (the "duplicate" question) works as an answer for small publishers, since there are so many of them and they are often very similar to each other. However, there aren't many publishers of MDPI's size. They attract attention from other publishers (example), and there are more facts about them available (e.g. their annual report).
The question also has close to 100k views as of time of writing in spite of being closed.
I wonder what others think about this.
I agree that MDPI is a special case which is not properly covered by the generic question. A typical predatory publisher it is very easy to spot as such, and there is a broad consensus on their status. I suspect that there is no consensus on how to categorize MDPI, and having some high-quality answers there could be very useful.
It less clear to me whether reopening the old question or having a new question would be the way to go. As things have changed in the past three years, maybe a new question makes more sense?
Finally, we usually avoid discussing specific institutions - but if MDPI is the fifth biggest publisher, that would be reason enough for me to make an exception here.
I think I learned enough about MDPI that I can write a much better answer than the current ones. Hence, voting to reopen. A new question would also work, but I don't see how that would work, since the effective question is the same.
I don't have a clear idea about this, but I'm inclined towards keeping it close.
On one side, I think it would be reasonable to have that question reopened to allow anyone to write an answer better representing the current situation.
On the other side, having had to read and moderate some recent comments about that publisher, I suspect we would end up having two large and strongly biased factions insulting each other with no possibility of finding a common ground. I'm thus not sure whether any good would come from such a reopening. Moreover, where do we set the closing line then?
If that negative scenario you depict became true, one could still close it again.
Please see my comment below @AnonymousPhysicist's answer.
Even if this question were on topic, I do not want it reopened because the current answers are obsolete. The top answers are not well founded.
In recent years I have peer reviewed several times for MDPI and had wildly inconsistent experiences regarding the editors' reaction to my peer reviews. It may be that, like Elsivier, their journals vary greatly in quality, in which case the question has no answer.
I want it reopened for exactly the reasons given in this answer.
@lighthousekeeper The subject question is a shopping question to me because it seeks assessment for MDPI. (2) The subject question is opinion-based according to this answer (I just upvoted it, meaning that I agree). Users who have good experience with MDPI would say yes, it's a reputable publisher, those who have bad experience would say, no, it's not reputable. For these two reasons, I would vote to "Leave Closed" if it ever gets to Reopen queue.(I just checked, I gave it "Leave Close" a while ago.
@scaaahu Sounds more like an answer than a response to my comment.
@lighthousekeeper Actually, my intent was to comment on this answer. I just accidentally put your name at the beginning. Sorry about that.
@scaaahu I see. For (2), I think there's more to be said here. There seem to be some aspects that are fishy, some aspects that are more legit, and a good answer would list these. For (1), that's technically right, but I think that this is such an interesting and timely case that it would warrant an exception. The alternative (having the closed question from 2012 as a top google result) is less useful.
@lighthousekeeper One of the reasons I am reluctant to answer is because of my time zone. It's close to my snack and bed time. Let me express my biggest concern here. If someone asks a question about the other publishers, e.g. Elsivier, are we going to close it or leave open? My take is to close all assessments (except software, though).
@scaaahu For Elsevier, we could discuss that case, too, if there was a closed question about it that attracted 100k views...
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4955 | Removal of answer content by moderator --- edit detracts from the answer
My recent answer to a question about how to address racist comments has been edited by a moderator (eykanal) to remove a substantial portion of the content. As authority for the edit the moderator cites another meta post discussing whether or not a different answer contains off-topic commentary. The moderator also states, "OP - If you wish to discuss this edit please feel free to do so on Meta, but please refrain from heavy editing as the current votes are based on what was present." The moderator has now locked the post to prevent rollback of his edits.
(A brief history of the answer: (1) there was an initial detailed answer that received a large number of upvotes and a few downvotes (approx +50 net upvotes); (2) following solicitation from other users in the comments section, I added an additional section to the answer, and there were then a small number of additional votes which did not make any substantial change to the net score of the answer; (3) the moderator edited the answer to remove the bulk of the content (including both the new section and most of the original post), based on his rationale above; (4) based on the rationale that the answer should not be heavily edited after receiving substantial numbers of votes, I rolled back all edits to restore my answer to its original form in (1), when the bulk of voting occurred; and (5) moderator then restored his edit removing most of the content, and locked the post to prevent further edits.)
I do not agree with the removal of content from this answer and I would like the original content of the post restored. There are several problems with the moderator edit:
(1) It removes relevant content --- this content is on-topic and gives a detailed argument challenging a false premise in the question, in order to give context for the advice at the end of the post;
(2) The edit does not fall within the scope of when should I edit posts in the help centre guidance;
(3) The edit does not leave the post in a better state than the original version; and
(4) The edit contradicts the moderator's own instruction that the post should not be heavily edited after the bulk of votes are accrued to the post;
(5) Unlike the case of the answer that was the subject of the meta-post cited by the moderator, this answer has a high net upvote score, suggesting that a large number of users found the post to be of value in answering the question; and
(6) The edits pre-empt the current discussion of development of "frame-challenge guidelines" on Meta.
I appreciate the work of moderators on this site, including the present moderator. Nevertheless, in this instance my answer has been edited down to a shell of its original content, and this edit substantially detracts from the quality of the post. (The main negative effect is that it removes contextual argument on the premises of the question that are crucial to understanding the advice given in the post.) It seems to be getting more common for moderators to edit down answers where they feel that the content is "controversial", and in such cases, there are some very stretched interpretations of what is "off-topic". In particular, in questions where there is an assertion of "racism" by the OP, moderators seem to be opposed to answers that question this premise. Questions on racism, sexism, etc., are necessarily going to be controversial, so it is important that we allow scope for "frame challenges", questioning about potentially false premises, etc., without removing this content as "off-topic".
A secondary problem here is that it represents an instance where moderators unilaterally remove the bulk of contents from an answer (in this case a highly upvoted answer) and then put the onus on the answerer to go to Meta to appeal this change. In previous cases there is usually a discussion on Meta that comes first, to discuss whether or not the answer should be edited down. The present case sets a bad precedent in which moderators remove content under a strained interpretation of what is "off-topic".
Moderation on this site has always had a substantial arbitrary component. It's time you accept that. Also, I strongly suggest you learn to be more concise; excessively long posts are not useful and voters should vote accordingly.
I think it’s long past time to block all questions touching on gender or race from the HNQ. In the former case there’s already a highly upvoted meta answer saying to do this!
Voters did vote accordingly, and overwhlemingly found the answer to be useful (hence its large net-upvote total).
If we are going to take that line (of selectively ignoring voting totals when they tell us something we don't like) then really we can never invoke vote totals as relevant to anything. Even if it is true that the post was upvoted on HNQ, those are upvotes from users who apparently appreciated the answer; counterfactual downvotes of people who don't have that privilege is completely speculative. As stated, the moderator in this case specifically invoked the justification that a post should not be heavily edited after it has accrued its votes; that militates in favour of the original post.
I'm removing the comments (and ensuing discussion) that are basically an ad hominum attack against one of the moderators. We debate ideas/decisons, not the people who write them (per our code of conduct). As for the demand for details of internal moderator discussions and tasking: sorry, no, we do not comment publicly on these.
@cag51: Based on visible comments, it seems there are pretty liberal rules re ad hominum against OP (i.e., me). Perhaps review some of those comments too, including a certain sentence fragment in your own (otherwise polite) answer.
I am not sure what comments you are referring to, and am baffled as to which of my sentence fragments could have offended you. In any case, you can always flag ad hominum attacks (such flags are usually reviewed by multiple moderators before being declined, if they end up being declined); that said, we try not to delete comments on meta unless they are truly abusive or unacceptable (we do not want to be in the position of censoring discussions about censorship).
@cag51: I haven't flagged your answer because I think the bulk of it is polite and reasonable. It is the insinuation that I consider SE to be my personal blog that I consider to be ad hominum. Like I said, just one little thing in an otherwise polite answer (and honestly not a big deal), but if you are looking to purge ad hominum there is plenty of it around in the comments here. To be clear, I think your answer is reasonable, and I probably would upvote it if not for the slight ad hominum, which detracts from it.
Obviously I agree with Massimo's answer, but let me add my own reasoning.
Your answer included a 1500 word (!!) monograph describing your views on the distinction between racism and concern about migration. This long discussion was unrelated to Academia (as defined in our help center) and only loosely related to the question at hand. This occurred a day or two after you wrote 500 words describing your views on the FDA's approval process for the COVID vaccines.
This is a Q&A site, not your personal blog, and as you know, we are rather strict about closing off-topic questions and not allowing anything but answers in the answer box. There is no magic formula that can unambiguously differentiate on-topic and off-topic answers, so there will occasionally be disagreements like this one, even between reasonable people with good intentions (which I am sure you are). But in this case, I think the consensus will be that three-page treatises on racism -- going back to the Irish Rebellion of 1641 -- are not sufficiently probative of the question, which was "how can racist/offensive comments from a supervisor be addressed?"
Sorry, was traveling the past two days. Both these answers address the reasoning behind the edits quite well. I don't have anything else to add.
First, let me remark that controversial cases like this one are always first discussed internally by the moderators' team, sometimes with further advice from the Stack Exchange Community Managers, and the moderator action that you see is virtually never unilateral but it's usually agreed by all moderators.
As you can see from the answer's timeline, your answer received two not-an-answer flags and two rude-or-abusive flags. The number and type of flags clearly indicate that your answer is problematic and not up to the standards of the site and the code of conduct.
We decided to salvage the part that attempted somehow to answer the question because the alternative, given the content and the flags, would have been that of deleting the answer entirely.
Final remarks:
When answering a question, try to accept the premises at face value. You can challenge an action or its effect, but questioning what someone has witnessed, knowing that they wouldn't be able to give more details anyway, is rude.
Don't use answers to propose or discuss theories around topics that are not considered on-topic for this site.
This meta answer, written by a Community Manager, essentially covers also this case.
I agree with most of this answer, but I am curious why the number of flags raised is relevant to the suitability of a post. Since almost anyone can flag a post, isn't it more an indication of the controversial nature of the post, without necessarily being an indication of quality?
@GoodDeeds Anyone can flag, but few do and an answer with four flags is a rare event. Simply controversial answers are usually just downvoted, not flagged.
I see, thanks..
Mere flags do not show that an answer is flawed. There is clearly nothing rude/abusive in the post, so flags that assert that are highly dubious. You seem to be giving a "heckler's veto" based on whoever is willing to flag posts.
Nothing in the answer disputes anything witnessed by the OP; it takes this at face value. What the answer disputes is the characterisation of actions by the OP. Saying that this is rude is censorious, and non-scholarly; academics should have the ability to challenge subjective characterisations of actions in a question.
@Ben As I wrote, we had an internal discussion. Flags are indeed a way to indicate possible issues in answers and questions. They exist exactly for this purpose. For you, there may be nothing rude or abusive in your answer, for others there may clearly be. Since no one but the OP has witnessed those actions, disputing their characterization without enough ground can be considered rude.
@Massimo: If you take a totally subjective view of what is rude then that is literally the heckler's veto. Anyone can flag a post as rude/abusive and if you are unwilling to engage in an objective analysis of that claim then that is a veto anytime a sufficient number of users choose to flag an answer. Deletion of an answer then becomes purely a popularity contest.
@Ben I'm not a moderator, so they should feel free to correct me, but my understanding of the process goes like this: (1) Flags draw the attention of moderators, (2) Multiple flags indicate a situation worth the moderators discussing as a team rather than simply resolving individually, (3) The moderators then independently decide what to do about it, regardless of the nature of the flags or the opinion of the writer. You seem to be interpreting flags as votes, when they are not (except in the special case of spam).
@jakebeal: In the present post, the moderator explicitly states, "The number and type of flags clearly indicate that your answer is problematic and not up to the standards of the site and the code of conduct." So this contradicts the view that moderators independently decide the matter; it is an explicit statement that the flags prove that the answer is problematic/not up to standard.
I think Massimo was just a bit imprecise in the wording and was intending to convey that this number of flags is incredibly unusual and indicates a likely problem, not to imply that moderators don't also consider the validity of the flags and content of the post. Focusing on that sentence and ignoring the rest of this answer seems disingenuous.
@BryanKrause: That is a really unfair comment; I am surely entitled to assume that people mean what they say. If Massimo was indeed misdescribing the process then that is a fault in his answer, not a fault in my interpretation. To say that I am disingenuous to believe that he means what he said is totally unfair. The reactions to my complaint on Meta (which moderators suggest you raise in these cases) are really nasty stuff, and very disappointing.
@Ben What do you think of Massimo's first paragraph (and the third), and how that relates to your interpretation of the later sentence?
@BryanKrause: They are fine as far as it goes. If moderators look at things as a group, great. If they try to salvage the part of the answer not in dispute, also great. If the moderators tell you that the occurrance of multiple flags clearly indicates that the answer is problematic (and you take them at their word that this is what they do in deciding on the response) then that undermines the other two aspects of the process. Okay, I've answered your question; now, what do you think of calling someone disingenuous for taking moderators at their word in their description of the process?
@BryanKrause: With regard to me focussing on that part, we naturally comment on parts of an answer we are concerned about, not the parts that are fine. I doubt you go through answers and write lots of comments about all the parts of the answer that raise no concerns to you.
@Ben I stand by it. I think you chose to read in something that wasn't said: to interpret "4 flags indicate your answer is problematic" (personally as a mod I don't think I have ever seen 4 flags on one post except for explicit spam) to mean "we don't review the validity of the flags and just count them". You can assert as much as you want that your answer wasn't rude or abusive, some people in the community thought otherwise and flagged as such, and the mods agreed the answer needed to be edited to stand.
The stated reason for the edit was that the answer was (found to be) off-topic; not rude or abusive. I'm not sure why people are asserting that.
@Ben I wasn't one of the flaggers, but yeah, I found your answer pretty rude and abusive, as it excuses a whole thread of racist behavior as somehow justified. I think it was charitable by the mods to consider it merely off-topic, and to edit by removing the (in my view) rude and abusive parts and letting the rest remain.
It did not excuse anything; it merely asked for a deeper inquiry into the reasoning of an anti-migrant sentiment (and explicitly noted that this might or might not have a racist basis on further inquiry). Nothing in the answer was remotely rude or abusive to OP.
That is really one of the problems here.; if you say, "X might or might not be racist; seek more information" you have people on here say "you are excusing racist behaviour and are therefore ipso facto being rude and abusive to anyone who asserts that this behaviour is racist". That attitude forcloses any analysis of the subject and replaces it with smears.
Let us continue this discussion in chat.
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4799 | Should [coauthors] be a synonym of [authorship]?
I just noticed that there are two highly similar but distinct tags on the main site:
authorship, which has 893 questions, and co-authors, autorship, and equal-authors as synonyms.
coauthors, which has 25 questions, no tag description, and no synonyms.
Since co-authors is a synonym of authorship, I think that either:
coauthors should be made a synonym of authorship (this seems most appropriate); or
co-authors and coauthors should be made synonyms of each other, with neither being a synonym of authorship.
I have now made [tag:coauthors] synonym of [tag:authorship].
Yes, your option 1 seems the most appropriate. Here, questions about co-authors are essentially questions about authorship, and I can hardly see a description of co-authors sufficiently different from that of authorship: I would thus consider 2 not a good option.
Moreover, the description of authorship already explicitly mentions problems of co-authorship:
Queries related to academic authorship, i.e., who should be an author, the order of authors, or special roles such as corresponding authorship.
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4793 | Controversial question getting worse
Mod's notice: Given the clear outcome of the poll below, I've now closed the question (MO).
I have the highest voted answer to this controversial post regarding racism against an Indian student. The claims in the OP are quite extraordinary, but the poster deserves the benefit of the doubt, so I gave sincere advice. Then I read this reply by the OP on my answer that was just posted yesterday (September 19th):
In the end, I remarked to this individual that one serious problem is that I'm a high caste individual, and look at white people in my university as an abominable low caste, and that automatically creates a lot of problems.
I had to re-read it to make sure I wasn't misunderstanding. Then I looked back over the rest of the posts, and I'm not sure what to make of it. The OP implicates the following list of people with some very over-the-top racism, including physical confrontations and swearing:
Other PhD students
The department chair
The Dean
HR
Multiple faculty
It's certainly possible that this person landed at the most racist institution in all of Massachusetts. But in light of the quote above, it seems more plausible that either the OP is the problem, or more likely, the whole post is an elaborate and puzzling attempt at trolling.
At a minimum the conversation has become so focused on this person's bizarre situation that I can't imagine it being particularly useful to other readers. I'm not sure what the appropriate action would be though.
So what does the rest of the community think? Am I being overly harsh in my judgment after reading the above comment?
Some more context from the linked chat room from the same OP:
I wrote this after documenting a huge number of incidents inside our
department, and got a reply from the Title IX office saying there's
nothing really wrong. Actually I'm not sure if all of the documented
incidents could be dealt with by the Title IX office, but certainly
there were major serious incidents there that they should have dealt
with. Caste is officially a protected category in this university. I
felt a bit sick myself talking in this manner with these disgusting
hypocrites who pretend to be such progressives that they make caste a
protected class, but with this cabal, it felt fine. I wanted to see
their reaction; if they would do anything now that I claimed that the
whole problem was basically casteist. This was meant to slander them
even further. I mean, caste should be a protected class, but very very
few places in the US have added caste as a protected class, if I'm not
wrong. I was basically baiting them at this point. I hope I could make
the context clearer; I was basically trolling, and trying to conjure
up an image of myself as a casteist a**hole and that too by calling
white Americans in my university lower castes by default, in a
farcical tone. None of this is really relevant here, but from my high
school and college days (my opinion changed from middle school when I
was more swayed by the opinion of General category folk around me), I
have openly advocated for caste based reservation in India and why it
is important for it to continue for at least a few generations, and
have faced the wrath of some of my friends for saying this. Of the
handful of really close friends I made in college, about half of them
were from a non privileged caste. We never discussed caste then of
course. In fact literally four of my most closest friends who I hung out with
in college were all from a non privileged caste. I've lost touch a
little bit, but good old days, and we'll meet again! But again, this
is what you would call "reactive behavior" at best, but I felt the
time for continuing politeness with our university administration was
pretty much over, after their continuing dismissals of all incidents.
Further comments:
This was exactly what I had written in the very last email to the
Title IX office: "Actually a lot of these problems stem from the fact
that I'm a high caste individual, and look around in this university
and see a dimwitted peasant class that is a natural anathema for me.
Do you think that can enable you to take some kind of action?" I did
not say 'white people in the university were an abominable lower
caste'. The idea was to bark back. The context was that this
university made headlines by adding caste as a protected class, and
thus showed off it's progressive cred.I should mention that in the
prior emails, the documentation that I had was huge, and this thread
or the chat probably covers at most 30% of everything documented
there.
OP later clarified:
I hope in the discussion, I could make it clear that I don't actually view white people in my university as a lower caste, or want to look down on lower castes in India.
I noticed exactly the same comment as you. FWIW, I certainly think the OP is not trolling and is sincere in their beliefs; you probably have enough rep to see some of their deleted posts from March 2020, such as https://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/145334/harassment-while-doing-phd-in-mathematics-part-3 (which I can't, although I had bookmarked it at the time)
Of course, whether their beliefs are accurate is something I cannot possibly judge with any, erm, accuracy. I do agree with your assessment that "At a minimum the conversation has become so focused on this person's bizarre situation that I can't imagine it being particularly useful to other readers"
I added some more info from the OP from the chat room. Gonna be honest, we should probably just nuke it from orbit
I momentarily locked that question while we sort things out.
@AzorAhai--hehim I feel too junior in this community to make recommendations but that would be my preferred outcome FWIW. (I assume that's an Aliens reference?)
There is also enough information on the post now to easily identify the university in question, if not the individual themself or the faculty involved.
I concur with your concerns. I'm inclined to say we should post possible paths forward as answers to this question, and let the community decide how to proceed by voting. What do you think?
The user has previously posted under a specific name, easily tied to content in the questions asked and to a real human. Either the user is that person and is quite disturbed or trolling (and if the latter, then by using their own name also the former), or is someone else and is purely smearing this person+trolling. I don't think they can be helped here if they are legitimate.
Can any mod tell me why this answer was marked R/A and deleted?
@scaaahu "Lunatic" is inappropriate.
@AnonymousPhysicist Thanks. I missed it.
To the mods, I think the penalty is too harsh (regarding my previous comment). we could replace "It may be that you are a lunatic" by a milder one, like "It may be that you have a problem". The whole answer is not that bad.
@scaaahu The question was first flagged by a user and the flag was first reviewed by me. I agreed with the flag because, in addition to "it may be that you are a lunatic" I find it also problematic the sentence "Your account is one sided and doesn't make me think that you're the victim". I'll flag that answer so that another moderator can review the decision.
@MassimoOrtolano I didn't notice that answer in the first place (I thought it was marked R/A for reasons). Then I read the meta here, "I'm a high caste individual, and look at white people in my university as an abominable low caste", I kind of think may be "Your account is one sided and doesn't make me think that you're the victim." is right. Thus, my two previous comments. But, anyway, you mods decide. Maybe it's too late
Just a correction: I had mentioned the former departmental chair, not the current departmental chair, who is universally well respected. Also, in my post from March, I had mentioned incidents with a faculty member in a nearby university, which were also very disturbing, and about which I had spoken with an Emeritus faculty member in our department (and an eminent combinatorialist and former Putnam Fellow), and he had agreed that I was getting abused in that situation.
Also, if it is of any value, I want to assure that the post was not an elaborate attempt at trolling; and if you ask some Chinese students in our department they will also tell you about the behavior of our teaching faculty member unless they fear repurcussions, and literally everyone in the department knows about this specific grad student I'm speaking of; although I don't think he has said such extended amount of crap as he has to me in such an offensive tone, being in the same year as me for one thing.
I think this over the top racism has one important reason, which I will not opine on here, since that will give away the institution.
I took a look at the deleted answer on which Massimo requested a second opinion. I think the deletion was reasonable, and while there might have been a way to salvage it with aggressive editing, I recommend that we just leave it be, particularly since the entire post seems destined for closure (and probably deletion) in any case.
@laputalanglang - yes, please see the appropriate uses of comments and our code of conduct. Your comments that accuse our users of racism (without evidence) and post unrelated material ("spam") violate both of these, and may therefore be deleted without warning. Please be aware that we have extended you the benefit of the doubt in that we have so far only deleted the inappropriate comments; however, users who continually or seriously violate our code of conduct may be suspended.
I'm sure you are an educated person, and have critical thinking skills; do you understand how CJRD's comments above are unsafe?
I have chosen not to involve myself in that discussion at this time; however, I see no issues that require immediate moderator attention.
Upvote this answer if you agree we should close (for any reason); downvote if you strongly disagree.
Close the question. This "depends on individual factors": if all these details are really needed to understand the question, the question does not belong on this site.
Upvote this answer if you agree we should delete (for any reason); downvote if you strongly disagree.
Delete the question (in addition to closing). The situation seems enough of a mess that suggestions based on an incomplete understanding of it can easily do harm.
I wonder why you have a "new contributor" flag when you have 18.8k rep and have been a user for 6 years
@Azor - Looks like their first answer on meta!
@AzorAhai--hehim - indeed, it is a weird quirk of the Metas and how 'new' is tracked...
Victim-blaming is often a manifestation of prejudice. It's a manifestation of prejudice that is seen from time to time on this site. We are not defense attorneys, so there is no need for us to investigate the victim.
Does this imply that we should leave the question open? Or only that we should be cognizant of this whatever we do?
Be cognizant. This response is neutral on the open/close" issue.
I view this a bit differently. It's not that we are defense attorneys investigating a victim, but I do think we act as self-scouts.
@BryanKrause No idea what that means.
@AnonymousPhysicist A self-scout (kind of borrowing a sports term here) is responsible for looking at your own weaknesses, finding holes in your defense or weaknesses in your offense. I don't think questioning someone's presentation is blaming the victim when the purpose is to say "here's how your approach paints you in a bad light". "Investigating the victim" is not a bad thing when it's done from the victim's point of view, to strengthen their position, rather than to truly dismantle it.
Upvote this answer if you agree we should heavily edit the question and leave open (for any reason); downvote if you strongly disagree.
Heavily edit the question, then leave open. We can edit to (1) generalize the question, and (2) remove some of the troubling comments cited above. This will allow us to keep the existing answers intact.
Upvote this answer if you agree we should leave open in its present state (for any reason); downvote if you strongly disagree.
Leave the question open in its present state.
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4172 | Misrepresented as making a post community wiki
Mi answer is labeled as been made a community wiki by me.
Post Made Community Wiki by Jose Antonio Dura Olmos
That is not the case, I did not make the answer community wiki.
There may be good reasons for a moderator or automatic script to have done so. That's fine if so. But, please, don't attribute such action to me.
Please see this
@Wrzlprmft I see that. I'm fine with it being turned automatically into a community wiki. I'm not fine with such automatic action being attributed to me. Though... if this issue is not specific to Academia I should raise it in StackExchange meta rather than here.
Yeah, that's a SE systemwide "feature."
Your answer was automatically marked as Community Wiki because you answered a Community Wiki question. See How does a post become a Community Wiki post? in this answer.
Since you say it was automatically marked I assume you agree the one marking it was not me. Since I wrote the post manually.
@JoseAntonioDuraOlmos If you're answering a Community Wiki post you're accepting that your answer will be marked Community Wiki by the system on your behalf, because this is the behaviour implemented by SE. If you want a different behaviour, you should make the proposal on the main Meta. Don't expect your proposal to be accepted, though.
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3991 | I cannot reply to chat? why?
Please explain to me why I cannot answer to chat? people will think I don't want to reply to their oversimplification and false info about subject.
Have you tried joining the room by clicking the box on the right?
@StrongBad I dont understand you? How to join to something that I am already part of?
Does this link work: https://chat.stackexchange.com/rooms/73133/discussion-on-question-by-k99731-why-would-a-professor-say-in-pure-math-want-t
That's just bad UI. The "join this room" button is not where you would expect it (and is unnecessarily verbose).
The screenshot in your question shows that you're looking at a chat transcript, which is read-only.
To participate in a chat room and reply to messages, click on the button on the right that says "Join this room" or "Join N users in this room". Once you have joined the chat room, there will be an input field at the bottom of the screen where you can write messages.
dear ff524, thank you for answer, but am I stupid or I dont see those options? "Join this room" or "Join N users in this room"
@SSimon look on the right side of your screen shot. There are three orange boxes on top of each other in the middle of the right side bar. The top one says "join 1 user in this room now".
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5281 | Are lengthy 'update' edits appropriate?
I noticed this old post has been edited to include a lengthy update to the original question.
To me, this seems like a slight missuse of the platform which is supposed to be a Q&A site, not a forum. This feels more like a blog post with an excessive amount of unecessary information that doesn't contribute towards helping a user understand the original question.
Should it be rolled back?
General answer: I agree. We definitely allow / encourage question-askers to post updates after the question text, but such updates should be concise and high-level. Personally, I also don't approve of multiple updates: there should be one update paragraph that describes all the updates, not a long series of incremental updates.
Question askers are also allowed to post answers to their own questions. In some cases, these can effectively be updates: "I tried X and the result was Y." In such cases, length is less of a concern. But these must be legitimate answers to the original question; only answers go in the answer box.
Should it be rolled back?
I would recommend leaving a comment suggesting that updates should not be so long, and inviting the OP to shorten their update. You could even link this meta discussion. If you have the inclination, you could even attempt editing it yourself. If you do all of this and the OP does not cooperate, you could then flag for moderator intervention.
Specific Answer: I have left a comment directing the OP to shorten their update. If they don't do so within a day or so, I (or anyone) will do it for them. In the latter case, the shortening would be a moderation action (i.e., they should not roll it back to the long version), but the specific edits would be a suggestion (i.e., they can choose to write a different short version if they prefer).
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4571 | Why is there not an equal approach to judge which questions are off-topic or primarily-opinion based?
Recently, this question attracted a lot of attentions, surprisingly not just from new users even from experienced users with moderation capabilities, despite the fact that it is obviously off-topic and opinion based.
The other issue is that it took more than "2 days" after several flagging and reporting to close this question and remove spurious and spam answers, until the moderators closed it finally, despite the fact that many more relevant questions have gotten closed already less than minutes as off-topic or primarily-opinion based.
My concern is that it seems even experienced users with moderation capabilities don't care too much about guidelines that say what is on-topic and what is off-topic here in Academia.SE and don't have an equal approach to judge the questions. My guess here is that because this question, despite the fact that it is obviously off-topic, attracted a huge amount of attention (> 8k views until now) and as a result, people preferred to put some answers in the hope of getting reputation, which I think it worked very well for some people here.
So I ask my question again: Why there is no an equal approach to judge which questions are off-topic or primarily-opinion based?
Why is it so obvious that it is off topic?
Please do not make accusations as to peoples' motives.
I don't think it's so obvious that it's off topic. I think it's borderline. I reviewed flags on it as a diamond moderator, and decided that it would be better to let the community handle it, rather than close it unilaterally, because it wasn't so obviously off topic to me. Some users thought that it was off topic, and voted to close. Some users thought it was an acceptable question, and voted to "Leave open" in the review queue. Some users thought it was a good question, and voted it up, or answered it.
Please don't comment "But it's so obviously off topic because..." - I'm not saying it should be reopened, or that those who voted to close were wrong. I'm just saying that what is obviously off topic to you, may seem acceptable to others, and I guess that's what happened here. Questions that are borderline tend to linger for a while before they are closed (if they are closed at all).
I think your guess that it stayed open because users thought it was off topic, but answered it anyway to gain reputation, is probably wrong. There are only four users who have close vote privileges who answered this question. There are many, many, many more users with close vote privileges who didn't answer the question, and also didn't vote to close. Obviously those other users were not motivated by reputation. The much more likely explanation is that the question wasn't so obviously off topic to them.
I disagree with quite a few assumptions in your question.
You suggest that fact that the question was slow to be closed is a bad thing. In most cases, that's simply part of the culture on this forum... we tend to allow discussion to go on. Whether that's "bad" or not is a matter of opinion, and many of our users seem fine with this more laid-back approach to moderation.
You also seem to suggest that moderators should have stepped in earlier. I think we, as a team, have made it fairly clear that we tend to operate with a very light touch. There are very few cases where we simply step in and shut something down, particularly more borderline cases like this one. Personally, I tend to wait for a number of high-rep users to vote for closure before casting the final (automatically binding) vote. This approach has worked well in the past, and I don't think its something the community is clamoring for us to change.
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5177 | Can the linked duplicate question on a closed question be changed afterwards?
This question was recently closed as a duplicate of the canonical "Journal Workflow" question. Yet, when looking into it due to it being in the "reopen" cue, I think there are some better candidates that this question is a duplicate of, e.g. this one or probably even better, this one (created as a result of this meta question). The question is now: is there a way to switch the linked duplicate question on an already closed question, or do we have to reopen and then vote to reclose the question suggesting a different duplicate? (Which feels quite like a complicated detour)
One thing to bear in mind is that closed questions with no answers are likely to be automatically deleted by the system. So this problem is usually worth solving only if the question saw lots of activity before being closed (and if the current duplicate target is extremely bad, not merely suboptimal).
I agree that the second canonical question is a better duplicate target, so I’ve changed it.
About the process:
Yes, once a question is closed, to change the closure reason or the duplicate target, standard users have to first reopen the question and then reclose it. Since this requires five votes for each part of the process, it can be difficult to achieve. Moderators and gold tag-badge holders can instead edit the duplicate target directly.
Multiple duplicate targets can also be added by moderators and gold tag-badge holders without the need of reopening the question. However, in this particular case, I thought it was better to change the duplicate target altogether, rather than adding the new one.
"Moderators and gold tag-badge holders can instead edit the duplicate target directly." Is it better to post on meta or to raise a flag?
@AnonymousPhysicist For clear-cut cases a flag is enough.
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5278 | Update: tag [paperwork] can be deleted - new tag [document-organization] created
This is a follow-up of this question about how to proceed with the tag paperwork. Sorry for the series of questions, but as every one of them is slightly different I thought it best to create a new one.
I have now deleted the tag paperwork in all instances where it was mistagged. Following Anyon's upvoted answer that a tag bureaucracy should not be created, I retagged some of them where bureaucracy would fit with administration, as they actually also are about administration issues, so I think that is a good alternative. There is now no question left with the tag paperwork, so I guess it can be deleted.
As per my suggestion to create a new tag for organizing papers, articles etc. I have also created the new tag document-organization which I think is an OK name for that - please suggest different names if you can think of a better one. I will try to retag the questions that fit into document-organization within the next days.
You should give some wiki to the new tag. You are probably the best one to do so since you've looked at all of these recently.
@Buffy I already wrote a short description, but it has to be reviewed first before it will be visible. I will also add a more detailed wiki entry soon.
I suggest that a better name for this tag might be document-organization. I added some wiki to indicate that the tag shouldn't be used for filing complaints or applications, but the name is currently likely to lead to such usage.
Yes, that is a good suggestion. I will change the tag accordingly.
OK, I see that I cannot change a tag name. That will need to be done by a moderator I guess.
Shouldn't that be a mod action? If a mod changes the name I don't think it will disrupt the top question listing order. Maybe you have superpowers that I don't, but adding a new tag and retagging is probably not the best way to do it.
I think we wrote the comment at the same time: I (sadly) don't actually have superpowers and thus did not change anything.
Go to the Ivory Tower and ping one of the mods to look at it. And, thanks for all the "maintenance" you do on this site.
@Sursula I've renamed the tag, thanks for the tag maintenance.
I've renamed the tag, so that we can consider this status-completed.
About the deletion of the older tag, mods can't directly delete tags, but as explained in this post on the main Meta, tags not associated with any question are automatically destroyed at 03:00 UTC every day.
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4471 | Academia varies more than you think it does – The Movie
Introduction
One of the actualities of academia that is important to be aware of when using this site is:
Academia varies more than you think it does.
More explicitly: Academic practices strongly vary between countries, fields, journals, universities, departments, and even groups.
It is easy to arrive at the false conclusion that some aspect of academia is the same everywhere.
This is a problem that pertains to all levels of users on this site:
Questions whose answers depends on the culture and regulations of individual institutions (that operate below the national level) cannot reasonably be answered by us (or any other similar Internet site). We close such questions since we have become tired of having a bazillion answers whose only substance is: “it depends”.
Answers that assume that academia is homogeneous in some respect when it is not are at best confusing to some readers and wrong and misleading at worst.
I already noted this in my answer to Welcome to Academia SE, which got insanely popular.
However, given the restrictions and purposes of that question, it contains only a list of the most important examples – which is already quite long for something that is supposed to be a short introduction.
Yet, due to the above problems, an extensive list of inhomogeneities in academia would be a valuable resource for the users of this site.
Hence I am asking:
This Question
In which respects does academia vary more than many people expect?
Variations can be along different axes, e.g., between fields, countries, journals, universities, departments, or groups.
Answers shouldn’t be an obvious consequence of the differences of subjects, countries etc., e.g., it is little surprising that work groups in theoretical physics don’t refer to themselves as labs, or that research in poorer countries focuses on less expensive subjects.
Group answers into reasonable categories, roughly per tag on the main site. If you have something to add that does not fit into the existing categories, add a new answer (and link it in the table of contents below).
When possible, link to relevant posts on the main site.
This is a community wiki. Please feel free to contribute.
Table of Contents
Publications
Authorship
Writing and Writing Style
Employment and Funding
Academic Life
Studying and PhD Programmes
Theses and Defences
Student Body Properties
Academic Administration
Great to have this list. Is there any point in making an extended list in some way, where we can add which countries/regions/subjects/blah fit into which of the mentioned categories?
@TobiasKildetoft: I don’t think that this would be feasible, given that there are so many of them. Also, you may always find a subfield, university, etc. that is different, so it’s easy to provide false information.
Why isn't it surprising theoretical physics work groups don't call themselves "labs"? I've heard theoretical syntacticians call themselves "labs."
@AzorAhai: Because a lab is a place where experiments are performed, and theorists usually do not do this (more or less by definition). Sure, you will always find some exceptions, where a group which does not have a literal lab calls itself lab, but if anything, that’s the surprise.
Where can I watch the movie?
Why is this Q on meta and not on the main site?
@FedericoPoloni Uh, I'd say because it's more of a guidance to things you should be aware of before answering a question.
This will quickly get too long to be useful.
@AnonymousPhysicist If someone on the main site gives a sweeping generalized answer on a certain topic, we can refer to specific sections of this Q&A to point out how certain things vary across the academic world for that topic. The same if someone who asks a question fails to enough details about the localization.
The most important thing (maybe I will later write an answer on this): Don't assume academia does only consist of Mathematics, Physics and Computer Science!!!! Many people here make this severe mistake which turns a lot of people off from the site.
@Holla: That’s a different problem though (which was also already discussed on this meta).
I do think it belongs here, no? People think all academia is Mathematics, Physics and CS, but it varies more.
@Holla: I don’t think any user believes that academia only is math, physics, and CS. Some users may think that all of academia is like those fields in some respects, in which case the details of which are what this question is about (and in fact some points are already mentioned in the answers). However, if you think there are other problems from users being overly focused on those fields, this belongs elsewhere. (Complete sidenote: As a physicist having glanced into many other fields, it seems to me that physics has more in common with most other fields than with math and CS.)
titles? https://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/180452/under-which-conditions-can-a-person-use-the-title-of-professor
Publications
In some fields like computer science, conferences act as publication venues: you submit papers, they get peer-reviewed and disseminated. In most fields this is not the case and publishing your work in written form and presenting it at a conference are two different things.
The duration of the peer-review process varies greatly across fields, journals and publishers, ranging from a few weeks to more than a year (further reading). Other stages in the peer-review process such as editorial assessment scale accordingly.
Double-blind peer review (i.e., the reviewers do not know who the authors are) is the norm in some fields, while impossible or unheard of in others. Sometimes, only single blind reviewing is practiced (the reviewers know the identity of the authors, but not the other way around).
The prevalence of publishing preprints (on the ArXiv or similar) strongly varies across fields and even subfields and so does the acceptance of this practice by publishers.
Mentioning somebody in the acknowledgements requires their consent in some fields or for some journals (further reading).
Some fields have a tendency towards many small publications (with the extreme being salami publishing), while in other fields, authors try to accumulate as much content into one paper as possible. In yet other fields, much or most new work is published as complete books. Relatedly, the average publication frequency of researchers differs strongly across fields.
The average numbers of citations made and received by papers vary strongly across fields and even subfields. Relatedly, what is a high impact factor varies strongly across fields: Some mega journals that are regarded as a junk pile by some disciplines (due to their low impact factor) are sometimes erroneously held in a high regard by others (due to their high impact factor). Note that this is also affected by the impact factor only considering citations within the first two years, thus disadvantaging fields with long “response” times.
Journal article formats are different in different fields and in different journals. Sometimes there is a strict format. Sometimes the author can organise their paper as they wish.
In some fields, submission fees are common, while in most ones article processing charges or color printing charges are due only after a paper is accepted.
Wow, I'm surprised about requiring consent to say "The author wishes to thank X". Unless X is a fugitive in hiding...
@einsupportsModeratorStrike it's also making sure that the person you're thanking is aware of it and believes that it is appropriate.
“I’d like to thank my colleague @einpoklum for helping me realise that the earth is flat, society is ruled by the Illuminati, and Gödel was a charlatan, as I shall further demonstrate in this paper.”
@PLL: Hmm, I guess you have a point there.
Authorship
In many fields, the order of authors in a paper indicates how much or how they contributed: The first author usually did most of the work, while the last one is sometimes the supervisor. Other fields order authors alphabetically.
Depending on the field and even the journal, corresponding author can refer to the author who communicated the paper to the journal or the author to whom post-publication communication about the paper by third parties should be addressed (further reading). Among others this results in corresponding authorship being valued in evaluation or for funding (further reading) in some contexts, while this seems bizarre to those used to the other meaning of corresponding author.
In some parts of the world, the PhD supervisor may be the first author even if the PhD student did most of the work.
In some fields, papers with more than a handful of authors are rare. In other fields, one might regularly find papers with dozens or, in extreme cases, even hundreds or thousands of co-authors.
In some fields, the authors’ affiliations on a paper indicate where the work was done; in others, affiliations indicate where the authors can be currently found.
It should be remarked that the extent of responsibility for the contents of the paper by various authors can also vary. In areas (like many areas of Mathematics) where authors are listed in alphabetical order, all authors share the credit---and the blame in case mistakes are later found!
Theses and Defences
In some countries and universities, you hand in your thesis to the examination office, which then distributes it to the examiners for grading. In others, you hand in your thesis to the examiners for grading directly. Yet another way is that you have to hand in a thesis that is already signed by your supervisor.
In some programmes, you must defend your thesis before submitting it; in others, you can only defend a fully examined thesis; in yet others, thesis submission and defence are mostly independent.
In some countries, bachelor’s degrees must be completed with a thesis; in others, this is optional or impossible.
Some programmes prescribe a fixed time that you shall spend on a thesis (which in turn can even vary between comparable programmes). Depending on the department’s and even group’s culture, this duration may be strictly adhered to, or it may be the norm that you only register a thesis once you are confident that you can finish it in time. In other programmes, you are completely free on when you hand in your thesis.
Some programmes have strict requirements on the length, layout, and structure of a thesis (which in turn strongly vary); other’s have no such restrictions at all.
Some universities have no dissertation defence. Other universities call it a "pre-submission seminar" instead of a defence.
The format of the “defence” — that is, the final thesis presentation/examination — varies very widely, from a public ceremony with multiple lectures (common in continental Europe) to a private oral exam (e.g. the viva voce of the traditional UK system). Usage of these terms also varies: often defence is used as an umbrella term covering all of these formats (as here); but often e.g. a viva may be considered as a different system entirely, not as a kind of defence.
A defence often consists only or primarily of a talk by the candidate, but in some systems (e.g. Dutch and Scandinavian) members of the thesis committee also (or even exclusively) give talks.
The length of a defence talk can vary considerably between programmes and even groups. In some cases, it’s just ten minutes; in others, it can take up to an hour. When the defence is an oral examination rather than a lecture, it may last longer, up to several hours.
The admission and role of the audience in a defence can strongly vary. Some defences are completely open to the public; some can only be attended by other members of the university; some defences happen only before the examiners. The defence talk and the questions may be treated differently in this respect. Questions from the audience can also be treated completely different: In some cases they are forbidden; in others they are allowed but rare; in yet others they are common and encouraged; and in some cases, a defence is not complete without a question from the audience.
The target audience of a defence may strongly differ even between groups. Some are supposed to directed at an expert audience familiar with the thesis. Others are supposed to be (mostly) understood by anybody from the field or even the faculty.
The opposition to the presented thesis/dissertation may range from perfunctory, through merely curious, to making a serious attempt at rebutting the presenter's claims or the novelty and significance of the results.
Customs after a successful defence vary greatly, from formal celebrations to throwing food at the successful graduate.
Australian universities usually do not have a defense at all. There may or may not be something similar with a different name.
@AnonymousPhysicist: There may or may not be something similar with a different name. – This is ambiguous. Do you want to say that you do not know whether there is something similar, or do you want to say that in some cases there is something similar and in some cases there isn’t. Either way, please edit the respective information into the answer.
@ Wrzlprmft: I’ve added a bit on the UK-style viva system, which I guess may be also what @AnonymousPhysicist was referring to.
The term "dissertation" usually refers to a Ph.D. candidate's thesis only - but apparently, in some places undergraduate theses are also called "dissertation". See the comments here.
Employment and Funding
In some countries, PhD students are university employees, which means they get unemployment benefits, healthcare, and pension contributions like any other employees.
In some countries, PhD students are getting paid, but it's legally a stipend, so the benefits are not the same, but every PhD student gets the money.
In some countries, PhD students are getting paid if they apply for funding and get it. If they don't get the funding, they can still study just without money. In this case, some positions might be tied to specific stipends, so if you are hired/admitted, you don't have to apply for more funding, but this is not the case for everybody in the country or even in the department.
In some countries, PhD students won't get paid for being PhD students, but they will have to do some paid teaching.
In some countries, PhD students have to pay tuition (which might or might not be countered by stipends or teaching)
In some countries, faculty contracts include twelve or more months of salary; in others only nine months.
In some countries, the funding is based on impact-factor publications; in others, they do not care about this sort of thing.
In some countries, prospective PhD students apply directly to potential supervisors; in others, they apply to a department.
All these may also vary between fields or institutions within a given country.
The fact that it's called a "stipend" rather than a "salary" does not, in itself, make Ph.D. students non-employees. In many cases (and in many countries), Ph.D. candidates are unrecognized employees.
Studying and PhD Programmes
In some countries, you have to decide on a discipline when you start studying, in others you start broadly and decide for a major (or similar) later.
Some countries and programmes, you need to pass major hurdles before you can start studying such as good grades in previous education, entrance exams, or paying a considerable amount of fees. In others, you need only minimal qualifications to study, but passing the exams is a major filter. Depending on this, half of the students failing an entry-level course is a disaster or the norm. This is somewhat linked to whether students are regarded as customers.
In some countries, there are no extensive university- or department-wide policies (on behaviour, cheating, writing reports, etc.).
In some countries, there is a big difference between undergraduate and graduate studies. In others, this distinction does not exist or is merely marked by bachelor’s degree. For example, it isn’t even possible to accurately translate the words undergraduate and graduate student into the German language.
In some countries, PhD programmes are purely research-based but require a master’s degree (which usually takes two years) for admission; in some they are purely research-based and require only a bachelor’s; and in some they require only a bachelor’s degree for admission but require coursework to be completed as part of the PhD. In the third case, the concept of “mastering out” exists. In the first (and second?) case, graduate schools do not exist or are mostly virtual structures (the author of these lines was a member of a graduate school that did not even inform its own students of its existence). Of course, there are variations of both schemes.
In some countries, prospective PhD students apply directly to potential supervisors; in others, they apply to a department.
In some countries, the PhD student chooses, or is assigned to, a supervisor only after some time (e.g. two years), while in some countries the student is to find a potential supervisor, willing to supervise them from the very beginning, before the actual application.
In some countries and universities, it is the norm to attempt to keep past exams secret (and obliging examinees to do this), so they can be re-used in future exams. Elsewhere, this approach is considered naïve and bound to fail and exams are designed under the assumption that all previous exams are available.
"Graduate studies" is a problematic term. When you're doing research work, this is not just studies. Do you mean "the coursework part of the Ph.D. or M.Sc. track"?
@einpoklum: What difference would it make in this context?
Wrzlprmft: It's the difference between your third point being (essentially) false or true. See this question and my answer there.
@einpoklum: I fail to get your point. The statement holds if you only focus on coursework only; it holds even more so if you include research work. Also see the fourth point.
On the countrary. if you consider research work, there is always a huge qualitative difference between people in the M.Sc. or Ph.D. track, and undergraduate students: The former do productive scientific work.
@einpoklum: Not everywhere. Here, both bachelor and master students do coursework and have a thesis project in the end. Both theses are scientific work. The master’s thesis is somewhat longer and arguably more productive, but that’s a gradual increase, not a completely different thing. As I wrote in the answer, here most bachelor and master programmes originate from splitting one big programme in two.
Do M.Sc. candidates perform research projects which are beneficial to their labs or research groups? Projects which are often funded?
Do M.Sc. candidates perform research projects which are beneficial to their labs or research groups? – Sometimes yes, sometimes no; same for bachelor candidates. It depends a bit on whether the subfield can offer such projects on that time scale. The students are not funded, but their work may be connected to a funded project.
Well, the ones that are funded - by the university or an external sources, and are required to show up for work every day, and expected to produce meaningful research work (albeit much less than experienced researchers) - are the ones who, at a minimum, should be considered university employees. There are very few if any undergrads in this situation, many/most/almost all M.Sc. candidates, and most/almost all Ph.D. candidates. I would say the difference among countries and institutions is more in the breakdown into the employee'ish and non-employee'ish categories.
@einpoklum: Here, during their thesis, bachelor as well as master students are expected to work nearly full time on their projects. Neither are employed for this (whether that’s fair is another discussion). And yes, I am aware that this is different elsewhere, but that’s exactly the point of this.
But my point is that the nature of the work is not different; it's just the question of recognition and pay that's different. Which is why I made my comment in the first place.
But my point is that the nature of the work is not different – Then why do you write: “if you consider research work, there is always a huge qualitative difference between people in the M.Sc. or Ph.D. track, and undergraduate students”? Also, my statement here is this: There is a prominent divide between undergraduate (up to a bachelor’s) and graduate students (master’s or PhD, whatever comes next) in some countries (e.g., the US), while it doesn’t exist in others (e.g., Germany). This applies to both, coursework and research. Where exactly do you disagree with this?
I was mis-stating my case. I was making the over-generalization of undergraduate students not being engaged in useful research, and M.Sc. candidates being so engaged. The former is perhaps closer to the truth, but apparently - as you suggest - not everywhere; the second - not so much, I should have qualified it.
@einpoklum - having, as an undergraduate, given a talk at an APS March meeting on my senior thesis work, I'd like to think the research was useful... The full followup took a PhD student several more years, but my work initiated the project.
Writing and Writing Style
In pure math, a paper’s introduction may just be “We consider the problem of X.” and not have a conclusion or summary. In other fields, you are expected to argue why a problem is relevant, summarise previous research, and place your own research in that context.
The question whether single-author papers should be written using “I” or “we” depends on the field (further reading).
"I", or "we", or if you get certain reviewers, "the authors of the present work" ;-)
Paper in math usually need a longer introduction than that, often doing some more or less cursory literature review, but that also varies strongly by subfield.
Academic Life
In some countries, universities don’t arrange academic or mental-health counselling services for students.
In some countries or institutions, mass graduation ceremonies are a big thing. In others, most graduates just fetch their diploma from the respective office when they completed all the requirements (or receive it via mail), and mass graduation ceremonies are seen as something for people coming from the former countries and people who (or whose parents) like dressing up – if they happen at all.
In some countries or universities, it is common to strongly identify with and be loyal to one’s university or to an institution within the university; in others, this is regarded as outlandish.
In some countries, the academic year is interrupted by a large break during which campuses are mostly empty of students; in others, there are periods with classes that are interrupted by shorter breaks, while at least some students are almost always around for one university-related reason or another.
What kind of dress is the norm or appropriate strongly depends on field and to a lesser extent on country. The same attire can be overdressing for a formal occasion in one field and underdressing for everyday work in another.
Clothing requirements may also vary for practical reasons (e.g., no open-toed sandals in a lab; no strongly patterned clothing in a Deaf Studies course).
In some countries, institutions, and programs, instructors are required to keep daily attendance records for all students registered in a course. In other programs, such a requirement would be considered offensive and a violation of academic freedom.
In some institutions, how academic integrity cases (cheat, plagiarism, etc.) are handled is entirely outside the hands of the faculty member; e.g., the faculty member may file a report with a dean or other office, who entirely take over the job of investigating, passing judgement, and applying penalties. Or the faculty member may have responsibility for the investigation, and turning over any evidence to a judgement body. At other places, faculty are given wide discretion for the entire process, including the exact penalties to be applied. And some places may be a mixture of these (e.g., academic penalties decided by faculty; disciplinary penalties decided by administration).
Student Body Properties
Some academic contexts do not have students at all but still fit within academia (e.g. the Institute for Advanced Study).
Some have only what is usually called graduate students; others have only undergraduates.
In some countries, an institution of higher learning may not be called a university unless it has graduate programs, or is a certain type; in others naming conventions have little relation to this.
Some degree-granting institutions operate wholly within the online space, with nearly all part-time students; others only have full-time, on-site students. There are many, many ways to mix these nowadays.
Some physical universities have nearly all students living off - often very far from - campus, while others are nearly completely residential.
Which employee teaches what kind of student (or teaches at all, and how much) depends widely upon type of university, country, degree program(me), etc.
Some student bodies are highly culturally and racially diverse, others are quite homogeneous. Sometimes certain programs are homogeneous, but not of the dominant ethnic group of the community or country. Some programs in a given university may recruit widely from other countries, while others at the same one will have nearly all local students. And of course some student bodies are homogeneous and local, but do not fully reflect the community surrounding the university.
The same as the previous point, except regarding diversity of economic statuses. Naturally there are many times this point is strongly related to the previous point, but it is not always the case, particularly when students studying outside their country of origin is involved.
Certain universities have a common language of instruction which is not the local language, or even the first (or second or third ...) language of most students. Sometimes this is because there is no clear common language and a lingua franca is chosen. Some universities are bilingual or more.
Academic Administration
The role of the head of a faculty, department, institute, or similar can be seen as anything between:
a prestigious and powerful role that people strife for, requires years of experience (as a professor), and that people stay in for long times,
a nuisance that only distracts from more important tasks (such as heading a research group), that changes yearly based on an established rota, and where there are rules what arguments suffice to reject the role. Showing interest in the role is seen as a red flag.
There can be considerable differences on how many layers academic administration has and how narrow their scope is, even within a country or university. For example, the structural hierarchy for the same topic at universities of comparable size can be university → faculty for science → department of mathematics → institute for statistics or just university → faculty for statistics.
An elected faculty senate (academic senate), separate from the board, may exist as a representative body at the university level, or also at a faculty level (i.e., for semi-autonomous highest level departments), or there may be no senate and faculty may be represented on the unicameral board instead (if at all). Senate's responsibilities can range anywhere from ceremonial to strategy defining ones. Many academic senates consist of faculty only, others also represent students, either elected directly, or via an established student union, with the proportion of student representation ranging from symbolic up to one half of the senate membership.
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4579 | 2019 Community Moderator Election Results
Academia's third moderator election has come to a close, the votes have been tallied and the two new moderators are:
They'll be joining the existing crew shortly—please thank them for volunteering, and share your assistance and advice with them as they learn the ropes!
Also, please join me in thanking aeismail who will be stepping down as moderator.
For details on how the voting played out, you can download the election results here, or view a summary report online.
Thanks to all the participants for volunteering and congratulations to the winners. I wished this would happen in less interesting times.
Congrats to the winners, thank you to M'vy for also running and thank you aeismail for all you past work.
Sorry to see aeismail go as moderator. I hope you can still participate at a high level.
And if the two new mods continue to contribute as mods as they have as members, the site will be in good hands.
Congratulations.
Please next time you apply. :)
Thanks to all for your confidence / votes ... my happiness at being elected is tempered only by my sadness to learn that aeismail is stepping down.
Congratulations to both of you. You have many challenges lying in front of you now, and I wish you good luck to tackle all of them!
Thank you aeismail for all your good work as well, we will miss you.
Thanks to all those who participated in this election, and especially thank you aeismail for the work done so far!
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5209 | I asked for a software solution, question was closed as "shopping" - legit?
I asked this:
How can I generate an elegant (academic) static CV web page?
which got a couple of answers, including a very relevant one. The question was closed as a "shopping question", but the very Meta answer explaining what inappropriate shopping questions are says that "seek help choosing, finding or assessing ... a software solution" is not inappropriate shopping.
So should my question really have been closed?
Looks like this got 3 close votes for "shopping question" and 2 for "opinion-based." As you say, software recommendations when related to academia are allowed per this policy. Personally, I would vote to reopen if I could do so without hammering it, but curious to see why others feel differently.
I’ve cast the last reopen vote. Unfortunately, it seems that the policy on software is frequently missed by close-voters.
(just writing an answer to get this off our backlog)
Thanks for posting. Software recommendations are indeed on-topic, and the community has correctly voted to reopen.
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4894 | Customize the information window for the first-time askers
It happens quite often that new posters are confused about the scope of this site, for instance mistaking it for a "you can ask about every possible study topic here" site, or a "here's the story of my life, what should I do" site. This leads to off-topic questions, additional moderation work, and unnecessary hard feelings from newcomers.
On SE sites it is possible to customize the content of the "how to ask" window that is shown to first-time askers. See below for how it looks like on Academia (non-personalized) and Server Fault (personalized).
Here is how it looks like on Mathematics, where it is even more informative (or at least it did at some point in time --- I don't want to create a new account there just to verify that this screenshot from the Meta.MO question is still accurate)
I suggest to add some text to describe the scope of our site; for instance, a shorter version of the "What topics should I avoid?" paragraph on the help pages.
Similar thread on Meta.Mathoverflow (where unfortunately the suggestion was never applied).
It seems a good idea: what is customisable and the procedure is described here. Let’s see what the community thinks. Anyway, we should still have the tag warnings.
This is great, thanks for finding this. I suggest we use this thread to discuss what we want, generally. Then someone™ (volunteers welcome) can turn these suggestions into a word-for-word proposal, which we can discuss in a follow-on thread. Our request is more likely to be processed if we agree on a word-for-word proposal and all the admins have to do is copy and paste.
We should make it clear that the scope is "academia" rather rather than "academics." It's hard to concisely define academia, perhaps something like: "academic careers, research, teaching, and publishing."
Based on the number of homework help questions we get, the existing wording still gives the impression that questions related to an academic subject would be on-topic here.
I strongly agree, but this needs amendment to exclude the content of research - one of the more common closures of off-topic questions.
Could you include the word 'university' somewhere? A lot of the most off-topic askers are people who have had no contact with academia and might not recognize the word at all.
Let’s remove the initial sentence “You’re ready to ask your first question [...]”. Even though it’s welcoming, the shorter the text the likelier that it gets read.
Encourage askers to put a question mark in the top-level question. Beyond grammar, this will discourage questions of the form "here is a 20 page description of my problem; what do I do?"
Maybe the best message here is "open with your question, do not present it just at the end"? Something in the spirit of "bottom line up front".
@Frederico I don't think that's necessary, it's just annoying to read titles like "struggling with advisor"
Yes, and if the title is "struggling with advisor", the post is very likely to be an information dump with no "reusable" question. Encouraging a question mark is only a partial solution; the real question is how to convey that questions should be reusable.
"Put a question in the title" is very helpful advice. It should be "question" not "question mark" though.
We should take into account that the question form, above the title field, contains already the suggestion: "Be specific and imagine you’re asking a question to another person".
Please include a link to What potential duplicate targets should I know about as a reviewer? near the prompt to use the search. It's an easier way to find the asker's answer than using the search.
A format that we could take as inspiration is that of EL&U:
We can list sites for which we frequently receive questions, e.g. Cross Validated, Stack Overflow and Physics (comment below if you have other suggestions).
Just my opinion, but personally I think it is better to explain the general concept rather than giving a list of sites; such a list would be too long and at the same time it would not include all possible alternatives.
@FedericoPoloni I have the impression that general concepts are easily ignored. A link might be a stronger suggestion, 4-5 links maximum. We don't have too many different frequent cases.
Probably Interpersonal too
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4022 | Treble notification of earning a "yearling" badge
I wonder why the notification of my earning a "yearling" badge came in triplicate (three identical notifications). I haven't seen this type of behaviour before on StackExchange.
This is the screenshot:
If look closely at the logo for the site associated with the badge, you will notice that it is grey, and thus does not refer to Academia, but to Academia Meta:
This is also reflected on your meta profile.
So apparently, your account on Meta was only “woke up” yesterday, but since its reputation and creation date is taken from your main account, you became eligible for there Yearling badges at this moment.
It is normal that you gain Yearling badges for your Meta account the same time as your main account even if you have no Meta activity whatsoever. However, this leaves the interesting question why this did not happen before for you – to which I have no answer.
So it appears that I was awarded three badges for an account—Academia Meta—to which I have never provided any input (prior to the present enquiry)! Why this happened at all is just as puzzling to me as why it happened yesterday.
@user10691: See my edit.
When I looked further at my Academia profile, I noticed that the "yearling" badge is described as (and looks) silver. This interpretation of the colour may be more appropriate than "grey for Meta". At least there was some activity, over a period of years, on the primary Academia site that might justify such an award—if not its timing and multiplicity.
@user10691: See my edit.
Thank you for the clarification.
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4221 | Rename review-articles tag to literature-review-articles
I subscribe to the review-articles tag, whose description is this:
"Survey" or "review" articles are academic publications that organize
and summarize the current state of research on a given topic in a
novel way that integrates and adds understanding to work in the field.
For questions related to the peer-review process, use the
'peer-review' tag instead.
Despite this explanation (which many people, especially new posters, apparently never get around to reading), maybe as many as 50% of the questions with that tag actually pertain to peer reviewing and have nothing to do with literature review articles.
Hence, I propose to rename the tag literature-review-articles, which I think should be more explicit in communicating the correct intention of the tag. In that case, I also propose deleting the review-articles tag; that is, not leaving it as a synonym, since that would perpetuate the confusion.
If this makes sense, then could someone with the right permissions please make the change?
To support my point, here's another one that came in after I posted this question: https://academia.stackexchange.com/posts/111540/revisions
In the meantime, I've created: the tag and I've added it to several existing articles. I hope it will soon be eligible to be proposed as a synonym: https://academia.stackexchange.com/tags/lit-review-articles/info
I think it's not a good idea to have abbreviations in tag names. literature-review-articles would be better.
@FedericoPoloni Revised accordingly
And here's another example: https://academia.stackexchange.com/posts/111996/revisions
I just wanted to comment regarding logistics: the best way to rename a tag is
post on meta to find out if the community supports or is opposed to the tag renaming.
if there is community support, moderators will "merge" the tag which effectively renames it.
It's generally not recommended to just start adding or replacing the tag manually, especially for a tag with many questions. (1) This can be confusing for people who are new ("what is the difference between these tags, which should I use for my question on a survey paper?") or who are used to the old tag schema. (2) It also bumps a bunch of questions to the top of the home page, which some people don't like.
(For reason #1, I have renamed the lit-review-articles back to review-articles for now. Once there is agreement on a new name for the tag, and the need for it, a moderator can rename review-articles again.)
Thanks for the clarification and correction.
Less than two weeks ago, I implemented a similar renaming: Before, there was only research; now, there is a synonym research → research-process. While this tag was blatantly misapplied on a daily basis before (I subscribed to the tag just to remove it), it has not happened since then. This shows two things:
Renaming the tag is indeed effective.
Only the master tag matters – very likely because this is what is shown when typing research into the tag field when asking a new question (best try for yourself).
I also second Federico Poloni’s comment that abbreviations should be avoided in tags.
I thus suggest to have the following tag structure:
review-articles → literature-review-articles
review-papers → literature-review-articles
I've revised my original question to remove the abbreviation.
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4118 | Would LMS-specific tags be appropriate (Moodle in particular)?
I use Moodle at my institution. I often struggle to find online support to get Moodle to do interesting things. Moodle has a pretty decent forum, but (like almost every other help forum out there), it pales by StackExchange standards. I've often thought that it would be great if there were a StackExchange just for Moodle. However, that might be overkill.
A simpler solution, I think, would be simply creating a "moodle" tag on Academia SE. Academia SE probably has the largest collection of Moodle users who understand the SE culture of asking and answering questions, so I think this would make a lot of sense. When last I checked, in fact, there were over 50 questions on Academia SE that mention "Moodle".
I came close to doing this when I created a more generic "learning-management-system" tag (with "lms" as a synonym) for a Moodle-specific question: How do you send personalized information to each student in Moodle?, but someone recommended that I ask here at Meta before I create such a specific tag. So, here's my question: would LMS-specific tags be appropriate for Academia SE (e.g. "moodle", "blackboard", "canvas", etc.), or would they be too specific?
As a related side note, StackOverflow has a "moodle" tag for programming-related questions; I am thinking of configuration questions finding a home here at Academia SE.
A [tag:blackboard] tag would be too easily confused (with, you know, the things that you write on with chalk).
@FedericoPoloni, "blackboard-lms" should remove any possible confusion.
Actually, I like the idea of having a “LMS” tag, because it unifies several different related sets of items into a single category. Learning management systems are becoming increasingly important, and having a tag to search for them may help users find useful related content, even if it's not specific to their platform.
By "such a tag", do you mean the "learning-management-system" tag or the "moodle" tag, or both?
LMS. Individual systems can be searched for directly.
should we also have lms as a tag, made a synomym of the full name? It seems to be a commonly used abbreviation.
It wouldn’t hurt.
@TobiasKildetoft, I've already created the "learning-management-system" tag, but I don't have the points to create the "lms" synonym. Could you or someone with sufficient points please create that synonym?
Please avoid using abbreviations as tag titles. They're completely opaque to people who don't know them. (And, to me, "LMS" is the London Mathematical Society.)
The tag is learning-management-system, but lms should point to it, since people may know of lms, but not know the full meaning.
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4754 | About shopping questions
My question
Is this website that claims to provide paper writing services real and legal?
was (rightly) closed as shopping question (I'm a dumb newbie in Academics SE).
I'm not interested in reopening the question: I've accepted the (excellent) answer.
A (IMHO) reasonable suggestion: the check-questions-bot can warn "Your link [...] shopping question. See [...] Edit if required."
Editing out the linked website was surely a necessary action. But...
An (admittedly) twisted question: it was sufficient? Many similar/cloned web sites can be found googling some of the quoted phrases. Ditto for a Google Images search of the posted image.
What is the check-answers-bot?
@GoodDeeds, all the questions pass a little test before being accepted. V. gr.: if the question has zero tags, the check-questions-bot (my name) can say "add 1 to 5 tags".
@GoodDeeds, see mi correction.
The bot is site-wide (across SO and all of SE). Academia.SE is tiny by comparison, and the shopping question ban is specific to Academia.SE. It's very unlikely the company would put dev time into this for just one small site; it's likely not a trivial task to detect shopping questions, and even though we've closed a lot of them I doubt we have a sufficient sample to train an AI to do the check without a substantial error rate.
@BryanKrause, thanks for the information.
No. This question is a shopping question because it asks for an evaluation of a service. Hiding the identity of the service does not change that.
Re: "Hiding the identity". Then, what does "[...] edit your question to ask how to make your choice in general and without naming any particular options." mean?
Re: "valuation of a service". Actually, I am utterly skeptic even about the existence of the service. Self-quote «("ethics" !!!!!) suggests that the site is a parody...».
@Martín-BlasPérezPinilla Scammers do not wish to target intelligent people. An example of a potentially on-topic, (but unwise) question is "How do I identify a high quality ghost writing service so that I can commit fraud effectively?" whereas your question seems to be "Is this particular ghostwriting service an effective way to commit fraud?"
Since you're not planning on committing fraud, please don't ask about it.
"Since you're not planning on committing fraud, please don't ask about it." OK, but... I sincerely believe that the answer by Captain Emacs can be useful for dumb-and-lazy students and dumb senior lecturers (like me).
I think the question you want is "What should instructors do to reduce paid cheating?" or maybe "What is paid cheating?"
"contract cheating" is the correct term, I think
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1443 | The correct use of tags?
Questions posted over the past few weeks have had incorrect tags in them that provide editors (especially new ones!) the opportunity to re-tag for reputation and general understanding of tags. I would like to get some consensus as to how we should be tagging these articles.
Let's say I have a (fake) question:
I am taking computer science courses on the side to help me with my math PhD work. How would I cite the textbook in my paper in APA format?
This short blurb, which has a bunch of stuff, could potentially be tagged with computer-science, phd, citation-style, citations, books, mathematics, and a whole other slew of tags. Let's say the author uses all 5 of these.
How would, and should we, be re-tagging this question to better help other members of the website, and keep everything organized?
I will present my approach, as I've been doing it for the past few months here. If anyone has a different point, please provide it.
Selective Tagging
As a Stack Overflow user, one of the ways we keep the questions organized, is to establish that tags should be related integrally to the question, such as a person who is familiar with the topic in question would be helpful or find the question interesting.
This disqualifies the computer-science and mathematics tag pretty quickly. While the book in question is about computer science, the question itself does not require knowledge from a person with a background in CS/Math for citing the book.
The phd is also not important in terms of citation. Papers are not PhD-only, and tagging as such will not benefit from people with specific PhD process knowledge.
The remaining 3 tags, citations, books, and citation-style, can be carefully examined.
In this case, both citation-style and books are immediately relevant. We were not provided a specific format for citation. Whether or not citations is needed can be debated.
So, the end result would be that we only need two or three tags to fully describe the situation, from a potential list of probably 10.
In other words, we should be able to use the tags to describe the question's content as succinctly as possible that presents it properly.
You don't seem to be taking the tag wiki excerpts into account; these generally define the scope of a tag, and when it should be used. They're especially useful for disambiguation between tags, like citation and citation-style.
@ff524 well, I'm having a hard time establishing when a question would benefit from citation and not citation-style. I guess the former is related to "Should I cite?" and the second is "How should I cite?"
Per the tag wiki excerpt, citation-style is "On the syntax and formatting of citations and reference lists according to a particular style guide (e.g., Chicago, MLA, IEEE)." i.e. questions that ask "In style X..."
@ff524 well, I would assume the question begs what format to use, technically, if I were to spend more time on it. I'll add that into the body.
Nice analysis! Your system works well with the way the system highlights questions with favorite tags and lightens those with ignored tags, and it's also helpful for people who look for questions to read/answer by looking through new content in tags they like. Using tag wikis when there are questions about specific tags being appropriate is a good suggestion, too.
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1705 | Interesting question that does not fit Academia.SE - upvote it or not?
Sometimes, I come along a question here on Academia that I find interesting, or that I can strongly relate with. When this happens I tend to upvote it: I think of my upvote as saying "I consider this a good question" and/or "I would also like to have an answer for it". But sometimes these questions are (clearly) not a good fit for the site. So my question is: should I think about an upvote as "good question AND on-topic"? Am I creating more difficulties by upvoting an off-topic question? Or it just doesn't matter at all?
I'd say: we have the tools to make this statement explicit. Up-vote the question and leave a comment saying that you up-voted because it's a good question, but you think it is not on topic for reason X.
If it needs to be migrated, that is probably the end of it. If it has a different problem (e.g., being opinion-based), then you might also consider proposing edits to make it a more answerable question.
thank you, @jakebeal :)
It is your vote and you should vote as you see fit. I think of up votes as saying this is a good question that is a good fit for our community. I only like rewarding people for doing things that help our community. There is also a small reduction of work if closed questions are not up voted since closed questions with negative vote totals are automatically deleted. Questions with a score of zero or more require high rep users to vote to delete them.
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4820 | Language choice: "Deal with" vs. "Improving" a situation
Questions regularly ask how to deal with a situation, rather than how to improve a situation. My understanding of the phrase "deal with" is that there must exist something that is causing a problem or making things difficult.
Why do users seemingly embrace the notion that a situation must be dealt with, rather than improved?
Surely starting from the latter perspective would instil a more positive mindset, which is typically beneficial.
I interpret deal with to be suggestive of a problematic person, which seemingly disregards the possibility of an interpersonal problem. Whereas improve seemingly acknowledges the possibility of an interpersonal problem. Now, of course, problematic people exist, so dealing with a situation may be appropriate. (E.g., extracting oneself from a toxic relationship.) But, surely such people are in the minority.
Is this forum focusing more on problems caused by problematic people? Or do questions disregard the possibility of interpersonal problems?
My question is likely ill-phrased. (Finding the right problem statement is the hard part!) I'm trying to get a better grasp on the underlying causes of problems that plague academia (from this forum's perspective). In particular:
Are interpersonal problems being ignored in favour of a blame culture?
Equally, is my perspective absurd, ill-informed, misguided, or similar?
I fail to see a big difference here. Questions about dealing with a situation imply that the way you deal with the situation is improving things. Conversely, questions about improving situations usually only get asked here if there is a problem to be dealt with. Of course there are some cases where the answer is that the underlying issue is not what the asker thought and there are cases where the asker makes a mountain out of a molehill (and vice versa in “run; don’t walk” situations), but I do not think language or attitude are the issues here, but rather lack of perspective.
What if a situation can't be improved? What if the asker wants to entirely eliminate the situation's existence, or to get out of it completely? Neither of these would be improvement of the situation, but dealing with them is definitely the goal.
@Nij Sure, I've edited to clarify, but such askers are surely in the minority, unless this forum is dedicating a lot of energy to solving problems caused by problematic people. (If it is, then focusing on the cause would be beneficial to all.)
@Wrzlprmft I fail to see a big difference here It seems rather nuanced to me and perhaps I'm failing to express myself. My edit perhaps helps: Dealing with seems to disregard the possibility of an interpersonal problem, whereas improving seems to embrace that possibility. (I may be reading too much into language, but I've been around this forum long enough to believe I am not, which gave way to my question.)
"I interpret deal with to be suggestive of a problematic person, which seemingly disregards the possibility of an interpersonal problem" - this seems to be a bit idiosyncratic. I certainly don't read it that way. There are certainly questions here where people don't seem to realize they may be part of the problem (maybe this is what you mean by "interpersonal problem"?), but I don't think "deal with" is the key phrasing that identifies these cases, and I think typically at least some answer points it out. It's certainly something I aim to do when appropriate.
The CIA model can prove useful. There are things you Control. There are things you can Influence. And finally there are things that you must Accept. You can only improve things you Control or Influence. Yet you still must Accept many things - those you must deal with. Now, one may also choose not to improve things that are under your Control or you have Influence on, but that is another issue.
I also dislike it when people use "deal with," but generally it's not worth editing.
@AzorAhai--hehim I'm more interested as to whether there's a deeper issue at play
@user2768 I don't think there is. People come here with problems, and I think in general people listen when we mention interpersonal issues. I do change "deal with" when it's egregiously rude.
To provide some data. Google's top 10 results for this site and the search term "deal with" are:
How to deal with a colleague who always puts you down?
How to deal with racial insensitivity in an academic ...
How to deal with a colleague who won't accept they're wrong?
How to deal with animosity between different "factions" in a ...
How to deal with unbalanced collaborations?
How can I deal with a professor who refuses to communicate?
How can I deal with being pressured by my department to...
Dumb moments in independent research and how to deal with ...
How to deal with an academic 'stalker'?
How to deal with arrogant e-mail of a student?
While for "improve", we have:
How to improve the language of my master thesis by myself?
How to improve my English from Academic papers....
How do I improve my rewriting and editing skills?
Improve software code when reviewing paper
What are good tips/ways to improve my writing on chalkboards
Improve learning skills
Is there a way to improve my grade after graduation?
How to improve English quality of my paper ...
How to improve chances of graduate admission following major
What are some good books to read in order to improve my ...
Based on these examples, people tend to use "deal with" when the premise of the question is that the situation is inherently bad (from stalking, to racial insensitivity, to bullying). Asking how to "improve" one's relationship with a stalker, or a racist, or a bully might be a bit strange.
On the other hand, answerers do frequently challenge the question's premise. For example, the consensus found that the "arrogant student's e-mail" (in the list above) was not so arrogant after all, and that there was nothing that needed to be "dealt with." This seems to be aligned with your view -- sometimes, askers think the problem is another person's behavior, when the problem is actually elsewhere.
As for your other concerns, I would point out that there is a bit of sampling bias in the questions asked here (especially the most highly viewed ones). Most of our users are well-educated adults, and so they know how to handle routine human interactions. By the time someone is posting here about how to "deal with" another person, odds are high that we are dealing with an interesting "edge case" (or even a "problematic person") rather than a garden-variety interpersonal conflict. So, I would avoid making broad conclusions about "blame culture" (for example) based on the situations considered here.
Agree with most of what you wrote except possibly the last paragraph. Yes, there is a sampling bias here, but I don't know that the things that lead people to academic research are quite the same as those that help in routine human interactions. There are also huge puzzles to solve for academics who find themselves working in a cultural context that differs from the one they grew up with, where social norms may be completely upside down.
I agree on both counts; academia is by no means exempt from interpersonal problems. My point was merely that the vast majority of interpersonal conflicts are quickly resolved and never make it to our board, so we should avoid making broad conclusions about "blame culture" based on the situations considered here.
| Stack Exchange | 2025-03-21T12:54:48.927815 | 2020-10-28T08:43:52 | {
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3895 | Questions about particular institutions
The guidelines state:
As a general rule, if you're asking about a particular institution...it's likely your question is too limited in scope
Can this rule be made more precise? In particular, can questions be asked about some particularly large institutes? E.g., CNRS, which employs 11k researchers. (As a comparison, Harvard has ~5k academics.)
Like what? We allow questions about institutions like the NSF and NIH. I cannot imagine a question specific to a single university having broad appeal.
@StrongBad Specifically CNRS. Apparently it employees 11k researchers.
See this FAQ as to why we do not like most questions about particular institutions.
@user2768 Note that the 11k figure refers only to tenured researchers (equivalent to associate/full professor without teaching) and does not include engineers, postdocs etc.
On the other hand the source reported by Wikipedia for Harvard does not provide the ~5k count, but 2-3k depending whether you count unpaid staff.
@fqq Is an engineer a research position? The 11k researchers seems the right figure to compare to the 4671 academic staff. Both those figures exclude postdocs. Harvard has 14.5k postgraduates, but that includes more than just postdocs.
@user2768 post docs will generally not be included in the 14.5k postgrad number.
I think a good line to draw would be:
Questions specific to individual institutions are only allowed if those institutions operate on the national or international level.
This would include institutions like CNRS, NSF, NIH, DFG, Max-Planck-Gesellschaft, etc., but exclude individual universities and similar.
As I understand it, "Positions at CNRS" mean something different than it would in other countries, because, for a combination historical, social, and legal reasons, the French government largely funds research by hiring researchers directly rather than by giving grants through the universities at which they work.
I was discussing possibly making a 1-2 month visit to a French collaborator. (In the end, we couldn't get the timing and the funding to work out.) If I wanted a collaborator to visit me in the US, the funding mechanism would be that I would apply for a grant (eg from the NSF) or a supplement to an existing grant or a reallocation of funds in an existing grant to fund the visit. On the other hand, if a French person wanted me to visit him in France, the most common funding mechanism involves me applying (with his help and support) for a temporary one-month position from the CNRS.
The basic idea is that if the answer to your question would only be of use to people at the institution in question, it’s not a good fit.
Questions related to funding and support clearly fall outside of that. Internal HR policies at the NSF or NIH or Max Planck-Gesellschaft, for instance, would not.
I like this answer, but I have a hard time reconciling it to your comment that suggests that the question about the internal hiring policies at CRNS are on topic.
@StrongBad: It's not clear that all the jobs are internal positions—some of the research groups are hosted at universities. (It's very NIH-like in terms of scope and operation.)
I would argue that questions about NIH and UK MRC research positions are off topic. CNRS might be different since they might actually hire and employee people at multiple universities, but that is not clear to me.
But we would allow questions on NIH extramural fellowships that are hosted at universities, right? I think that the problem is in part that it's a single centralized process.
@NajibIdrissi thank you for that. Maybe what we need is a question about the CNRS.
@StrongBad someone has now asked about CNRS: https://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/100215/what-is-the-cnrs
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4619 | Is the word "Bizarre" too loaded with negative meaning?
I find myself uncomfortable with the title of this question, but don't want to get into an edit war, and the question is at the moment both protected and close to closure: Is it bizarre that a professor asks every student for a 3 inch by 5 inch photograph?
Calling any action by a staff member bizarre just precludes a sensible dialogue or response in my view. Perhaps the question wanted to find out how unusual is the request or how widespread this type of thing occurs.
Should I have just toned it down by an edit?
The Cambridge English dictionary gives these synonyms:
eccentric
flaky
freakish
outlandish disapproving
Whereas the Oxford gives these:
strange, peculiar, odd, funny, curious, offbeat, outlandish, eccentric, unconventional, unorthodox, queer, unexpected, unfamiliar, abnormal, atypical, unusual, out of the ordinary, out of the way, extraordinary
fantastic, remarkable, puzzling, mystifying, mysterious, perplexing, baffling, unaccountable, inexplicable, incongruous, irregular, singular, ludicrous, comical, ridiculous, droll, deviant, aberrant, grotesque, freak, freakish, surreal
outré
So even the dictionaries have different views of the power of the word!
Just a comment because I cannot judge from the perspective of a native English speaker, but the Italian equivalent bizzarro or the French bizarre (from which the English word probably derives) are not particularly loaded words, and so I don't perceive the title as strongly worded.
I don't think the word "bizarre" is too loaded with negative meaning, but to me it is more negative than "unusual". If the word bizarre was in the body of the question and I was editing it for another reason, I would probably change it. I would not edit the body of a question to only change the word "bizarre". In the word was used in the title of a question, I think an edit to only change the word would not be out of place. As the question is now closed, I would want to see a more substantial edit so we can consider reopening the question.
Getting into an edit war over the word is not useful. If the edit gets rolled back, bringing it up in meta or chat or flagging it would be fine.
When I retitled the question and introduced the word "bizarre", I was deliberately reusing OP's language from the body text. To me it seemed like OP was asking whether this was "bizarre" rather than "unusual." In particular, the question seemed to be whether this was something they could complain about to administrators.
That said, I would not be inclined to start an edit war if someone were to change the word "bizarre." Perhaps "acceptable" would be a good choice.
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5188 | How to lift an "answer ban" / why banned at all?
I am new to this Stack, though I have been participating in other stacks before. I answered a couple of question but have got constantly bad reactions, which for some reason are not very well liked.
In this questions I gave an answer, which was tagged "unclear". I don't see that and even another commenter did not see that.
In this query I give an answer based on my expert knowledge, which seems to be somewhat not acceptable for others.
In this query that is content-wise correct, even though others disagree if my suggestion is smart.
As a consequence I am banned from answering, which paralyzes me on this platform. My take on this platform is: I participate in Academia stack because I am science manager. I have a PhD, I worked at different academic institutions. Since my PhD is on copyright policy, I have some good knowledge about it. I can contribute with answers and suggestions, but not with questions. So my question is
How to unban myself?
How to prevent from being banned again?
Overall, I am wondering, whether the modus of right/wrong is suitable for most of the questions asked on this platform, because the questions seem to be very often rather vague, which makes answer suggestions.
https://academia.stackexchange.com/help/answer-bans
Thank you for the link. Since I am banned from answering and banned from posting comments, my only way - it seems - is to ask questions.
See What can I do when getting "We are no longer accepting questions/answers from this account"? which answers your questions about how this happened and how to undo it.
This is an automated system and we cannot intervene to override it.
The specific algorithm is a secret to make the system more difficult to abuse, but in general you get an answer ban when you receive mostly downvotes and few upvotes across multiple posts, including deleted ones.
Although you say you are an expert in some aspects of copyright, it seems all of the answers you link were likely downvoted for confusing plagiarism and other academic ethics concepts with copyright, which are separate concepts that are nonetheless often confused, and I think that makes people fairly aggressive about emphasizing when they are incorrectly interchanged.
Thank you! My take-away is: don't make people aggressive (and learn about what makes the community here aggressive).
@slinel Another possible takeaway: copyright law does not govern every legal or ethical issue encountered in academia.
If you suggest that I should take that away, I am beginning to wonder whether it is a language problem (as I am not a native english speaker). You are refering to example number 2, which was about scientific misconduct and plagiarism. My answer was only about plagiarism, not misconduct. All the critic to my post was about plagiarism. If you'll want to discuss the correctness of my answer, I must be allowed to comment - which I am not. Which is why I am asking what to do about it.
I am wondering, whether the modus of right/wrong is suitable for most of the questions asked on this platform, because the questions seem to be very often rather vague, which makes answer suggestions.
In that case, you should refrain from answering the question. If you had sufficient reputation, you could vote to close the question using the "opinion" reason.
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3888 | How is the order of tags defined for "Top Tags" in the "Profile"
My "Top Tags" are not the ones with the highest score, but somehow the number of posts plays a rôle as well.
Can someone clarify the rules to me?
(by the way: Are they the same on all SE sites?)
EDIT: Top Tags
All Tags
You see that e.g. "lab-meeting" is missing in Top Tags.
| Stack Exchange | 2025-03-21T12:54:48.929520 | 2017-11-22T07:58:36 | {
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3832 | Why was the recent question about dealing with common postdoc advice put on hold?
The community has recently put the question Post-doc priorities: “Laundry list” vs. “Research trumps all” on hold. The given reason was that the question depends strongly on individual factors. Other commenters have argued that "Too Broad" and "Opinion Based" could also apply.
If I am being honest, I don't see it. The question lists a few conflicting advises that are generally given, and asks for a strategy how one generally selects between them. Notably, the question does not follow the pattern of "here is a bunch of facts about me, now tell me what to do", which is the standard format of questions we usually close as based on individual factors.
To me, this is a typical Academia.SE question, for better or for worse. Yes, it is somewhat opinion-based. Yes, it is a little broad. But I think it is important, well within our usual range, and actually fairly answerable (I tried to give it a shot, but I would love if others could answer as well).
If we start being that strict about opinion-based and broad, I am afraid we will end up with very little answerable questions. Is
the postdoc priorities question really qualitatively different than this recent question, or that recent question, or the following recent question?
I find it too a very interesting question (actually, one of the few I've seen recently), and I was disappointed by the closing.
Same here [https://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/97016/is-it-disadvantageous-to-my-research-career-in-bioinformatics-if-my-phd-work-is?noredirect=1#comment250167_97016]
In addition to @AlexanderWoo's answer, I think some of the broadness of this question steps from the postdoc in addition to the job itself.
For example, there are people who I know who are extremely good at playing "The Game", for whom the "Laundry List" approach would potentially be very productive, and where "I spend a lot of time on Twitter" is actually a major benefit to one's career instead of a time sink.
Similarly, there are people who are immensely productive when writing papers - if they can ditch the other stuff on the "Laundry List" for a bit, they can absolutely churn out solid, impactful research results. In this case, "I shall crush them under the weight of my CV" might be a good strategy.
I have seen these people co-exist in the same position, and have similarly good career trajectories.
Sounds like an awesome answer to the question to me.
@xLeitix While flattering, I think it's an overly broad answer to an overly broad question.
@xLeitix That being said, given it was reopened, I posted an expanded version.
Yes, I do think it is different, because I can think of multiple examples of specific jobs for which "Research Trumps All" is clearly correct if you are applying for that job as well as multiple examples of specific jobs for which "Laundry list" is clearly correct if you are applying for that job. Over the job market as a whole, I do not see a clear preference for one over the other.
(Keep in mind my perspective is North American, and it seems to me that there is more diversity here in types of universities and their preferences than there is in Europe.)
For the other questions, I do not know of multiple examples of situations where different answers are clearly correct.
It's unfortunate that downvotes here could have 2 different possible meanings: (a) I'm incorrect about the lack of a clear preference in the job market; (b) this is not a good reason to close. I think it might be best if we have another meta-question to address (b), along the lines of "What should we do if the answer to a question is that there is no consensus and hence one should choose what one personally likes better?"
There is more in one's career than just the job market.
@MassimoOrtolano I don't understand your comment. What would be your career if you have no job?
@scaaahu In the long run, one's approach to research determines also the structure and breadth of their knowledge. And I think it's important to describe to someone who is at the beginning of their career what are, overall, the long-term consequences of certain choices, not limiting the discussion to the job market.
I think your answer would also be valuable as an answer to the original question, rather than the meta-question. Then it would also be easier to interpret upvotes and downvotes.
@MassimoOrtolano: When one expands from job market considerations to entire career considerations, then the answer to the question becomes even more dependent on personal preferences.
There are aspects that depend on personal preferences and aspects which don't. For instance, I think that the current answer does a good job in outlining the latter. For the very nature of this community, we have already many open questions that actually have a certain dependence on personal preferences, but I think they are acceptable if the personal part is kept at a reasonable level. I think that the linked question falls in this category.
@MassimoOrtolano: I think the current answer is not quite right and it depends more on personal preferences than the current answer suggests. Although it is not a priori obvious, I think the correct answer to the question is to do whatever you like best, because there is a diversity of permanent faculty jobs (and career possibilities within those jobs) out there and you might as well optimize for the ones that want you to do what you like doing.
@AlexanderWoo The thing is, your answer "this depends on personal preferences more than you may think" is a valuable answer here, because it's not obvious. This is much unlike in other cases, where the answer obviously depends on individual factors. The obvious cases are the ones that would normally be closed (to summarize the point made by xLeitix above).
@lighthousekeeper: Yes, it's a valuable answer, and the answer is conveyed by closing the question!
@AlexanderWoo Certainly the wrong way to convey it, since it doesn't allow to vote, comment, and accept the answer, while removing the possibility to give other valuable answers. Good that the question was reopened.
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4812 | About questions that are not questions
How does this site feel about questions posted only in order to share the related answer, added by OP as they post their question, as in How should I respond to an offer to pay a bribe for authorship fraud?. It feels to me as if someone is editing a FAQ page, maybe in order to ease future reference to standard answers, but does it as a pseudo question.
I’m decidedly no fan. What is the community opinion? Are there related rules?
As I try to submit this, I see a checkbox “answer your own question Q&A style.” Is this now encouraged? It makes little sense for a site as this one.
Edit after cag51’s comment:
I mean specifically on this site. The linked self-answered questions in the meta answer address common coding situations. I’m also familiar with the second reason given, and have done it myself (later find an answer to a question I asked on math.SE, and posted it). With the typically softer type of questions here, it seems to me a possible platform for soap-boxing - not in the case at hand, although I don’t see why it needed to be asked. “Should I still pursue an academic career? Yes, and here is why.” It’s like a blog - or could turn into one. And my remark is only about post+insta-answer situations.
Are you asking about the practice of asking-and-answering generally, or do you have a particular concern about the linked question? In the former case, asking-and-answering is explicitly encouraged network wide, see this discussion.
@cag51: I mean specifically on this site. The linked self-answered questions in the meta answer address common coding situations. I’m also familiar with the second reason given, and have done it myself (later find an answer to a question I asked on math.SE, and posted it). With the typically softer type of questions here, it seems to me a possible platform for soap-boxing - not in the case at hand, although I don’t see why it needed to be asked. “Should I still pursue an academic career? Yes, and here is why.” It’s like a blog - or could be. And my remark is only about post+insta-answer.
Thanks for clarification. Do you have any "real world" examples akin to your hypothetical example? I see what you mean and agree that you may have identified a way to abuse our format, but if the worst example is the one you linked above, I'm not sure there is a problem that needs to be solved.
So far as I can see, answering one's own question is, and has always been, a fine and encouraged contribution.
Some arguments in favor of this:
StackExchange is not just for the questioner but also those who search for similar questions afterward.
Other people can add their own answers as well, that may be even better than the self-answer.
But what if somebody tries to abuse this to game the system in some way?
Well, if the Q&A pairs they post are of low quality, then they should get downvoted, flagged, and/or closed just as they would for low quality questions and answers that do not come in a pair. If it happens often, then the person will end up running into automatic system limitations.
If the Q&A pairs are of high quality, however, what is there to even be upset about?
Agreed, this would be my answer too: there's no need to handle this kind of Q&A any different from "standard" Q&As.
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3243 | Using h-index style score as SE users performance indicator
I suggest to use an h-index-style to indicate SE users performance. As with publications, it gives a direct indication of activity level and users interest.
The h-index for answers (for example) is calculated by arranging the answers in descending order and stopping at the answer that has an equal number or higher of votes as its order. For example, a user with 15 answers with the following votes: 50, 43, 42, 20, 15, 14, 14, 11, 10, 10, 8, 4, 2, 2, 1 will have an h-index of 10, while a user with 1 answer of 246 votes will have an h-index of 1 (although both has same number of total votes).
You'll have to elaborate on what you mean. How would your proposed h-index be computed? In what way would it be different from the current reputation score, and why would it be better/more useful for this website?
@ff524 I added some explanation, I hope that helps.
Yes, thanks. Obligatory warning: voting is different on meta. Downvotes on this post most likely indicate disagreement with the proposed feature request, not that there's something wrong with the post.
@ff524 as long as it doesn't affect my poor reputation it's ok :)
Anyone know how to write a query for the data explorer? http://data.stackexchange.com/stackoverflow/query/45194/what-is-my-h-index
@StrongBad Try this one: http://data.stackexchange.com/academia/query/66081/what-is-my-h-index
@ff524 much better. It probably should be an answer ...
Citation metrics are flawed for...lots of reasons. Especially when they're pegged to something like "indicating performance", presumably with the usual rankings and the like that come with it.
Just using StackExchange related problems:
It utterly ignores other contributions, such as questions (never underestimate the importance of good questions to a site), comments, etc. As an example, whether you like it or not, JeffE's "Run, don't walk" comment is a cultural item on this site, and an "h-index" wouldn't really see that at all.
External votes become a thing. "Hot Network Questions" get lots of traffic, even if they're not particularly good question. Which means that, by strategically answering those, you could boost your "h-index". At the same time, diligent, workman-like answering of lots of questions that are likely to be helpful, but not flashy, and get a few upvotes and an accept, would be discouraged. That's the opposite of a healthy community.
We already have reputation
The reputation system also ignores comments etc... Questions and answers can be part of the h-index system. 2. The voting system does not address the source of the votes. 3. Same argument applies to citations with publications, h-index is a combination of quality and quantity (see the data explorer provided by @ff524 above, a user with 50k reputation has higher h-index than a user with 100k)
@jak123 That the reputation system is not fully useful does not suggest a system duplicating many of it's downsides is a good idea. One of the flaws is assuming that "Lots of upvotes" is a reliable signal of quality. I suspect it's much more likely a signal of "Lots of people looked at this question."
Same argument applies to publications, it's annexation rather than duplication (as is the case with badges). Quality (as with publications) means many people find it useful. Quality as an absolute concept is, sadly, irrelevant.
This has been proposed before: Modified h-index for questions and answers?
To me it does not seem all that useful. If you want to look at users based on their H-index, you can use this data explorer query
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4301 | How to prevent censorship in a StackExchange forum?
I have made a question very clearr (and interesting) as the answer and comments show (Why publishing in a journal instead of arxiv or in my blog?), but 4 users flaged this as unclear. I feel that this is a censorship strategy because the question (and answers above all) are not to the liking of them. May be that those people work for editors or have their own interest in censoring that question.
Is there any mechanism in these forums so that this does not happen?
I did not vote to close the other question. I doubt people voted to close unclear because of "HIP". If you mean High Impact Paper by HIP, please go back to that question and edit it to make it clear. We can't read your mind when you use HIP for High Impact Paper. It could be Hip
@scaahu I clarify what is a HIP in comments, but ok I will clarify it in the question. I hope you vote to unhold this now.
I see no indication of censorship. The original looks unclear to me even after editing by a more experienced user; the present thread also looks strange. These reflect on downvotes as this platform is interactive.
I did not find the question particularly unclear, but there were certainly some problems that led to it getting closed. A wish of our members to censor this discussion was certainly not one of them, as we have many questions in similar spirit that were highly upvoted:
It's a duplicate. Notably this question contains more or less the same discussion.
It sounds like a discussion prompt rather than question with a clear answer. Stack Exchange is not a discussion forum, and questions in the style of "I identified this problem with academia, what can we do?" are not in scope of this website.
Somewhat relatedly, it probably triggered the "rant alarm" of many of our community members. In this Stack Exchange, many members are wary of questions that are asked in bad faith, or meant to provoke or trigger discussions. Again, Stack Exchange is not a discussion forum. It's simply not the right place to brainstorm alternative ideas to academic publishing. It certainly is the right place to ask why the publishing model is the way it is, as the question linked in the first bullet item shows, but your question did not sound like that.
You are asking a number of questions at the same time. The question of why to choose a journal over arxiv has already been answered, but you also ask about publishing a blog post instead. You also ask why it's not better to not care so much about scientific rigor and try to get it out of the door quickly, and there is also something related to IPR and patenting in there. The Stack Exchange model really only works well if you ask one, fairly narrow and specific, question at a time.
It's an unfortunate reality that one really should not read too much into the specific closing reason here. Oftentimes, what exact reason the community members choose to close a question on is a bit random. Going over the comments in the question (or asking a meta question, as you have done) is more instructive in learning how the question can be salvaged.
Further, note that putting a question on hold does not mean that people want to kill it with fire. It purely means that we think the question needs some editing before it becomes a good fit to the site. Oftentimes, fairly small editing to the question is sufficient to bring it in scope, at which point it will be re-opened.
TL;DR: If users say that your question is unclear, please consider the possibility that this is because it is actually unclear – and not because of censorship.
There were several problems with your question as it was closed:
It was not understandable due to using an acronym (HIP) that is not in active use. In the ten thousands of questions and answers on this site, nobody ever used this acronym. The first results by Internet search engines are from some exotic company. (This issue is now fixed.)
It asks several questions at once, which is something not suited for our question-and-answer format. Please take the tour to learn more about how this site works. A specific problem that already arose from this is that the existing answers addressed different aspects of the question and thus are not comparable.
You tell us very little about want you already know, why you want to know what you are asking for, or why you are skeptical about certain things. This is not a forum where you just throw a topic into the ring and everybody writes an essay about it.
Some of the questions you were asking were already addressed before or are very broad themselves and we have several questions around that topic.
Note that the primary purpose of putting a question on hold is to prevent further answers while giving you the opportunity to fix the issues with the question. It does not result in deletion and unless users vote to delete your question, it will not be automatically deleted. If you edit your question, it will automatically be sent to a review queue, where users can decide whether the issues are fixed and it can now be reopened.
Finally note that the right to put questions on hold is a privilege in this community and it takes five users to agree on this, so it’s not that easy to abuse this function for censorship. Also note that the privilege of closing requires much more reputation than the privilege of downvoting, and so far nobody downvoted any of the answers that you presume they disliked.
Welcome, Ixer. This is a feature, not a bug. The Stack Exchange system is designed to make it easy to remove low quality questions. If you do not like this, try a different website.
If you want an example of how to ask a higher quality question, you might like this:
Why are journals used in modern scientific academic research?
My question is not a low quality question as you can see. There are only 4 that think it is unclear but a lot of people are interested on it.
@Ixer questions that people are interested in get hundreds of upvotes - that does not seem to be the case with your question...
"a lot of people are interested on it". No. It has a score of zero and 139 views. Its pretty much the opposite, very few people are interested in it.
Note that the question in question is closed, not removed. If the status quo is not changed, it will not ever be deleted.
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1755 | Redundant answers
This question is related to Answering etiquette
After a helpful answer and some helpful comments to my other question, I realize I need to articulate an additional question.
On the flip side (and this is what motivated my inquiries):
Suppose I have written a careful answer to a question. It gets several upvotes. Then someone with a fancy academic position and a massive reputation score comes along and writes an answer which is (in my opinion, of course!) essentially equivalent to mine. Their style is more authoritative than mine, but we are using the same logic and reach the same conclusion. Neither one of us cites any links. Their answer gets upvoted like crazy. Is there anything I can do about it? Can I at least take the moral high ground in my own thinking? Or is this a perfectly ethical artifact of the SE system? Do I just need to be patient and slowly amass more points?
(Please note, I do realize there may be more differences between our answers than what I myself was able to perceive. But I'm trying to figure out how things work here, so for the sake of argument, could you please try to give an answer based on my premise? Thanks.)
For future readers of this question (since Sursula edited it and brought it to the top of the queue) - the OP was fairly new on the site when they wrote this. They have now garnered enough rep that they are in the top 0.5% of rep on Academia. Congratulations to them (and thanks for the contributions!). And it shows everyone else that good contributions do get recognized, even when just starting out.
Due to the nature of the topic there are always going to be bigger reputation effects on this site than many other stackexchange sites. This isn't like StackOverflow, where there is often a "right" answer that you can check works correctly. A lot of the questions here deal with cultural customs, traditions, expectations, etc. that don't have verifiable answers. It's very possible to have two well-written and sensible answers, but still have one of them be completely wrong just because it isn't "how it's done" in academia.
In this situation, that "fancy academic position" and "massive reputation score" are the best indicators we have that the person answering is actually knowledgeable about the topic. If I see two functionally identical answers, but one is from someone unknown and the other is from a known academic who has a history of giving reliable information, the latter actually is more helpful.
Of course, there are other etiquette methods around this. Perhaps high-rep users should focus on +1-type comments on good answers from less-known users in these kinds of situations; giving a seal of approval instead of writing another answer with similar content (in fact, I think this is already done to some extent, and I rarely see a redundant answer like you describe from a high-rep user).
In general though, I don't think the hypothetical you describe happens that often. Well-written and well-researched answers usually rise to the top regardless of the author. If anything, timing tends to have more of an effect than author (a well-known SE bias, early answers quickly rise to and stay at the top).
It's only happened to me once, but I took it harder than I might have if the person who wrote the functionally equivalent answer hadn't written something extremely rude about me previously. I would suggest that "high-rep users should focus on +1-type comments on good answers from less-known users" be added to the SE documentation. I'm not sure how to make this suggestion formally.
@aparente001 Making a post on the meta is how you propose it to the community. If it's widely accepted and possible to do then it will probably be implemented. However, I personally think this is a pretty niche issue that doesn't have that big of an impact, and almost certainly isn't worth formalizing anywhere.
I do not know what specific answer you are referring to, I am only addressing the hypothetical situation you have described.
Per What are we generally looking for in answers, one thing we look for is:
A fresh take on a question
so yes, users are encouraged to post answers that add new information.
However, you mentioned "someone with a fancy academic position and a massive reputation score." Note that another thing some people look for in answers is
A user that, based on her/his bio and SE habitus, seems trustworthy to answer the question
With the following rationale:
given that we usually deal with rather subjective topics, I usually take into account who posts an answer if it goes against my own opinion or seems counter-intuitive. Yes, that's unfair towards new users, but I have certainly seen new users post, well, stupid things much more frequently than high-rep users, who, often, also happen to be senior academics.
Regarding "Is there anything I can do about it?" - I can't think of anything in the hypothetical case. In a specific case, there might be something you can do to engender trust in your answer - for example, you could mention (in your answer or your bio) the relevant experience you have that qualifies you to answer the question authoritatively.
Oh dear. It sounds like I can't even take the moral high ground... but thanks for answering.
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5410 | Should we request a pop-up to warn users about creating new tags?
Given all the recent discussion about banners and tags, I raise the following question: should we request a warning pop-up whenever someone tries to create a new tag? Apparently this is possible and would look like this.
I doubt it is possible for each site to request custom wording, but if it is possible, I would request even stronger wording. Perhaps the last paragraph could say:
Creating a new tag is almost never the right thing to do; most new tags require an approved proposal on meta.
There's a lot of activity on meta these days, so I'll assume that upvotes on the question indicate agreement. If anyone disagrees, please post an answer.
My upvote indicates support for requesting a popup with (at least) the default text. I'm not sure I'd go as far as your suggested stronger statement, however.
@Anyon, and I'd support the stronger text.
Since when have tags required a "proposal"?
@AzorAhai-him- - there was some discussion about it here. A proposal is probably not necessary in every single case, but it's a good rule-of-thumb for newer users.
AS you can see, I participated there. There's a lot of points in your answer and I guess I would say it's not really a straightforward proposal to require a post on meta before creating a tag.
Apologies for the long turnaround. The pop-up has been enabled. Please note that we don't have the ability to customize the text, so it's using the standard text as seen in the screenshot in the question.
Thanks!!!!!!!!!!
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5402 | Should we request a banner to warn about our policy on AI-generated content?
As announced here, sites are allowed to request a banner that would remind answerers about our policy on AI-generated content. The text would say something like:
Reminder: Answers generated by Artificial Intelligence tools are not allowed on Academia.SE. Learn more.
Do we want to request such a banner for our site? Personally, I'm inclined to say it couldn't hurt. It will appear only over the Answer box, like this:
(This is how it appeared on Stack Overflow; for our site it would say Academia Stack Exchange)
You specify "answers" in the banner; does it mean that AI-generated questions are ok?
@FedericoPoloni This particular banner appears specifically on the window where answers are composed https://i.sstatic.net/StYoj.png , and I don't think we have a lot of choice about what it says specifically, though we could insist.
The only hurt involved is a slight reduction in screen real estate. I personally surf SE on my desk machine, where this is really not an issue. I wonder what percentage of a mobile phone screen this banner takes up? That said, have we had enough of an AI deluge here to make such an ad worthwhile?
@StephanKolassa It only appears with the answer box, I added a picture from the linked Meta post.
Also note that the Stack Exchange network employee mentioned "All users will see this banner when posting an answer with the option to dismiss. Once dismissed, logged-in users will not see this banner again". See Network Meta Announcement linked in the question for more info.
Apologies for the long turnaround time on this request. The banner is now enabled, with the "Learn more" link leading to the AI Policy help center article.
I think it is probably fine and is certainly worth emphasizing. The only issue I see, however, is that in the UI for a phone, it separates the formatting bar from the text form. That bar is especially useful, I think, on phones. And there is already a separation possible for the warning to be nice to new users.
I doubt that a UI redesign is in the works.
No real objection, but the way it is expressed is also an effective reminder that it is possible to generate answers by AI. If there is any way to adapt the text, it might make more sense to actually say what is allowed instead of saying what is not.
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5482 | Should we have a canonical question about Part III of Cambridge's Mathematical Tripos?
Over time, we've accumulated a certain number of what seem to me to be very similar questions (with very similar answers) regarding Part III of Cambridge's Mathematical Tripos, which is a 1 year masters degree. While not all of the questions about this degree are duplicative, a certain number are. They boil down to "Does success on Part III increase competitiveness for subsequent PhD applications?"
The first in this list is from today. The oldest is from nearly 10.5 years ago:
How useful is Cambridge Part III for PhD applications in Europe?
Benefits of doing Part III at Cambridge (Pure Math) for US PhD applications
How appreciated is "Part III" in the US?
How much weight does the tripos III carry for further PhD admissions?
Part III of the Mathematical Tripos at Cambridge (Pure Maths) with scholarship, and US PhD applications
As a logistical matter, we're not being overwhelmed with this question. The question is in some sense perfect for this site: Students may not have heard of it, but the degree is reasonably famous amongst practitioners. Even better, some logistical aspects of the degree are peculiar because of its short length. This is again easy for practitioners to spot and relay but harder for students.
We've answered minor variants repeatedly over time with little new information, however, and I'm increasingly thinking that this dispersal is undesirable for Q&A findability. If you look at the most recent question of this type (the first link), its only difference from previous questions that I can dig up is a concentration on searching for a PhD in Europe as opposed to the US. It's hard to close this as a dupe because the other questions have focused on the US in the past.
Normally, I would say fixating on a specific named degree isn't typically what we want to do on this site. It keeps coming up, however.
Bottom line: I'm of the mind that a canonical question answering (in long form): "Will successful completion of the Cambridge Masters degree, Part III of the Mathematical Tripos, generally increase a student's competitiveness for subsequent PhD positions in related subjects? Does the degree's short time-table introduce any generally applicable logistical considerations?" would be short and centralize this information once and for all. But I'd rather see if there's some consensus one way or another before proceeding with that.
Thanks for finding this.
Normally, I would say fixating on a specific named degree isn't typically what we want to do on this site
I agree. Canonical questions are quite rare: we only have ~12 "tagged" canonical question and maybe another 12 that are common dupe targets. Making one for this would seem very strange.
It's hard to close this as a dupe because the other questions have focused on the US in the past.
Of the ones you list:
Questions 2 and 3 could be merged -- the same question, focused on the US, each with many good answers.
Questions 5 is also about the US and has no answers. Seems like a dupe of the above.
Question 4 doesn't have the US in the title, but it is about the US and it has only one answer with 7 upvotes. Another dupe of the above.
Question 1, the new one, is the European flavor of the same question. So, this one should probably be left open, perhaps after editing to mention that it's already been asked-and-answered for the US but not for Europe.
Update: I have merged questions 2 & 3 and closed 4 & 5 as duplicates of this. For question 1 (the European version), I am open to additional opinions. Personally, I am reluctant to close question 1 before it gets a good answer. After it gets a good answer, it might make more sense to combine the two remaining questions into one giant region-agnostic version. But as it is, all the answers are US-centric, and the odds that someone adds a high-quality, Europe-centric answer as the 10th answer on the merged question seems pretty low.
I like the ideas for administrative alternatives to a canonical question-- I haven't seen very many merges in my time, so wasn't thinking about that. But also, I'm at least a bit reluctant with a solution that leaves question 1 independently open. My main issue there is that I'm fairly certainly (though not completely) that the question has a region-agnostic answer. There's also a variant of where I ask the region-agnostic question, mark it community-wiki, but we leave off the "canonical-question" tag, I suppose.
@user176372 This seems like a good opportunity for a region-agnostic question that allows for region-specific answers.
There's no specific functionality in Stack Exchange for something to be a Canonical Question™. It's just a particular post that the site community decided to make expansive and encompass, and then use as a duplicate closure target for anything on the topic henceforth. If the only reason to say "we shouldn't make it canonical" is the desire to avoid it seeming official, don't use that tag, but otherwise close the duplicates as duplicates as they should be.
Thanks Cag, I think this sounds like a good solution for now. In fact, I missed your update and it's what I was coming around to anyway. Since this European version of the question is the first one in a "new" region, we can productively procrastinate on further merging for as long as another region-focused one doesn't appear.
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5432 | Bug report - '.. every 40 minutes'
Just a bug? report. I just now joined Academia (I am a long-time user of many SE sites); I posted a question and ..
No issue to me, just lettin' y'all know, cheers.
resolved below
According to the official rate limiting guide, this is by design.
Users with < 125 rep on the current site [are rate limited on question-asking to] 40 minutes since their last question anywhere on the network
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5363 | What should we do about questions asking for career advice outside of academia?
I felt like questions involving careers outside of academia have been received inconsistently in recent times.
To look more systematically, I went through the industry tag specifically over the past 9 months or so; most of these questions involve careers in industry. I've sorted those into three broad categories:
Well-received (open, net positive score, at least one positively scoring answer):
Pure Math in Industry
Industrial PhD: which doors closed?
How much CS knowledge is needed to get into cryptography from math?
What non-academic job options are there for someone with a PhD in algebraic topology?
Closed:
Career advice: Which jobs or positions are interesting for a computational physicist or data scientist? Industry, academia or something else? (shopping; community vote)
Career opportunities switching from academia to industry (needs focus; community vote)
Jobs similar to research that don't require a PhD (out-of-scope; unilateral mod action by me)
Career path/growth outside of academia (out-of-scope; my mod vote plus 3 community close votes)
Neutral/Mixed:
From Math to AI with Few Formal Accomplishments
Can a data science postdoc improve my chanced in industry as a pure science graduate?
Transitioning from academia to industry (I left a comment noting this seemed off-topic to me, as did another mod, but neither of us closed it unilaterally)
How different are the industry jobs specific to Ph.D vs jobs where both Ph.D/MS are hired?
There may be some patterns here. "Career" in the title is associated with closures, though the close reasons varied and were not necessarily specifically for asking for advice about industry. Career questions involving mathematics seem popular. Our help page is fairly explicit that non-academic career advice is off-topic here:
Please do not ask … about preparations for a non-academic career (“What graduate degree will help me get a job as X?”)
but that does not seem to accurately describe the way the community is treating these questions. Maybe people are unaware of this policy, maybe people disagree with it, maybe people agree with it but view the prohibition as having a narrower scope than my own interpretation. Especially because a couple of the closures involved my own hand, I thought it was worth polling the community on this and soliciting opinions and suggestions for how we should modify either the policy (for clarity or substance) or curation.
There are some previous related Meta discussions but they are relatively old so a new topic seemed in order:
Two similar questions about non-academic jobs/internships — one closed as off-topic, the other was not: what gives?
Expand scope of site to include academics searching for info on industry jobs
Are questions on opportunities in industry after a doctorate on-topic?
The general consensus from these old conversations seem to support being more open to these questions than our written policy in the help pages suggests.
Did some of the questions simply not get closed due to a decline in closing activity during the strike?
@Sursula I don't think the post dates would support that as a primary explanation.
Does this answer your question? Are questions about preparing for industry on topic?
@AnonymousPhysicist No, it doesn't, because it's 11 years old and is inconsistent with how the community is actually responding to these posts, hence my entire point of raising the issue now
@BryanKrause The state of play in the answers seems to have grown fairly static at this point: do you feel like there is sufficient clarity for mods to make a decision on how to proceed?
@jakebeal For me personally, I'll take a lighter hand on these questions and avoid unilaterally closing them unless they're clearly in the shopping category where I think there's no debate.
As a researcher outside of academia I find that this site, like many academic organizations, tends to conflate "academia" and "research" and often has a poorly-defined notion of "industry."
In the on-topic page of the help section, the first sentence includes in the scope "anyone in or interested in research-related or research-adjacent fields." That breadth has served this site well, because:
The differences between "academic" research and "industrial" research are generally not methodological but organizational, meaning that answers are often relevant to both.
Most research does not take place in universities. Consider, for example, that in the US in FY2020, businesses spent $112 billion on basic and applied research while universities spent only $86 billion (there are some nuances in those numbers, like the $5.2 billion spent at universities by businesses, but the basic conclusion holds).
I thus have always considered the statement "preparations for a non-academic career" to be be better interpreted as "preparations for a non-academic and non-research career".
That captures all of us in the "research-related or research-adjacent fields" as well as academics in non-research positions, while still appropriately excluding all the "Will a Masters in Dog Whispering help me get a job as a fire fighter?" sorts of questions.
Mind you, most of the poorly received questions above should still be closed: not because they're off topic, but because they're shopping questions, opinion-based, or poorly focused. The only one that I feel is incorrectly closed and should be reopened is "Career path/growth outside of academia", which I think deserves at least one answer from a contributor with a research career outside of academia.
Bottom line: change "preparations for a non-academic career" to "preparations for a non-academic and non-research career"
I've read this several times and I'm still not clear what the recommendation is. If someone posts "what kind of jobs should I consider with an MS in dog whispering?" do we leave it open or close it?
I completely agree. With some 30 years at a national lab, I consider myself part of academia - I've done research, gotten funding, and hired plenty of PhDs as postdocs and staff. I just haven't been associated with a university since finishing my PhD. If many professors are ill informed on options, we can and should help folks out.
@cag51: "What kind of jobs should I consider with an MS in dog whispering?" should be closed for the exact same reasons that "What sort of graduate programs should I consider with a BA in dog whispering?" should be closed. Both are terrible fits for the SE model as both shopping questions and highly dependent on personal factors.
The recent question about why anyone needs a PhD outside 'academia' (where university employment was intended as the sole academia) demonstrates that there are many people who frankly do not understand post-PhD options at all, yet are in a PhD program. I find that very weird, and horrifying at the same time. We can, and should, help.
I guess I don't really see the fault lines here the same way; I would have certainly included people like Jon Custer as part of academia, as he does. I would also include people who publish in academic contexts despite having industry employers as part of academia. But, there is a lot of research that is not academic research, I think the "...and development" part of R&D is really important, and is where most of that money you refer to as research is being spent. The development part of R&D shares very little with academic research in terms of goals and organization.
Even the well-received questions I am not seeing how they are associated specifically to an "academic research" or even just "research" career in places that are not institutions of higher learning; they seem to me like they are just asking about a job: "will my choice of research topic affect my ability to get a job in this field". Isn't that outside our scope? I think I'd be more open if the question is closer to "can I do this type of research/are there people hiring people to do this type of research in an industry setting", but that doesn't look like most of the actual posts we get.
@BryanKrause While you're right that development dominates, you are still far underestimating the amount of real honest-to-goodness research that's done in industry. If you look at the NSF source that I cited, you'll see that development is another $425 billion beyond the $112 billion on the research!
As for the "get a job" questions, would you say the same if it was about whether somebody could get a job as a lab tech in a university, or at a high-energy physics facility? I don't think that "industry" vs. "academia" is the real issue here. I think the question fit is more about its generality and the degree to which it engages with scientific knowledge and research skills.
@jakebeal Hmm, indeed, I should have looked more carefully at your source! Thanks for enlightening me. As of now, our policy states that preparation for a non-academic career is an issue, so if that shouldn't be an issue, we should remove it from the policy, and replace it with something else. Expanding to all research careers seems quite broad to me and difficult to find the border of.
@BryanKrause The border of academia is pretty hard to find as well: do FFRDCs count, or service labs like AFRL and NRL? How about Fraunhofer Institutes or INRIA, the Mayo Clinic, Cold Spring Harbor, Schloss Dagstuhl, Lincoln Lab, or JPL? Frankly, I think that we should embrace the fuzziness of "research-related or research-adjacent", because the problems aren't coming from research careers, they're coming from bad questions or questions that are clearly outside of even the fuzzy borders of research careers. To come to the point: what do you think of my proposed wording change to the policy?
@jakebeal Should it be on-topic to ask how to craft a resume for a job at a medical device company?
@BryanKrause Probably not, for the same reason it's not on-topic to ask how to craft an application for a PhD program in algebraic topology. I think it would be on topic, however, to ask questions like: "What sort of research career could an electrical engineering PhD have in the biomedical industry?" or "How hard is it to publish as a biomedical industry researcher?" or "What is likely to be different in doing biomedical device research in a company vs. at a medical school?" All of these are industry career-focused but research-centric and general enough to be interesting to many.
@jakebeal We have a lot of on-topic questions about PhD applications, especially essays. Also rec letters, formatting your lists of papers and presentations, etc.
@BryanKrause I think your comment further emphasizes the parallels that I am seeing. Applying for a PI-level non-academic research position often has similar components as a faculty application, with significant differences in emphasis and process. Recommendation letters, research talks, a strong scientific CV, all are important (but subtly different) there as well. I disliked "How to craft a resume for a job at a medical device company?" because it sounds poorly formed, but I'd definitely support "What parts of my CV to emphasize applying for research lead at medical device company?"
@jakebeal Wouldn't that be a better fit for a site about the workplace more broadly? I thought this one was for the peculiarities of an academic career.
Absolutely not. Applying for a research PI position in a company or other non-university research organization often looks a lot more like applying for a faculty position than it looks like applying for a job as a software developer. Another example: when I went up for my most recent promotion, we essentially put together a tenure case (except for the teaching bits), outside references and everything. I would say it is the peculiarities of "an academic career or research-related or research-adjacent career."
@jakebeal That sounds like an outlier to me, though I have limited anecdotal evidence for that in my brief time outside academia. The research-related jobs I'm familiar with were very different from any academic roles, and the jobs were indeed very much like applying for a job as a software developer, jobs in managing preclinical and clinical trials mainly. History of scientific publishing would have been a plus, but not at all in the same way as within academia.
Perhaps another case of Academia varies more than you think it does?
@jakebeal Or "Non-academia varies more than you think it does" ;)
@BryanKrause - our internal process for promoting technical staff to the 'Distinguished' level looked very much like a tenure package until recently. They changed the process because, frankly, we already knew internally who was highly regarded internally and externally. And my hiring process is not too dissimilar to hiring a professor except (1) I get fewer candidates by a long ways it seems, and (2) I'm looking to keep them for a long time.
@JonCuster I certainly believe you that in an environment like a national lab, that is very academia-adjacent and, as you argue, might as well be considered as part of academia rather than separate, that these things are more similar. jakebeal is arguing about all research including an industry environment, and in my (albeit limited) experience at least of the medical device industry, hiring/promotion for research jobs there looks just like hiring for any other industry engineering position, including for PhDs.
@BryanKrause - fair enough. I still remember IBM Yorktown Heights and Bell Labs (who gave us our staff levels including 'Distinguished'). While those are now not what they were, there are still industry R&D groups doing research much like the old days - they just aren't big divisions anymore. Still, many people getting PhDs now will not become professors so we can let them know that is OK. The mechanics of how to apply for a non-academia job - No.
@JonCuster Certainly there is overlap between industry and academic topics, especially grants or publishing. I don't think there is any opposition to questions from outside academia on those academic-overlap topics. Then there are also special cases in industry like the examples you list, plus government-operated research facilities, where there may be additional overlap into hiring norms, etc. My understanding is that jakebeal is arguing for a broader scope extension to any jobs involving research, including those where publication is not a primary goal.
@BryanKrause My core argument is that it's difficult to draw a clear formal line: notice that you're already adding multiple exceptions! Thus, we should embrace the fuzziness of the notion of a "research career" and in judging any individual question should err on the side of inclusion, rather than defaulting to exclusion.
@jakebeal Yes, being inclusive certainly simplifies trying to draw a line, but I guess I just haven't seen many questions that are targeting the exceptions I have in mind, so I'm not sure those should necessarily lead us to being a much broader career resource. But, also not a hill I'm going to die on.
@BryanKrause I think we're actually fairly close here: I mostly don't want to see the small fraction of good on-topic questions like the one from RogerVadim in this question getting pre-emptively closed when they should be able to get a good on-topic answer here.
@jakebeal That question attracted some downvotes in addition to the close votes, reaction to it seemed decidedly mixed, probably related to the comments about the meaning of growth being unclear, though I do think Wolfgang's answer shows that maybe a useful answer can still be provided (the other answer...not so much, IMO).
I'd certainly like to answer it too if I got the chance. :-)
It depends on the interpretation of academia:
Academia could include only those with permanent positions in universities, involved in research, teaching, etc. - a somewhat restricted category in the US, although it could imply a much broader range of people in other places - e.g., in Europe, where non-senior university positions are also often permanent.
Academia could include anyone conducting research or other scientific activities in academia - this would include postdocs and PhD students. I am not aware of the exact statistics here, but I suspect many (if not most) of these eventually find employment outside of the academia. Finding an employment and perspectives of professional development outside of the academia are of interest to this category, which sometimes turn out to be very poorly informed about their options.
Finally, academia could apply to anyone who has ever done studies (or is currently doing studies) in a university, which then include pretty much anyone with a job requiring college education. Their future career path is a part of the reasons for undertaking the studies, and of great interest throughout.
As already mentioned above, the attitudes may also vary depending on the country and culture. In my experience, in the US both professors and graduate students tend to be poorly informed about the options outside of academia, and the graduate studies are usually undertaken under the assumption that aims at a career in academia (although for good students such studies might be the path of least resistance - these students are typically invited to do research by one of their professors in undergraduate courses, while looking for a job elsewhere requires extra effort.) On the other hand, in Europe graduate studies are often undertaken with the explicit goal of securing a job in a prestigious company (which may also imply doing high-end industrial research) - this also affects the teaching approach, which focuses more on teaching a greatest possible range of skills, rather than an independent research in a specialized area. This choice of pedagogical approach, as well as appropriately informing and helping students in their career choice, should be then of interest even to those included in the narrowest definition of academia.
To summarize: I am a low-rep user here - I don't know who are the majority of the community in terms of their employment (academia or not), career level (students, postdocs, profs) or geographical origin, although all these should be taken into account. Thus, my following recommendation is based only on my interpretation of term academia: questions on out-of-academia matters should be allowed as long as academic background, experience, etc. have direct influence on the matter.
Given these thoughts, what's your recommendation of policy for the site?
@jakebeal I am a low-rep user here - I don't know who are the majority of the community in terms of their employment (academia or not), career level (students, postdocs, profs) or geographical origin. Thus, my recommendation is based only on my interpretation of term academia: questions on out-of-academia matters should be allowed as long as academic background, experience, etc. have direct influence on the matter. In this sense my own question is on topic only to the extent that my ignorance about careers out of academia is a consequence of the many years that I spent in academia :D
Thanks! It might be helpful if you add the judgement in your comment explicitly into your answer.
I strongly disagree with this approach. If you changed it to "questions on out-of-academia matters should be allowed as long as academic background, experience, etc. have direct influence on the answer" then it would be much better. If the question is best answered by a non-academic, it does not belong here.
@AnonymousPhysicist why non-academics should be prohibited from talking about their academic experience? Note that this includes people who might have spent decades in academia. I have seen successful academics to quit at the end of their career, in order to devote themselves fully to applying their discoveries/expertise in real world, via a company. Also, in some countries there's obligatory retirement age from government/university jobs, but people may want to remain active.
@RogerVadim That is not what I said. I said "If the question is best answered by a non-academic" which has nothing to do with limiting who is asking or answering.
@AnonymousPhysicist firstly, it still seems to me as a minor remark. Secondly, the most qualified to answer such questions are obviously those who habe experience inside and outside of academia. Finally, it is not clear what you mean by academics - the first part of my post specifically addresses this question.
Again, who is answering is irrelevant - it the content of the correct answer that determines if a question should be closed.
@AnonymousPhysicist it is you who raised the matter of who is answering: If the question is best answered by a non-academic, it does not belong here. Furthermore, the point of closing the question is that no one can answer it - if there's an answer(s), especially a "correct" one, it is too late to close.
@RogerVadim As I said before, that's not what those words mean. "Best" indicates the sentence refers to a hypothetical ideal answer, not the actual people answering.
This site describes itself as:
Academia is a question and answer site for academics
Academics do not have non-research careers in industry. Questions about non-research careers in industry should be closed as "not within the scope of this community."
By my reading, this looks to be coherent with my own answer. Would you agree, or is your interpretation different?
@jakebeal Your answer seems unfocused to me, so I am not sure.
Key recommendation: change "preparations for a non-academic career" to "preparations for a non-academic and non-research career."
I think it merely kicks the can from defining academic to defining research. Or it might imply a circular definition: research - research is what academics, we exclude as non-academic anything that is not research.
(added for completeness)
We should close such questions as off topic. If my other suggestion (for a canonical question) fails, I do not see how we can take such questions at all. Having a ton of individual posts for different sub field, countries, and personal interests, each with (at most) a few answers giving anecdotal suggestions, does not seem like what we do here.
Thanks for raising this, I’ve been wondering the same.
I know we generally frown on making giant lists, but to me this seems like a case for a giant canonical question of the form “I have a PhD in X, what non-university jobs should I consider?” Then we’ll have an answer for each field, as we do for the countries in that canonical post.
The trouble with all the individual questions is that only two or three people are likely to reply (at most), and a few data points are hardly representative. But a single list that people can add to over many years may be more helpful.
I don't like this idea because I think the list will not be about to be canonical due to being poorly bounded. Academia is just such a small portion of the research universe, and the rest of it is far more diverse and difficult to categorize.
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4468 | Can we reopen the question about reducing PhD positions?
Can we reopen this question? Originally it presented some arguments for reducing the number of PhD positions offered, and asked, "What's your opinions about this". It's been edited so it's fairly clear what it's asking (Are my arguments valid, What counter-arguments are there), it hasn't been answered in an especially satisfactory way, and it's a valid (and useful) question. (Although it would benefit if it would be more clear who "we" is in the context of the question.)
It still looks pretty opinion/discussion-based to me. There are individual claims that could be countered or investigated, but the question isn't really asking about that, it's asking for an opinion on the synthesis, by my read. The title is also terrible: "Is there any valid reason..."
Eh, the title is asking an especially clear and answerable question. What exactly counts as "valid" might be up for discussion, but it asks for any reason. I suspect what you're attributing to the question can be pretty safely attributed to the asker, i.e. they have an agenda and want to know about the synthesis, but the question itself seems fine to me as a question. (Is it really more opinion-based than "How should I deal with discouragement as a graduate student?"? That's the highest rated question on this site.)
Given that the question is based on a large fallacy (that the number of PhDs awarded should somehow line up with the number of faculty openings), a valid answer to the question is, "Yes, there are valid reasons to not limit the number of PhDs". No, it is still a biased question with answers that are personal opinion.
@JonCuster So you're saying that the question should stay closed because there's a valid answer to it? Or because the answer is especially obvious? Every question has answers that are personal opinion. But there are (I assume) answers that are not purely opinion. Is there some sort of guideline for when a question counts as "opinion-based"?
But it is an entirely useless 'valid' answer, since the question is broken to begin with.
@sgf https://stackoverflow.blog/2010/09/29/good-subjective-bad-subjective/ is the canonical reference linked from the help. In general, academia.SE tends to allow subjective questions when the answers are based on personal experience, either in the position of the question-asker or the people they are interacting with (admissions and other committees, journal editors/reviewers, etc). This question doesn't fit those categories.
@BryanKrause I'm aware of that. I'm not convinced yet that the question falls into camp subjective to begin with. After all, Jon Custer is convinced that there is an objective answer to it.
I don't want this to turn into a fight, by the way. It seems to me that the kernel of the question is this: "It is generally understood that many more people go into a PhD with the intention of staying in Academia than actually will be able to. Does this mean that there should be fewer PhD positions." That seems like a legitimate question to me.
I agree it's a legitimate question, but I don't think it fits the SE format well. The answer will be based on personal opinions and will solicit discussion. There is no reference that will support an opinion either way (except to say someone else shares that opinion).
Let’s put it this way - I have a PhD and do not work in academia. My company employs more than 1000 PhDs. I’ve hired dozens of them. The question is bad and simply unfounded.
@JonCuster Perhaps, but if so, it doesn't follow from what you're saying. Honestly you give the impression you want the question closed because you don't agree with the underlying assumptions, but to me that sounds like a good reason to answer the question, challenging those assumptions, not to close it.
@sgf - you seem quite passionate about an admittedly flawed question. I suggest that you craft a clear question in line with your interpretation of the question and ask it.
The linked post isn't a question; it's a persuasive essay. There isn't even much of an attempt to frame it as an objectively addressable question; it's simply an attempt to argue a philosophical viewpoint from one particular angle. While this is a great "letter to the editor" or blog post, I would suggest that this is a perfect example of a question that we aren't looking for on this site.
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5045 | Tag synonym suggestions for redundant tags
I had suggested a tag synonym for a tag that was likely created due to a typo a few months ago, but it seems that the queue is not monitored. I also had a few more suggestions to clean up some redundant tags, so I decided to make a post. I believe most of these are very straightforward, but please let me know if any of them requires a separate discussion.
Tag
Suggested Synonym
Comments
Decision
publication
publications
status-completed
bullying
personal-misconduct
bully is already a synonym of personal-misconduct. See here.
bully and bullying combined with abuse
collaborator
collaboration
Only one question, can alternatively be retagged.
status-completed
facebook
social-media
The tag info for social-media explicitly mentions Facebook as an example.
status-completed
twitter
social-media
Twitter is another social media site, and probably does not need its own separate tag.
status-completed
mistakes
errors-erratum
See here.
Questions tagged mistakes retagged
review
peer-review
Alternatively, should be disambiguated. Some discussion here.
Questions tagged review retagged
review-process
peer-review
Suggested by Tripartio. 29 out of 44 questions are also tagged peer-review, and there seems to be no clear difference in the usage of the two.
status-completed
Suggestions from answers:
Tag
Suggested Synonym
Comments
Decision
withdraw
quitting
See here.
Unchanged, for now
Thanks for doing this. But we gotta find a way to pump your rep.
The non voted suggestions are all good as well.
Do we vote on the "vote" tags by upvoting the respective answer or by leaving a comment?
@Sursula By voting, but check the answer to see what "upvote" means for each, all the three answers propose alternative options to synonymization.
Marking this entire post as "completed" since the original 8 have been resolved and it's not clear we'll find a solution for the [tag:withdraw] tag that is better than the status quo (though we can continue the conversation, maybe we'll think of something).
Thanks for bringing this up! Indeed, it seems like the "canonical" process of waiting for 4 approvals is broken (not enough reviewers), so time to bring out the mod hammers. Some quick thoughts.
I approved and merged your suggestion about publication / publications.
To me, the collaborator, facebook, and twitter examples seem similarly straightforward; barring any uproar here, I would suggest adding those and we'll hammer them through.
There are only 4 mistakes questions (and yet a ton of question posted here are about mistakes); my suggestion would be that we retag those questions rather than creating a synonym.
The other three (bullying, review, and review-process) seem more significant/complicated -- I suspect your suggestion is the right thing, but I would want to study more carefully and/or let others comment before taking any action on these ones.
There is also an old suggestion about making withdraw a synonym of retraction; this one is a bit complicated because "withdraw" is also used for withdrawing from studies (not just withdrawing a paper from consideration). This withdraw tag seems quite bimodal; we should think about ways to improve it (ideally, without having to retag most of its 116 questions).
I think the issue is not the lack of reviewers, but the lack of any notification when there are any pending items in the queue, unlike the post review queues.
Agree -- it is this lack of notification that leads to lack of reviewers.
To me, [bullying] is also straightforward since [bully] is already a synonym, and if this is not made a synonym, then I think [bully] should be desynonymized from [personal-misconduct] and made a synonym of [bullying] instead.
I had considered [withdraw] and [retraction] too, but I think that they are not synonyms for another reason — many questions under [withdraw] talk about withdrawal during the review process, while retraction refers exclusively to content that has already been published.
Yeah, those were my initial thoughts as well -- but as a wise ent once said, "let us not be hasty." :-)
And for the question of retagging vs synonymization, I have no strong preference, but my understanding was that synonymization would help prevent the tag from being created again, which is why typos like [autorship] and [etiquitte] are synoynms of their correct spellings.
Well, my concern with mistakes is that there are mistakes that won't lead to an erratum, so it could lead to some mistagging. And only 4 people have used the "mistake" tag in the past 10 years, so it doesn't seem like a huge problem we need to solve.
Now that I think of it, [errors-erratum] is a highly unusual tag, in that it combines two related concepts that do not necessarily always overlap (and also uses the singular form, "erratum", which is different from most other tags). I don't think there is any other tag like that on this site. I wonder why it was created that way. Two separate tags, [mistakes] and [errata], might make more sense.
@GoodDeeds Probably because corrections are usually called "erratum" because they are published one at a time.
@AzorAhai-him- The same could be said about publications, books, etc.
@GoodDeeds Not really
@AzorAhai-him- Okay, then maybe I did not understand your original comment.
@GoodDeeds - looks like there is a consensus here. If you want to add collaborator, facebook, twitter, and review-process, I will hammer them. The withdraw one (which did not come from you), I will hammer "declined." The other three, I will post separate answers for and see if they get any significant upvotes / downvotes / comments.
I can't, unfortunately, because I don't have the required score of 5 in those tags. And the suggestion for [review-process] in already in the queue, from Tripartio.
oh, I see. OK, I will take care of it sometime soon.
I'll give withdraw vs retraction some thought, but it is a conundrum. The wiki for retraction uses the word withdraw. drop-out is another synonym for withdrawing from a program.
Note that we already have [tag:quitting]. Is that the proper synonym for [tag:withdraw] for program withdrawal?
status-completed
mistakes --> errors-erratum
I think a "mistakes" tag should not exist at all; virtually anything (e.g., sexual misconduct) could be framed as "mistake." So, I suggest retagging those questions (there are only 4) and not creating a synonym.
Strongly agree.
status-completed
review --> peer-review
I think this "review" tag should not exist. There are only 3 questions with this tag: one should be peer-review, one has to do with "reviewing" for a test, and one has to do with "when a limitation is limitation and when its not" (whatever that might mean). Thus, it seems there is no real historical need for this tag, and if we make it a synonym, people will likely use it on situations that don't involve peer review.
Strongly agree.
status-completed
bully & bullying--> abuse
To me, this is the hardest one. "bully[ing]" is certainly a form of personal misconduct, but it seems like a very distinct subset.
GoodDeeds wrote in the comments:
I think [bully] should be desynonymized from [personal-misconduct] and made a synonym of [bullying] instead.
I suspect this is the best way to go. And, maybe we should make both bully and bullying a synonym of abuse. It's true that abuse is broader than just bullying (e.g., torturing lab rats is abuse but not bullying), but the vast majority of the questions tagged with abuse are about mistreatment by a supervisor.
I agree that abuse is the proper version, not personal-misconduct.
agree to the abuse solution
Update: This is now being discussed in this thread.
While we're at it: let's delete the tag undergradute altogether, since it is just a mispronunciation of undergraduate.
I am not sure, but I think the idea of synonymizing misspellings was to avoid the problem of the tag getting created again. Other misspellings like [autorship] and [etiquitte] are also synonyms of their correct spellings.
According to this discussion, synonyms should not be used for misspellings.
@cag51 In that case, I think this deserves a separate thread, there are probably more tags synonymized based on misspellings.
@Gooddeeds - OK with me.
OK, unless @Sursula wishes to take it up, I will start one after a few days.
@GoodDeeds I will do it today or tomorrow
withdraw --> quitting
For those questions using the withdraw tag in the sense of withdrawing from a program, rather than withdrawing a paper prior to a decision. The quitting tag exists for several question already. This may not be a synonym addition, but just a scan through the questions and tag updates. Painful though. But the tag wiki needs to be clear - even in the short version, though not everyone pays much attention.
Making the necessary tag changes to a number of the 116 questions with the withdraw tag will mess up the active questions list for a while.
Maybe we should rename withdraw --> withdraw-from-studies, which we can then make a synonym of quitting. Then we can create a new tag withdraw-paper, which we can make a synonym of retraction. The advantage of this will be that if someone tries to create a "withdraw" tag, they'll see we already have two withdraw tags and they'll choose the appropriate one, rather than recreating the withdraw tag (or inadvertantly using the quitting tag when they should use the retraction tag).
Though in this case, we should see how many of the [tag:withdraw] posts are about quitting versus about retraction; this will tell us how much retagging is necessary. Normally we try to do 3-5 a day so we don't flood the home page, but for a large set like this, maybe it is better to do it all at once (manually bumping the questions that occurred right before the deluge), I am not sure.
@cag51, quitting is also used for quitting the profession. So it isn't just withdrawing from studies. I updated the wiki for quitting, BTW to reflect that. So, we should also decide if the two "quitting" ideas should have the same tag or not.
Offhand, seems like they probably should; for students in particular, quitting "studies" and quitting the field are essentially the same thing. Trying to restrict the "quitting" tag to only post-PhD folks is probably a losing battle (unless we change the name).
There also seem to be some questions under the tag about withdrawing from a course / the grade W. Is that appropriate usage?
oh, that is a good point. So if we decide to clean this up, we would probably a need third option; withdraw-from-course. What a mess.
@cag51, withdraw-from-course doesn't win the game. Besides being too long for the UI - phones especially, a "course" in some places is a complete "program of study" in others. I think UK has that convention. Actually I don't think that course withdraw (us usage) and program withdrawal, really need separate tags. Too many tags can lead to mistagging as this whole thing suggests.
agree, three withdraw tags is probably not a good idea. Maybe it's better to just let withdraw remain "overloaded."
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5047 | Questions related to ADHD among students and academics
Should questions that focus on the effects of ADHD on academics and students be on or off topic? For example: Survive the postdoc stage having ADHD.
And the OP has added a new tag. I'm of mixed feelings about whether to expand the wiki or delete the tag adhd. Advice?
Technically it is a medical issue, but a lot of folks in academia are affected by it.
I am not sure that asking for specific types of productivity advice should be considered a medical issue. Even if it were the case, I don't think there is anything wrong in discussing questions related to performance (excluding medication), when these questions are related to someone's physical/mental/neurological condition. Prohibiting it just leads to exclusion of such people. There are questions from blind people on this website, they are not banned, why ADHD should be?
regarding the tag I have no strong opinion
My worry is that some advice might conflict with medical advice, thus I asked for guidance. I can do the wiki if we keep the tag.
I am not sure what you mean. Of course if random people would start suggesting undergrads tacking stimulants every time they struggle at an exam, that would not be good. But productivity advice cannot possibly do any harm, I think. ADHD is an under-researched field in general and many of the productivity advice doctors give themselves are not very much evidence-based medicine anyway.
Similar questions: https://academia.stackexchange.com/search?q=adhd+is%3Aquestion+closed%3Ano. Most of them use the [health] or [disability] tag, however (if at all).
@GoodDeeds, yes, I made a search before posting this. It has come up several times. If it is "on topic" then the tag is probably warranted.
Ignoring the question of on-topicness for a moment, why not use the [health] tag for such questions, if on-topic? (Also, I think this is slightly relevant: https://academia.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/4783/please-undo-the-synonymisation-of-the-tag-disability-with-health-issues)
@GoodDeeds, I won't express an opinion on it. I'm vigilant about new tags without wiki provided and have removed quite a few of them. Added wiki to a few others. Just looking for advice here, but don't have a position. This case seemed different to me so I didn't act on my own.
RE the tag, I think adding an "ADHD" tag would invite the creation of other tags for autism, depression, imposter-syndrome, etc. Better to have a catch-all tag [tag:mental-health]...which we already have (it's a synonym of [tag:health], for better or for worse, but it exists). So, I recommend using the (mental) health tag instead of creating this new tag.
@cag51, I've replaced the tag for the moment. So [tag:adhd] is now an orphan. But that still leaves the question about whether such things are "on topic".
@buffy - awesome, thanks. Agree that I didn't answer the title question (that's why I only wrote a comment); let us see what others say.
I recommend keeping these questions. School is not designed for (and often hostile to) people with ADHD, thus many underachieve and do not make it to higher levels of academia. Therefore, most academic advice out there on the internet for people with ADHD tends to be geared towards children, high school students, or college freshman. This is one of the only places I can think of that could host advice for ADHD folks trying to do serious academic work. There are a lot of novel problems that come with that which are inherently on topic.
I'd also like to push back on merging the tag with mental-health, because the experience of ADHD is very different from things like depression or imposter syndrome or burnout. It really doesn't belong with those-- and while we're at it, neither does autism. It would be more appropriate to create a neurodivergence tag for these, if you must have an umbrella. These are not health problems, and there are many who would be fairly cheesed to see them considered as such.
A [neurodivergence] tag seems like a great idea.
Many would also happily agree that their ADHD or autism cause interference in daily living, which is the DSM criterion. I don't want to get too far into that argument, but I would support the idea of separating them out from [tag:mental-health] for the reasons you describe. I'm not sure an umbrella tag is necessary.
For many of these mental health issues, a canonical answer would always be "See a health care professional". Imposter syndrome is probably different. neurodivergence is unlikely to ever be noticed by anyone. Normally the questions are about individual response, not how to build a better academic system.
A neurodivergence tag would be quite likely to be noticed by the neurodivergent, as well as those interested in building an academic system that is more inclusive with respect to neurodiversity. (I do think individual tags would be better, and support their existence for the same reasons.) Regarding the individualized nature of the questions you've seen so far, I would expect better questions to appear once it is clear that they are welcome here and will not simply be dismissed (e.g. "see a health care professional") or lead to further stigmatization.
I think you make a great point that we are one of the few places that can host advice for neurodivergent folks doing serious academic work. But, I worry that none of us are really qualified to be giving advice. Even if someone has (say) ADHD or a close family member with ADHD, it is difficult to say that they should be giving advice to others, in whom the presentation may be quite different. And only a tiny subset of our community will have any real familiarity with these types of questions -- though others may try to give well-intentioned, common-sense advice, which is not helpful.
RE the tags -- one option (though it's a major change) would be to separate [tag:health] from [tag:mental-health]. Perhaps we could then make [tag:neurodivergence] a synonym of [tag:mental-health] (or vice versa). I understand your point that they are not exactly synonyms, but that doesn't mean we need separate tags for them (and hoping that users will understand the subtle distinctions between our tags when they tag their question is a losing battle).
@cag51 Relevant: https://academia.meta.stackexchange.com/a/1787/68109
Yupp, that is the historical reason, but no reason we can't revisit six years later.
I agree that medical advice about adhd would be off-topic here-- let me challenge the frame. I have in mind questions like "Will my academic reputation suffer if I use a double time accommodation on my quals?" or "Which countries can I not do a post-doc in as an individual on Adderall?" or "What to do when I inevitably forget to go to classes that I am teaching?" These are not so much questions about ADHD as they are questions about operating in academia in which ADHD is already a given. In particular, they require the expertise of those working in academia, rather than medical expertise.
Ah -- yeah, those example questions are on topic for sure. But in those examples, the details of the underlying health condition seem almost irrelevant, which sort of argues against the need for any tag more specific than (mental) health, no?
I'd argue all of those are primarily of interest to people with ADHD, and a tag would help them find them better. I could make the questions more explicitly about ADHD, though-- just from the top of my head, "Avoiding ADHD stigma as a grad student" or "Will it reduce my authority to tell my students I have ADHD so they don't interrupt and derail me during lecture?" or "My PI doesn't believe in ADHD and wants me to resist giving students accommodations"
Stop treating health problems as something to be shamed of. Everyone can have health problems, a lot of thing are health problems. ADHD is a chronic mental disorder, and as such must be treated according to the professional guidelines.
What you are proposing is something along the lines "a woman with painful menstruation has not an health issue, so she can perform her job without hindrances and if she claim so, she has no right". What do you propose then? that she hardens up and ignores the pain? Please explain it to me
@EarlGrey The language here matters. Does predisposition to painful menstruation mean that being a woman is a health problem? You wouldn't say that women are afflicted with Female Gender Disorder. And yet neurodivergent people are labeled-- by the neurotypical, mind you-- as disordered or mentally unhealthy, despite their neurodivergence being just as determined from birth, just as "incurable", and just as essential to their identity as being female. It is part of who they are, and despite the difficulties that may come with it, it is not a problem.
We are not anymore in the 60s. Determining someone has health problem(s), is not anymore related to putting someone in an asylum. But I understand your premises as well your defensive attitudes, however I see no common ground to further the discussion. The need of defining neurodivergent vs neurotypical (what is typical? please define it) is just the supposed-to-be-good side of a fascist attitude toward society, where there are the "normal" people and there are the "different" people. I personally think there are only "different" people, no reason to further divide people.
@AlexanderGruber First of all - I'm in psychology and I think getting the phrasing right is very important. In search of finding the right phrasing, what is the difference between "something that comes with difficulties" and a "problem"?
@AzorAhai-him- A "problem" to me implies that it is undesirable and one ought to be seeking to solve it. ADHD comes with certain challenges, like forgetfulness, and while someone with ADHD may develop ways to compensate, it's also possible to accept that one's brain works differently and that that is okay. Referring to disabilities as "problems" (even as "disorders", arguably) puts the onus on the individual to correct themselves and become "normal." But I think that it is up to society to be inclusive-- to provide an environment which accommodates their needs (the difficulties) without
So you delineate ADHD as being something you're born with and hence it (1) can't be cured; (2) is essential to identity; and (3) is therefore not a health problem. Is that distinction also useful for physical disabilities? We can contrast a broken leg and having Crohn's. Crohn's comes with difficulties, after all. I also wonder about using neurodivergence implying thresholds for users. Does a question tagged "neurodivergence" need a diagnosis? Obviously everything is a spectrum, but where can we helpfully create tags for "I have trouble listening for two hours" and "I have an ADHD dx"?
...implying that there is something wrong with them. We build ramps for people in wheelchairs, provide interpreters for the deaf, but judge people with ADHD as irresponsible when they have trouble making deadlines or remembering appointments. It's implied that the ADHD itself is a problem, one that could be solved if the person would just stop being like that, and at the very least that they must seek medical help to fit into society's expectations.
I don't know enough about Crohn's to comment on that specific example, but I do think the distinction is useful for physical disabilities. Regarding a diagnosis, I mean, I don't think we have to show proof of enrollment to post in [tag:graduate-school], it's just for questions related to graduate school. A neurodivergence tag would be for questions related to neurodivergence. Or, if your question is whether in general one has to be diagnosed to be neurodivergent, the lines are fuzzy. The wikipedia for neurodiversity or the autism rights movement could point you to some good discussions.
@AlexanderGruber No, I know. I didn't mean to suggest you had to have a dx to post in [tag:adhd], I meant I think we should have tags for people who need help with their diagnosed ADHD and people that struggle with attention sometimes (who doesn't?), and they may be off-put by using a tag [tag:adhd]. After all, an "expert" in ADHD probably isn't much help with someone dealing with subclinical att. problems, and neither is an "expert" in sublinical att. an "expert" in real ADHD. See my terminology suggestion below.
@AlexanderGruber ADD/ADHD is a catch-all term used by doctors for a wide range of issues that impact one's mental state. The principal cause for it is often unrecognized by doctors: neurotoxins. Lead, mercury, bismuth, arsenic, etc. impact the nervous system considerably and can be difficult to remove. A person can be born with these toxins, but the ADHD is not a genetic condition per se. Chelation therapy can remove them, but it is often the case that they get purged from the body over time and people tend to outgrow the condition, which is why more focus is on younger people with it.
@Polyhat While I understand there is some observed correlation between lead exposure and ADHD, I find it highly disingenuous to characterize this as the "principal cause." It is also not a "catch all term," there are very specific diagnostic criteria (though I will agree that the condition is not as well-understood as I would like it to be). You sound like you have been exposed to some misinformation on this topic. I would encourage you to look into the resources at chadd.org for more reliable research.
@AlexanderGruber My father is a physician who specializes in toxicology. I helped him with some original research on thousands of his patient records comparing hair-mineral analysis (HMA) results to patient diagnoses. We saw very clear connections/correlations. The results of our study, however, have never been published, so I can understand why you, and others, might not see any connection. We have seen people cured of the condition through detoxification therapies.
You will forgive me if I harbor doubts about your secret research study. I suggest that you expose it to peer review before making claims about causes or cures of conditions for which there is already an extensive body of literature.
@AlexanderGruber It remains unpublished, not for any surreptitiousness on our part, but simply for the fact that the doctor is too busy to take time to write it all up and figure out how to publish it. He is a doctor, not a researcher nor author. To be honest, this analysis was done over twenty years ago when toxicology was in its infancy. As for your doubts--feel free. It is proper to question unverified internet reports. But keep an open mind, and watch for the cause/effect relationship of toxins to ADHD going forward.
@Polyhat In medicine, "I've done a study that shows XYZ but I haven't gotten around to publishing it yet" is the academic equivalent of perpetual motion cranks and trisectors. If a physician really had data in their possession that could improve treatment for millions and failed to share it, they're doing the world a great disservice. More likely, there are substantial problems with the work, like with most individual research endeavors, and it would not stand to scrutiny. An unprinted study isn't worth the paper it isn't printed on.
@BryanKrause I can understand your view, but will respectfully disagree. Beyond the time and other considerations I mentioned earlier, there is another very good reason why this study has never been written up and published. I won't go into details here except to say that it has nothing to do with the truth or the medical/scientific facts, nor even with the manner of presenting them, and everything to do with politics. That said, it may be possible, after my father retires, to expand and complete the study and publish it. We'll see. I would like to see that happen.
@Polyhat The more you explain, the more it sounds like crankery... A secret study that demonstrated revolutionary results, but isn't being published because of "politics"? Besides, how did your father have the time/resources to do such a study, but not publish it? What was the reason to do the study in the first place if not to publish? This makes no sense.
@JSLavertu It was never done for any intention to publish. We got the primary HMA data for all the patients from the Doctor's Data laboratory, and we merged it, in an Excel spreadsheet, with our own internal diagnostic records. I programmed Excel macros by which to mathematically analyze the data and look for correlations. My father wanted to know for his own benefit and that of his patients. He was specifically looking for the compounding effects of having multiple toxins at the same time and how this would affect people. But he wanted evidence linking specific toxins to specific conditions.
@Polyhat That sounds like a HIPAA nightmare. Regardless, until the research is published and peer reviewed... It's not much more than an empty claim.
@JSLavertu I don't remember the exact dates, but it may have been before HIPAA. I remember when HIPAA came along and I was disgusted by the fact that it required all electronic communications to be done in ASCII...unencrypted! I wasn't impressed.
Let me suggest an idea, based on conversations on this page, and also the function of tags:
A tag is a word or phrase that describes the topic of the question. Tags are a means of connecting experts with questions they will be able to answer by sorting questions into specific, well-defined categories.
So let's imagine someone comes to this site looking for help with their (a) chronic illness; or (b) ADHD.
Separate health from mental-health. That never sat very well with me earlier.
Let's say person A wants to read about other people's health problems, well half of them are about mental health or ADHD (or similar), that's no use to them, or vice versa.
Leave mental-health for things like depression, and burnout. I also frankly have no issue creating tags for common mental health problems (they aren't a limited resource). Even if you tag your country, level, mental-health, and the problem, that's four tags.
I can see person B perusing this tag to see what else has worked for other people.
Suggestion: To encompass both diagnosed disorders1 and just general quirks, why don't we try personal-psychology. Again, I have no issue with creating sub-tags like adhd as needed, so that someone who has learned to succeed in academia with their ADHD can follow it and be helpful, but not also be bogged down by every question in health.
This can cover questions like Help with becoming overly obsessive (about mathematics), which is currently tagged health, which is borderline IMO.
But in conjunction with adhd you could use it on suggested questions Avoiding ADHD stigma as a grad student, or Will it reduce my authority to tell my students I have ADHD so they don't interrupt and derail me during lecture? or My PI doesn't believe in ADHD and wants me to resist giving students accommodations (thanks Alexander).
No, it wouldn't probably be a big follow target, but it declutters health.
This avoids the issue with calling certain things "disorders" (which wouldn't be relevant for the above question anyway). This paradigm would also mean we don't have to create a fuzzy tag like neurodiversity which, if applied to the question above, makes it almost useless as a category when asking questions about how to deal with your own brain.
1: I'm going to use it for now because, after all, it is what the "D" in ADHD and ASD stand for. While I concede there is a school of thought (which I support) and that individuals living with these may not consider them disorders, others do and so instead of coming down on one side of the debate, let's use a different term.
You seem to have accidentally posted the same answer twice.
@GoodDeeds Weird, tahnks for the heads up
Personally, I think that most of the questions concerning psychological disorders should be closed as dupes, and pointed to some good grand answer on the issue.
The counter to that argument would be that individuals can be helped by being responsive to their special issues. I'd counter that by saying if that's the case, then the question should be closed as being strongly dependent on individual factors.
So your answer to anything involving a question on this topic is it's either a duplicate, or too individual. Great! That's the site sorted, now we just have to automate the closing and go home.
@Nij I don't quite look at it that way. Rather, I think three or four GOOD canonical answers in the area, perhaps written by someone with a background in counseling in an academic environment, can help a person who needs help better than they've been served by the hundreds of answers that basically say "seek the help of a professional"
ADHD is defined as a mental illness or a mental disorder, so it should fall under the health category.
Since we are discussing ADHD in relation to the academic life of a person in his adult age, I would like to add a side consideration (and somehow a darker tone). In the recent past women were declared insane during the menopause. And for this reason they were forced to go to mental institution, as late as in the 60s.
Menopause mental disorder, on the other hand, is now a recognized mental disorder (perimenopausal mental disorders, to be more precise).
Long story short: would you conisder having a menopause tag?
On the presumption that this is meant in good faith: if MMD was creating enough issues regarding work and life specific to academia, and generating enough questions here about those issues that they formed a considerable proportion of any other potential tag which would identify them separately, all other tags the same, then yes of course we'd have that tag, and it would be very questionable why we wouldn't use it if needed.
@Nij I honestily think that making so many differentiations is pointless and missing the point: it is not important that sickness is relevant, the point is about health questions. Otherwise there is always the smartypantsy guy creeping in "hey, this chronic hemicrania the person is suffering is not a recognized mental disorder, so better the person harden up and get the work done".
Plus: there is no need to disclose the specific health problem, it is enough to state that because of a certain health problem, "productivity" or "worked hours" may be less than equivalent healthy person.
@EarlGrey Is it though? Chronic depression and ADHD both affect productivity in significant ways but the solutions to either will be completely different. Without that information, the answers might miss the mark completely.
@JSLavertu Is it though? the answer should be "contact a doctor" in both cases. Any other answer trying to address the medical aspects of these medical conditions without being medical-based answers, (to my mind comes a lot of good faith crap such as "raise your interest in your work" or "calm down and focus") are pure Bach flowers.
If, on the other hand, the question is "I have a student/PhD/PostDoC suffering from "do not specify condition --> lower productivity " then the informations may be relevant. Unfortunately I still have to see this degree of discussion in Academia, though...
@EarlGrey I'm going to heavily disagree with that. My doctor doesn't have ADHD or
experience with dealing with ADHD in academia. Unless it's an exclusively "medical" issue (which it very rarely is with ADHD), their recommendations are unlikely to go beyond generic tips (exercise, sleep, etc.). From my experience, advice that specifically adresses ADHD from people who either have or deal directly with ADHD has been the most useful, definitively not "pure bach flowers". ADHD affects how one interacts with the world in ways that go far beyond purely medical.
@EarlGrey To give an analogy, it's like if tags for Python 2 and Python 3 were merged on StackOverflow. Yes, they are both part of the Python programming language, but generic answers that don't take the version into account are unlikely to be useful or optimal. Besides, it's not like tags are in limited supply...
@JSLavertu I will leave the discussion, because it is strongly hinged on the fact "ADHD is defined as a mental illness or a mental disorder". I am in no way associated with medical studies, so I cannot have an educated opinion. The vast literature of anedoctes I am collecting is that ADHD is not at all a mental illness or a mental disorder, the above mentioned fact seems to me just an assumption. Unfortunately, I do not have the intellectual means to confute medical "science".
@EarlGrey Fair enough, I'm not too sure about how it should be classified either... Personally, i'd say it's more of a disorder since I didn't "catch" or develop ADHD (as opposed to just having it), but then again, I'm not a medical scientist. So there's that.
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4860 | Thank you Dr. Buffy, Academia.SE's GOAT
Yesterday, Buffy officially became Academia.SE's user with the greatest all-time reputation score: nearly 169K reputation! In just 2.5 years, Buffy has authored a stunning 3,742 answers and earned 48 gold badges, among many other positive contributions.
Academia.SE is lucky to have many highly active users who make many excellent contributions, but Buffy's sustained level of involvement is really unprecedented -- this is our stack's version of Jon Skeet. So thanks for all the work, and we look forward to 169K more points!
TL;DR:
Congrats! Buffy is often the first face a user will see when they come to Academia.se, and it's a pleasure to know that they are welcome with such friendly, positively inclined messages!
congratulations!
Congrats on your new t-shirt and socks!
Gosh. Oh, and woof-woof.
Hah love the puppy too!
Congrats @Buffy. Well deserved for all your efforts and contribution to make the site a clean and happening place.
Is there any way to have the money that might go toward swag to be donated to some charitable organization? Preferably hunger related or similar?
@Buffy Not officially. Maybe you can try to ask when you receive the email for the swag from SE. Stack Exchange donates every year to a number of selected charities on behalf of moderators (an initiative called Stack Gives Back), and maybe they can add that contribution.
Congrats @Buffy!
Congrats@Buffy.
Well done, @Buffy! You've answered me directly once or twice, and I've certainly read many of your other answers. Thank-you!
Less than 3 years later, Buffy has indeed achieved 169K more points. At this rate, he'll go over 500K by the end of 2026.
Dr Buffy has surpassed 400,000 and counting!
Congratulations
4️⃣0️⃣0️⃣, 0️⃣0️⃣0️⃣
Indeed. More than all four mods combined. My challenge of "169K more points" will probably be achieved before the end of the year.
Yes, Buffy is about to hit 400K and Dan Romik is our first user other than Buffy to hit 200K. Remarkable on both counts.
@cag51, interesting that I'm about twice that of Dan Romik in total rep, but I've answered about 7 times more questions. So, if we chose the GOAT by quality rather than quantity, I'd have a lot of catching up to do. Maybe you can point him to this.
December 19 is too optimistic, especially since the activity is low at the moment. Hoping for end of year, actually. Maybe.
Not that optimistic, it turns out. Might not happen today, but probably tomorrow.
@cag51, as you guessed, but I did not really expect. I can relax again, though I'm staying active.
Mostly, though, I'm happy to see increased activity.
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5038 | Canonical question on how admissions works in different countries
By far our most useful canonical question is: How does the admissions process work for Ph.D. programs in the US, particularly for weak or borderline students?
Recently, Buffy drafted a new canonical question for countries other than the US. In addition to being a good "duplicate target" for questions that would otherwise be completely rejected as a "bad" question, this is also a useful reference for all those who might not be familiar with grad school systems in other parts of the world. In some sense, this is a follow up to this meta question from three years ago.
So, two asks:
If anyone has suggestions for this canonical question (or thinks that it shouldn't exist at all), let's have that discussion here.
Right now we only have an answer for the US (which people should feel free to edit); if you are familiar with the grad school system in other parts of the world, please consider drafting an answer. Even a short answer will do; others can expand or revise it later.
The current canonical question (https://academia.stackexchange.com/q/176908/75368) is lacking answers for some important places, such as China, India, and Brazil. What is the advisability of providing a bonus for such answers as was done for Australia? We might need some guidelines to get authoritative answers. Do such bonuses attract good answers or just quick and dirty ones? Maybe this needs its own meta, actually.
@Buffy - hard to say. I was disappointed that no one from Australia responded to the Australia bounty. I suspect that is likely to happen again...outside of certain regions, there are only a few users from each country, so the odds that one of them bites on the bounty is pretty low. OTOH, my experience is that most bounty-hunters do answer in good faith; I suspect a failed bounty is more likely than a bounty awarded on a terrible answer.
What should be done if a new duplicate question gets asked, but there is no answer for that specific country in this canonical target?
I see several reasonable options:
Immediately close the question as a duplicate, and leave a comment asking readers to provide an answer to the canonical question. This has the advantage of avoiding answer duplication, but would probably prevent the new question from getting sufficient visibility, and it seems wrong to close a question as a duplicate when the target doesn't answer it.
Leave the question open initially, and if it gets good answers, write a new answer to the canonical question and then close the new question as a duplicate of the canonical question.
Leave the question open. Write an answer aggregating information from the new question and link back to the original.
My preference is option 2.
Agree, option 2 seems best.
Should the answer be only concerned with the international students seeking to apply/wondering what is it like?
I have started putting something together about Russia where I work and in the process of doing so two things have became apparent:
No one in their right mind would apply unless either:
Coming from some neighboring countries and speaking Russian freely (and being rich!)
Escaping some truly terrible living conditions
Being fully state-funded
For those falling under state-backed exchange programs, it varies wildly case-by-case and does not make a whole lot of sense as a general answer. It also has little to do with the rest of academia here. Exchange students coming in as opposed to "our" students going abroad is a fairly alien concept to Russian academia still despite their numbers growing in the past years as a part of 5-100 program.
Is there even a point in the answer, given the circumstances? If yes, should it be focused on "cold" applications outside of these specifically created positions or try to describe what being a 5-100 student would be like?
I think such an answer would be very useful. (1) Prospective students may not realize that Russia is different than, say, Sweden in that it is not a good choice for foreigners, (2) this could be a useful reference for answerers trying to understand questions from Russian grad students, and (3) Russian undergrads may not know how grad admissions in Russia works (just as we get questions here from many US people who don't know about US grad school)
https://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/27209/are-concerns-about-studying-in-russia-reasonable and https://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/46239/why-do-russian-and-israeli-universities-score-low-in-various-world-rankings Maybe you know the answers to these questions?
@Allure They already seem to have decent answers; in particular https://academia.stackexchange.com/a/27225/145124 and https://academia.stackexchange.com/a/46298/145124 come from very much relevant insider experience. I do have a bit more to say about rankings; but will do so in the actual answer - it's been a few (very busy) months, but you had a great timing - I just have gotten to that part of my backlog literally yesterday :)
One thing we should discuss is: Are there any places where it makes sense to have one answer that covers multiple countries? Perhaps countries where grad schools are very very similar? Or countries where our user base is so sparse that a "regional" answer is the best that we can probably do?
For example: maybe Eastern Europe should be carved into two or three blocks, rather than trying to write 30+ answers? Or maybe even larger countries, like AU/NZ, have very similar grad school systems? I am an ignorant American, so these examples could be totally off.
At this point, I am reasonably certain that we should have individual posts for the following countries:
US
Canada
UK
France
India
Japan
China
And that the following countries should be merged:
Germany / Austria
Wondering about:
Australia / New Zealand / Oceania
Eastern Europe
South America
Add Australia and probably Brazil.
I am wondering whether Australia should be alone or should be paired with NZ and the other islands. Same for Brazil: alone, or pair with the rest of South America? I really have no idea what Academia is like in those parts of the world....
I think we need expertise from those places. Australia and NZ might be quite different. We get more Aussie questions than from NZ, I think.
It is possible that for some countries a footnote to another answer might be enough. For example, are all of the Bologna Process countries similar enough to group?
Yeah, that's exactly what I'm hoping people can tell us, I have no idea. :-) Though in the interim, we could write an answer for, say, Australia, and then later add "and New Zealand" to the title if someone tells us that they really are super similar.
Austria and Germany are pretty similar. Subtle differences could be covered in the same answer, perhaps?
@henning, I'd welcome your answer. Maybe tag it as Germany and Austria. I think quite a few US folks want to study in Germany but think the system is the same as US. Big surprise.
@henning, an answer was provided for Germany. Should it be also marked for Austria, or can you either update the Germany answer or provide a separate one for Austria if there are differences?
Is US/Canada that different?
Good question -- I really have no idea what the Canadian system is like. It does seem relatively common to apply to institutions in both, but not sure if this is due to inherent similarity or just due to physical proximity.
@AzorAhai-him-, my guess is that the differences are important. Just some hints from reading answers. But the Canada system may share features with UK rather than US.
I have only very limited experience with Canadian academia, but I didn't think it was all that different. I look forward to an answer from someone with more experience than me.
Potential candidate for creating an answer for France: https://academia.stackexchange.com/q/16824/68109
There seems to be a potential for a lot of duplication in content between the existing canonical question for the US and the new canonical question. Even though the original focuses on "weak or borderline students", good answers for the new one should ideally include that aspect as well.
Since the original has multiple good answers, my suggestion is:
Include important points from the old question in the answer to the new question.
Close the old question as a duplicate to the new question.
Prominently link back to the old question from the answer to the new question, so that the old answers are still easily accessible.
Close all future duplicates as duplicates of the new question instead of the old question.
#3 has been done.
GoodDeeds pointed out that the old canonical question and this one overlap a bit in the case of the US. I agree this is an issue.
My preferred solution is the following:
Use the new question to explain how the admissions process for grad school works. That you have to apply to a committee and find an advisor afterwords, take the GRE, write a statement of purpose, etc. A lot of this could be migrated from the old canonical answer.
Edit the old question to focus only on Will my application to a US grad school be competitive, and how can I improve it? This one will have the advice for writing strong essays, compensating for weak grades, etc. This will also explain why we can't answer the question "can [my stats] get me into [my dream school]?"
I think this would be a lot better, because when someone posts "I have a 3.5, can I get into Harvard", the current duplicate target "How does grad school work" seems like it doesn't really answer my question, but the new proposed title seems like a perfect fit.
Update: On closer examination, there was less overlap than I expected; the old question was already tightly focused on "advice" rather than "process." For now, I updated the title to reflect this; so, perhaps, problem solved. We can discuss further if others see the need for more drastic disambiguation.
I like the direction of this idea, but isn't the new one supposed to focus on how admission to grad school works? "How can I get into grad school" and "How does admission to grad school work" seem a lot closer to me.
Good point, edited my answer. Maybe we should open the new one to also accept answers about how grad school actually works (e.g., coursework + qualifying exam + research, in the case of the US). I will add this as another answer.
I like the current version of this answer, and I don't see why "how grad school works" needs to be a part of the scope.
Yeah, I posted that separately for a reason...I'm pretty sure this answer's proposal is the right thing to do, whereas the suggestion to broaden the scope could go either way, imo.
Should the new question not focus on "particularly for weak or borderline students" then?
@henning, my purpose in starting it was not to focus on weak students but to give the general process that can be expected in applications.
I like this suggestion, but it may be a historical problem for questions previously marked as a duplicate of that one.
Well, it would only be a problem for questions that asked "how does grad school work" (and not some variation of "can I get in") -- I suspect most of these questions were quickly closed and deleted by the roomba. Though there may be some exceptions we have to deal with. But I think it is worth it -- currently, when someone takes the time to write a very detailed, specific question about their personal situation, they get dupe hammered with "how does grad school work?" -- rescoping the dupe target to "will my application be competitive" would be more welcoming / reasonable.
We should also broaden the title question to include a brief description of what happens after you get admitted. For example: how long does a PhD usually take in country X? Is it all research, or classes too? Do most students who start end up finishing? Do you have to pay, or do you get paid? Etc.
Wouldn't this get really too broad? I suppose "how grad school works" will also involve significant field-specific differences, far more than in the admissions process.
If we want to go nuts, another canonical question about what happens from acceptance to graduation. It is fairly common in US, but there is more variation in that than in admissions.
I actually wanted to write a question about academic tracks per country but got lost trying to scope it properly. Still, am very much interested in a list of things such as duration of each stage, requirements/expectations, duties. Answers along the lines of "MSc. Takes one or two years, requires BSc to be admitted, it's all study. PhD, the program takes 3 or 4 years, by the end of it 3 published articles and a written thesis are expected; also has some coursework on year 1". Where the funding comes from for citizens/non-citizens, that kind of thing.
@Lodinn, I think it might be too difficult to generalize about what happens during doctoral study. That, especially, is likely to vary widely by field as well as country. In the US, comprehensive exams are very common and very important in some fields, but perhaps not all. Another variable is maximum time to degree. Some impose it, but I doubt all do. In my answer to the current question I considered saying that you start with coursework and choose a thesis advisor only later. I left it out as of doubtful universality.
Some of the newer answers also discuss what happens during the degree, not just applications. Should I try to add something for US? Note that there is more difference between fields here. Especially between lab science and other fields - even other STEM fields.
Yeah, this answer only got 1 upvote and 1 downvote...I interpret that as saying that there is not much interest either way and so we should make an executive decision. It's your question, so I will defer to you...broaden the question or trim some of the existing answers? Whatever you decide, you can either do it directly (everything is community wiki) or reply here and someone else (probably me, though anyone is welcome) will take a stab at it.
Perhaps a "middle path" would be to add a brief section to each answer that explains just the highest-level facts about how things work...for example, I thought the Sweden's answer had good intel about the "supervision team", though the part about grad students' duties may be too much detail / too heterogeneous.
Maybe one of us could suggest, in the question, that information about the process of earning the degree after acceptance, if included, should be brief.
Nice edit to the question. I think we can probably leave the current answers as they were written. How general is the practice of required comprehensive exams do you think. In particular does US practice differ from other places?
Cool. I did already trim one of the answers, but you can revert if you think it went too far. My sense is that the US is a bit unusual in that we do coursework + research during the PhD (rather than having coursework in master's and research in PhD, with two different admissions cycles), and thus qualifying exams are correspondingly unusual. But I'm not sure how things work in the rest of the Western Hemisphere; could be that things are similar there.
You are braver than I would be for the Japan answer. Can you use superpowers to ping a known user from Japan?
Well, it is such a common question I wanted to make sure we got an answer on record for it. RE superpowers -- I don't see why not, if you want to leave a comment on the post identifying the user you have in mind, I'll reply with a superping.
Sorry, but I don't have anyone in mind. I'm no good with searching either. You are probably better than I am. We also need more folks in the conversation.
Oh, I thought you had a relationship with someone in particular. Yeah, I am hoping someone with first-hand experience makes some additions/edits, but I probably shouldn't superping random users.
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4932 | Meta tag descriptions
This is a Meta Meta question.
I just reviewed a number of tag guidance edits for several of the standard tags that are used on this meta site. However, most of these tags like discussion, feature-request, etc. are not specific to Academia Meta, but have common meanings on Meta sites across the Stack Exchange system. There are, in fact, technical requirements for how some of these tags are used on Meta sites and they have descriptions separate from the usual tag guidance found on main sites.
I voted not to approve most of the edits, since they did not agree with my understanding of how those tags are used on Meta sites; I tend to think there should be standardization for how, e.g., feature-request is used, across the entire Stack Exchange platform. However, I could not seem to find any rules (e.g. on the main Meta site) governing how tag guidance for common tags on Meta sites is meant to be used. So I mostly just wanted to point this situation out here, so it can be discussed and dealt with if needed.
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5056 | Delete misspelled tag synonyms
Resulting from a discussion on this tag-related question I propose the deletion of several misspelled tag synonyms:
Tag
Misspelled Synonym
undergraduate
undergradute
authorship
autorship
etiquette
etiquitte
plagiarism
plagarism
Please add if there are any more.
Reasons that speak for the deletion:
It has been discussed before and the outcome was to delete misspelled synonyms
When entering tabs for a questions, there are suggested tabs appearing as soon as you start typing, so users don't have to know the correct spelling
My preference is to delete them. A UI change (gasp) could show tags with only one question in a different background color so that they are easy for the vigilant (looking at you GoodDeeds) to update. There is enough activity here to make that possible, I think.
A related issue is that of tags that only mark a single closed question. There is little use for such tags and they tend not to have associated wiki with them anyway. I've removed the tags from a couple of questions and may do more, but that brings the question to the head of the queue. Is there a better way?
@Buffy Tags are by default sorted based on the number of questions they are applied to, so I think it is straightforward to find tags applied on only one question. Also, the number of such tags is very small (five right now, was seven a few minutes ago before you removed two of them :)). Out of those, only one of them is on a closed question, and I don't think that specific tag in itself needs to necessarily be removed.
I removed the rest on closed question. I left Thailand which is on an open question and a bit of wiki is there. Country tags are probably valuable even if there are only a small number of questions. One question I retagged was closed with two unique tags. Tag visa was adequate for the question.
The only tags I removed from questions were on closed questions.
@Buffy I agree with the retag and your reasoning, I did not mean to imply that it was incorrectly done. Thanks for doing them.
@GoodDeeds, no worries. I was just explaining what I did in case some mod wanders in here.
Thanks Sursula and GoodDeeds, this has been status-completed!
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