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111 | College undergraduate advice questions
We've had a couple questions since the dawn of Academia.SE asking for advice about undergraduate-related topics, the most recent being this well-formulated and generally pretty solid question. In the past, we've discouraged these kinds of questions. That was a while ago, though, and we've matured as a forum since then. Given how many upvotes the current question has received in such a short time, I'm curious what the community's current view is on undergraduate-related questions; should we continue to discourage them or should we allow them?
What does an upvote on this question mean? Does it mean continue to discourage them or allow them?
@DanielE.Shub - I typically interpret question upvotes as "this is a good question", and the answer should only be inferred from the answers below.
What I wonder about undergraduate admissions questions is whether anybody here can seriously address them, in a deeper or better informed way than just repeating information available from their college's admissions web site. I think very few faculty and almost no students could do this, at least in the sorts of systems I'm familiar with (private research university in the U.S.). For example, I have no idea how admissions officers evaluate applications from adults, or how the criteria vary between schools.
There are plenty of widespread ideas about how admissions decisions are made, which may or may not be true. Unless we either get answers from people involved in the process or get answers that point to authoritative information sources, there's a real likelihood of voting answers up based on how widely they are believed rather than how true they are.
I'd also be a little concerned if admissions officers started showing up to answer questions, since I imagine that would be incredibly popular and could easily take over the entire site.
So I'd be inclined not to expand the site's mission to include undergraduate admissions questions, even though this particular question is important and well formulated.
As for other sorts of undergraduate questions, I think there's less of an issue than with admissions questions, but I'd still restrict the focus quite a bit. From my perspective, a good undergraduate question should either deal with students who hope to become academics or with how academia works. I imagine that most requests for undergraduate advice would not fall into these categories, but some would.
How would admissions officers answering questions "take over the entire site?" Sure, you might have to create a whole slew of new tags, but why / how would this suppress the rest of the existing activity?
Is this site supposed to be for serious academics of graduate level and above, or not? The FAQ says that it is.
If we welcome undergrad questions, let's be explicit, (and anyone who wants a serious academic site, can go look elswhere). How junior do we go? Kindergarten and above?
But if we're sticking with the FAQ as it is, then let's close and delete all undergraduate (and lower) questions. On-topic vs off-topic counts for more than upvotes.
Candidates for closure as off-topic:
Attending university as an adult freshman
Distance Learning vs Free Online Education
That second question in particular should be of interest to academics. Many academics spend part (or in my case most) of their time teaching. My institution is losing students and money because of "free" or low-cost online education. Academics need to be able to adapt.
I think AC.SE should stop excluding undergraduates. Reasons:
Undergraduates are academics too. The dictionary defines academia as "the life, community, or world of teachers, schools, and education", which includes undergraduates. Notably this definition also includes high schools and primary schools and even kindergartens, but as another dictionary points out "academia" usually refers to universities.
Because undergraduate admissions is an essential part of most universities, questions about undergraduate admissions should not be excluded. I've only seen two objections to including this. The first is that nobody "here" can answer them. The other is that if the people who can actually answer them shows up, they might swamp the SE. Neither are convincing. First, professors aren't the only people in academia, and we already have questions which most professors probably cannot answer (example). Besides, that's kind of the point of SE - one can get answers from whoever knows them, regardless of who they are; furthermore if one doesn't know the answer chances are someone else does, and they can write an answer. Secondly, there are also a lot of questions about graduate admissions. I don't see why a canonical answer ala this one wouldn't work for undergraduate admissions.
Many undergraduate questions are answerable, in fact many of them are already asked, upvoted, and answered.
If undergraduate questions aren't asked here, where should they be asked? I certainly can't imagine an "Undergraduate.SE" since that would overlap so seriously with this one.
Finally one could argue that undergraduate questions are often not-generalizable. I don't find this convincing. First, the two examples ("which program should I choose?" and "which course should I take?") are both applicable to graduate studies as well. Second, one can always vote to close.
I think AC.SE should set its scope as all things specific to universities, including undergraduate concerns. (This would mean that questions on university housing is also within scope.)
We no longer exclude undergraduates. The policy was changed some years ago. If you look at the help center you'll see that.
See also this question, which originated the change afair: https://academia.meta.stackexchange.com/q/3300/20058
The help center still excludes questions about undergraduate admissions, life and culture, however.
@Allure: This post reflects our current undergraduate policy. If you want to get rid of the two exceptions, ask a new meta question suggesting this and argue against the specific points brought forward for these exceptions. (As the exceptions considerably differ, I suggest addressing each of them in a separate question.) As it stands, your initiative will probably get lost and confuse many as it is not based on the status quo.
Also mind, that I am pretty ambivalent to the two exceptions, as neither is a big thing in my country: Admission systems are pretty clear in most fields and there is hardly any undergraduate-specific life and culture and I guess many other users feel the same. This is something you may want to take into account when phrasing a question: Half of our users have strong opinions on this matter and the other half has no idea what the fuzz is all about.
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179 | New Semester publicity contest
With the semester starting around now for most universities, this site is now relevant to a whole bunch of new first-year grad students. We should try to capitalize on that by some targeted marketing, mainly consisting of flyers targeted at first-year graduate students. I can try to put something together, but I was wondering whether anyone else either (1) wants to make their own, or (2) has any other good ideas for publicity.
Some of the other SE sites run occasional contests; that may work for us, but I haven't been able to think of what the contest would be about. Anyone have ideas about that? Note that we could advertise the contest on said flyers, which may make more folks want to visit.
Some examples of previous contests on other SE sites:
SuperUser.SE anniversary contest
Security.SE anniversary contest
An interesting English.SE limerick contest, outside of SE but SE-sponsored
@charles - Done.
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795 | Removing useful but not immediately on-topic comments
I recently deleted a few comments (mods, you can see them here) which had been flagged as off-topic. Briefly, the OP had asked a question, a community member answered, and then a separate discussion took place in the comments about a different academia-related topic. I removed the comments that weren't immediately related to the question. The answerer took issue with my removing the comments, as he had put work into finding the answer.
My question here is: did I act inappropriately in removing those comments?
Isn't there an option to migrate comments to chat?
@Mechanicalsnail - Unfortunately, no... that would be very useful, and would mitigate so much of this issue.
I don't remember if it was you, but at least one time I felt that comment removal at this site is overzealous. First, IMHO some of my comments were not off-topic (maybe not evergreen, though). Second, as the author is not announced of the deletion, it is simply confusing (was I censored? or is there something broken with SE? or did I put this comment only in my dreams?).
Yes—and no.
Yes, you acted inappropriately in the sense that the discussion was still very much ongoing at the time. I would not delete informative comments so quickly—you have to allow people the chance to read them at the time that the discussion is going on. Otherwise, you could remove useful information which might actually lead to improved questions or answers.
However, if you had waited a few days before deleting the comments, then I would suggest that no, such behavior is appropriate. In the long run, Stack Exchange sites are not just about answering people's questions, but providing long-term curating of the answers. Extended side discussions that are not germane to the topic at hand detracts from that mission and should be removed when no longer pertinent to the discussion at hand.
Of course, we don't want to cut off relevant communications among users of this site; such "off-topic" discussions can always take place in chat rooms.
I appreciate and support this answer: I agree that such comments will not be eternally useful. But if you delete my communication while I'm communicating, then it is very disruptive and does not make me want to volunteer my time and expertise on a site like this (which would clearly like to have more involvement from career academics, not less, unless I drastically misapprehend the situation).
@PeteL.Clark: I think we're in agreement on that point. I've also restored the deleted comments for now, based on the above reasoning. Again, we're human—mistakes happen. If you think something was deleted that shouldn't have been, let us know.
I would simply add that there is a process of training here. Many people are used to forums where comments go on and on. Before removing comments which might be relevant, we should remain the author of the comment to update their question/answer so that the comments can be removed later. At @PeteL.Clark wrote, deleting mid-conversation would be frustrating for anyone.
Thanks to everyone for the civil discussion, and I apologize for interrupting the discussion. For now, it appears that aeismail already restored the deleted comments, so no harm done there. I'll pay closer attention to timestamps before acting on those flags next time. Thanks! @PeteL.Clark
@PeteL.Clark - I would like to make one thing clear... the votes here have clearly shown that the deletion was appropriate and the timing was not. In that vein, if this would occur again, deletion would occur again (after a reasonable amount of time). I notice that you're still active on this site today; please note that your continued participation in this community equates to your implicit willingness to work within this theory of moderation.
@eykanal: My interpretation of the answers here is that there has been a sincere apology on behalf of the moderators and a recognition that the precise deletion event that took place once should not and will not take place again under the same circumstances. Your last sentence seems a bit convoluted to me: but yes, from my continued participation on my site you can correctly infer my willingness to participate on the site, which includes a willingness to be moderated by its moderators. Certain actions that moderators might take in the future could affect that willingness...clearly.
I'm coming late to this party, but I am puzzled by the desire to remove comments. If a comment thread starts getting excessively involved, the system automatically encourages people to move to chat. If they still don't want to, is that so terrible ?
I agree that a comment might reference an edit that once made makes the comment moot. But in such cases I've often highlighted the edit as an update, so that the comment continues to make sense.
I've also deleted my own comments when I felt they were no longer necessary. But I wouldn't delete others comments unless they crossed the line into abusive/obnoxious/spamming behavior.
Comments are for constructive criticism or transient information. Allowing extended discussion both detracts visually from the site, as the page can get very long, as well as makes site visitors need to read through a long chain of often unrelated commentary to see if any of it adds to the answer. If you want to improve the answer, suggest an edit; if your answer is very different form the existing, post your own. (Do note that this is relaxed on meta, long conversations are common here.)
Note that my opinion has nothing to do with me being a mod; I flagged comments as "off-topic" before I was a mod, and I continue to do so on other SE sites where I'm not a mod. This is just my opinion.
which brings up a point: my understanding is that if enough flags accumulate on a comment, it gets deleted. If so, why not just let that happen ?
Because if there's a thread with 15 comments, what's the likelihood that five users will care enough to go through and flag every single comment? For that reason mods assist with the handling of flags.
In my view, that just means that people don't care enough. So I'd leave it. I do have a laissez-faire attitude to modding.
I don't know if I agree with that... IIRC, site engagement is somewhere on the order of 10%; 10% of visitors will actually register and vote, and 10% of those will actually become active members of the site. That doesn't mean only 1% care, it means only 1% will do something about it. As a mod, I'm trying to keep it nice for the other 99% also. (Note: I made those numbers up, but they'll do for estimates; if anything, they're both probably high.)
@eykanal But longer comment threads are folded by default, showing only the most upvoted comments. So no-one, except for people who explicitly want to see the full comment thread, se extraneous comments.
@PiotrMigdal - That only bolsters the point; long comment threads can cause useful content could be hidden by default, and the casual reader would never even know he's missing an important part of the answer.
it won't be hidden if it gets upvoted. And it's not hard to do one click to see the full thread and upvote something.
I can see aeismail and Pete's answers, but in my opinion we need to keep comments short or the site becomes a chatroom (which we also have, of course!). In the example given, the number & length of comments mean that many newcomers will probably not scroll down enough to see answers below Pete's.
And the right time for clearing comment is the current time, because a) most people view the question when it's still active, b) we may not get around to doing it later.
In short, in my opinion: having a prolonged comment discussion should only be very temporary, and should only lead to improving the question or existing answers. If the comments come to a useful conclusion, it should be incorporated into the answer. In all cases, the comments should be removed as soon as possible, by their authors.
I upvoted this answer as well. I hope people hear me when I say: I would be very responsive to requests to move my content elsewhere.
Let me respond to Charles' answer.
Thank you for including the link to the source of your excerpted passage about comments. That makes clear that it does not originate with this site and is not directly espoused by the users of this site: it is a message from some of the creators and adminsitrators of the hardware that explains how they intend it to be used.
However, any particular SE site is a group of people allied around building information and answering questions in a certain focused area. Like all communities, we have the right and obligation to make our own norms. If these norms diverge too far from those of the SE administrators...well, we can cross that bridge if/when we came to it. We came very close on MathOverflow.net, but after a long period of time, the SE administrators agreed to some very site-specific features and philosophies. Note that this was done in part because of the MO community being clear that certain things were necessary in order to ensure their long term commitment to the site.
I disagree that this passage should be used prescriptively across all SE sites. Some people at SE would want it to be: that's their perspective, which obviously carries a good deal of weight...as does ours, since both parties are equally necessary in order for the site to exist at all. But from a factual perspective it is clear that this "ephemeral" notion of comments is not the one which is practiced on MathOverflow.net, and to a lesser extent not on math.SE. Just to give an example, on MO the primacy of comments is so extreme that there are many questions which are only answered in comments. (In my opinion this is too extreme, and I have sometimes left community-wiki answers to such questions just to make sure that questions get answered in the technical sense. But I'm describing how things are at the moment, not how any one person wants them to be.)
What follows most strongly from the previous paragraph is
There is certainly no uniform agreement across all SE sites on the precise purpose and usage of comments. On any given site this is something that evolves culturally: all users participate in it, and respond to what they feel is "inappropriate" participation by others. No one person on academia.SE gets to say what comments are for and how they should be used. Thus I am disappointed that Charles tried to do this in his answer:
Hence, the proper form of communication on this site should have been: just-learning should have a left comment to Pete L. Clark asking to join a chat conversation to discuss about the top journals, and this comment should have been deleted once the conversation had started.
Please don't phrase your opinions as telling me and others what is the "proper form of communication". That is for all of us to judge. For my part I do not use the chat features of the site. I do sometimes contact people via email off the site, and since my email address is available they are free to contact me. When I make comments, I have chosen to do so. One difference is: comments are public; emails are private; chat is somewhere in between (I think; anyway it is not available to those who are reading the content that prompted the comments).
Can comments get out of hand? Yes, of course. It has happened to me on many sites, including on this one. In the sites math.SE and mathoverflow that I have participated in (and, I don't want to make a measuring contest about this, but I do have very extensive participation on these two sites, as anyone can check; in particular, I believe that I can claim to have as well-formed idea of what I want to use comments for as almost anyone), sometimes comments spiral out of hand by either (i) getting personal or (ii) getting confrontational / impolite. In such situations it is great to have moderator intervention. My understanding is that moderators spend a lot of time (on certain sites, anyway) intervening in such matters, and that seems like the best use of their time.
Concerning idea that comments which range off-topic from the question/answer should be deleted, I respond: it depends what is meant by off-topic. If it ranges outside of the scope of the site, then yes, it is a good time to curtail the conversation. However, if it just switches from one on-topic issue to another: well, that's what happens when professionals are having a profitable interaction. To me that is exactly the sort of positive interaction that sites like this are supposed to be encouraging. If you disagree, that's your right, and it's your right to try to act on it. But there are various ways to do that. You could act on it by leaving a comment saying, "Hey guys, maybe you'd like to move this discussion to...." In the case at hand that would have been a very appropriate and positive contribution: probably the OP should have asked a new question. But my point is that a short exchange in the comments is a positive move in the direction of such a new question. Flagging the comments and then deleting them is an incredibly negative move to make. This brings me to:
I get personally as well as professionally annoyed when my speech is deleted without a record made.
I am an academic mathematician, and though in many ways the latter is more definitive of my professional identity, in other ways the former prevails. This is such a time: valuing others' speech and writings is a sacred principle of academia. Academics agree that censorship is bad more strongly than they agree on almost anything: this was passionately argued for in Milton's Areopagitica in 1644 and has been well-accepted in the Western academic world more or less ever since. To me there is almost nothing which is more offensive than simply removing my text. (Seriously: if you want to respond to my comment by saying, "Hey, you asshole, why are you wasting my time and cluttering my page. Nobody cares!" then not only am I not that much annoyed by that...but it is much more likely to get me to remove or reformulate my comment. When you delete my comment, I think you are almost denying my personhood and wonder why I should even be associating with you.) This idea is well-understood on the two math sites mentioned above. It would be pretty ironic if this academic principle were felt less strongly on academia.SE....but let's see how people feel about it, I suppose.
We do need to push back in contemporary fora when our concepts of personal and academic freedom are being comprised. It is clear to me that the founders of SE do not value these freedoms as strongly as I do or most academics do. Those who have known me for a while know that several years ago (SE cofounder) Jeff Atwood deleted two of my comments on meta.math.SE. I said then what I said now: if that continues to happen, I must leave. Jeff Atwood was at the time very uncompromising, and I did take a break from contributing to that site...during which time I honestly think that my action was felt and taken into account. Jeff Atwood quickly became much more reasonable in his efforts as a "policeman" (his word; I think it's silly) on math.SE....and in fact he is no longer associated with the company at all.
Charles also writes:
No user is forced to contribute, and no user gains from contribution, apart from the collective gain of getting great answers to great questions. It is perfectly fine to question decisions made by mods, and to offer new solutions to solve problems, but someone threatening to stop contributing if they don't get it the way they want is not helpful.
Whoa there: you are really devaluing your product. Users can gain from contributions to this site in the following other ways:
They can get their questions answered in a timely manner by an expert audience.
[Questions are contributions, and getting your question answered when you need it answered is much different than the collective gain of an agglomeration of answers.]
Users can gain experience about how academia works in a worldwide, field-independent context, whereas most academics' (I mean me...) day-to-day life is mostly confined to their department in their university in their country. This is one of my main reasons for being active on this site: I have a lot of experience with my corner of academia, but I know very little about how HCI people do things or how people do things in India. Knowing this will be both directly and indirectly valuable to me: for instance it could make me a better department chair in the future.
[In order to get the most benefit out of interacting with academics around the world and the academic spectrum....you need to actually let us interact a bit. The idea that anything other than "The answer to Question X is Y" is idle chit-chat is really not helpful in this respect.]
Participation on globally active sites like this promotes me, my department and my university. My activity on MO and math.SE has done more for graduate admissions at UGA than anything else I have done or could do...I can really see the difference it's made.
Dually to the previous point: participation the site puts students in contact with professors: maybe by participating on this site I meet a math student in a faraway land who turns out to be really promising. My contact with this student could be really helpful for her (and hers for me). Please think about that when you delete comments between me and other students and young mathematicians.
I appreciate that you have your particular approach to how you use this site (as you describe in (2) and (6)), but please do not confuse your usage of this site with how the community has come to use the site. You found the comments section a good place to have a one-on-one conversation, and the community disagreed with that approach.... you can see that by the upvotes on the earlier answers. Please be open to other models of usage for this site.
@eykanal: The community did not disagree with the approach in any meaningful way that I can see: there was one person who flagged the comment and one moderator who deleted it. That's a very low threshold for permanent deletion of content. And most of the reason I am posting this answer is so that other members of this (admittedly, small) community can respond to it. This site is still in a "beta" phase, which I take to mean that it is still defining itself. Under certain definitions I would like to participate.
...If almost no one upvotes or comments in support of this answer, then it will be more clear how the community feels.
@eykanal I fear a little bit of a double-standard in the logic of using 'voting' to indicate anything. If anything, I'd say that the community at large is quite silent on this matter. There are a few moderators in favor of deleting comments, Pete is strongly against, and there are a few others (like myself) who essentially support Pete's argument without reservation and have said so. More specifically, I agree with Pete's objection to your conflating "moderators felt" with "the community felt". As I suggested earlier, if the community "feels", let them flag comments, or otherwise say so.
@suresh - Regarding the voting issue, again, that's how SO works.... via the voting mechanism. If someone wants to have a say, they can register their opinion by leaving posts or voting. Silence indicates indifference, and we cannot infer anything beyond that. Given that (as of the writing of this comment) the top answer on this thread has +11/-0 while this answer has +8/-6, I'm guessing that this answer is not as strongly supported by the community, while the top one is. Regarding flagging, I have nothing to add beyond my comments on your answer above; I think we'll have toagree to disagree.
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456 | Mod-protection as a precautionary measure
Lately, we've had a number of questions show up at the top of the "hot questions" list:
When this happens, things tend to get messy. Because of that, I often protect questions that are turning into hot ones. This has worked well in the past; the aforelinked question was protected while it appeared in the menu, and the extraneous content was limited.
To that end, I protected the question "Keeping your throat comfortable after hours of lecturing". In case you were wondering why, that's why.
A note: high-rep users can also protect questions… and I strongly agree with you that protecting "hot" questions is a good idea in general
Weird - I thought that was a terrible question for this site. Lots of jobs involve long periods of talking. Yet people love the question. (of course, that doesn't necessarily mean it's a good fit for the site.)
@EnergyNumbers - Funny, I thought it was just fine. You can open another meta question if you wish to discuss it. Even better, this question which was just posted an hour ago is basically on the same topic; feel free to chime in.
I didn't get "why"...
You might find this meta.stackexchange post interesting.
As someone who is on a site which also gets a lot of questions up there (some of which are of varying quality...) I absolutely err on the side of protecting them as protection against spammy types of answers.
Just a note - high rep users can only protect questions after a few days have passed. Moderators can protect immediately.
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3264 | Should homework questions that are otherwise not problematic be left open?
This is a pretty uncommon scenario here, but it appears that someone has posted what looks a lot like a homework question to the site. The twist here is that the question itself is very relevant to the site, and if the OP would have put any effort into modifying the question to appear as if it was their own, we would never have noticed. Is there any issue with leaving this question open?
As the question has been copied from some APS material and they provide an answer. I do not see a place for this particular question. It seems weird to just repost material from other sites.
It might be a good question if the OP had some good reason why the existing answer was not sufficient (besides for "My ethics professor said we can't just plagiarize the APS answer") or did not apply. But as far as I can tell, the OP just didn't even bother to Google it and find the answer.
Personally, I say leave it open.
There's really no way to police this.
The question is interesting; removing it punishes ourselves.
This happens so rarely that doesn't really need a policy.
EDIT: I posted this before @ff524 found the exact question, along with answers, already online. Given that update, I'm a bit more hesitant... as @Strongbad says, we don't need to repost stuff from other sites just for the heck of it.
I edited the question to make it clear where it came from and that it is a case study.
In the abstract, it might be OK. This question, not so much.
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59 | Questions with "assignment" in them should have automatic warning
On the main SO site, any questions with the word "best" in them have a warning automatically displayed:
Based on some recent questions [1][2], I want to propose a similar warning for our site if the question has "assignment" in it, with the following wording:
Your question appears limited in scope... please ensure it's within site guidelines before posting.
Comments?
In the first example you give 'assignment' was actually misspelt in the submission version ('assignmet', based on the URL), so ironically this wouldn't have flagged it...
I think it's a pretty clever idea, but it should probably be phrased somewhat softer than the Stack Overflow warning for "best". Because, for example, there's some teaching related questions that I can see having 'assignment' in the title, and we don't want to drive those away.
That's a good point, I've been trying to think of the best language. I've updated the text, what do you think?
I like it better. It should function as a warning/note rather than the much stronger "You're thread's probably going to get closed"
This works for now; we can revise as needed if it doesn't appear to be getting the job done.
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94 | Fixing up the postdoc treatment question
How can we fix this question to be more focused on helping postdocs and less argumentative and provocative?
I don't know if there's an easy way to clean up this question. The premise is argumentative, and therefore the responses (including my own) have a somewhat strident tone as well. The comments don't really help.
We shouldn't delete the question—but perhaps the issue is to clean up the header of the question to be less "angry?"
Delete it.
It's not going to contribute anything useful, it's not constructive, and the site's better off without it.
I have to agree.
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3532 | Close questions on cheating as "primarily opinion-based"?
We've had a few cheating-related questions lately (this, this, tangentially this). Almost all of these end up yielding a number of answers to the effect of "I think X, because Y". While the reasons are good, they're really individuals expressing their personal ethics, rather than being definitive. The tough part is that they're not definitive because in these instances there often isn't a definitive answer.
So, that said, my question is: should questions related to students cheating (where the answer isn't explicitly defined in their academic integrity policy) be closed as "primarily opinion-based"?
where the answer isn't explicitly defined in their academic integrity policy – In this case the question is either pointless (since the answer is already known) or should be closed for depending on individual factors.
@Wrzlprmft - Check the first and second linked question, neither of those situations would be explicitly covered in an integrity policy.
I am aware of this. The point of my remark was rather that the exception in your question seemed pointless to me as it excludes questions that are clearly off-topic.
@Wrzlprmft - Fair enough, and I agree. Being a mod has made me overly pedantic, apparently :/
And I thought I was the one being pedantic right now …
should questions related to students cheating (where the answer isn't explicitly defined in their academic integrity policy) be closed as "primarily opinion-based"?
No, this is far too general and comprises almost the entire cheating tag.
I agree, however, that we should take care that these questions are asked in a way that makes them a good fit for this format. For example:
Questions should not just ask whether something is ethical or not, but for ethical arguments for and against something or for an ethical analysis. The asker has to make the decision, not we; but it is valid to ask us for aspects to consider when making the decision.
Questions should specify an ethical framework or paradigm (e.g., fairness, avoiding disproportionate measures) on which answers should be based.
Questions that aren’t actually about determining the ethics of a situation, but for example about possible legal consequences or similar should specify this.
(Also see my answer on “Attitudes of academics towards X?” On or off topic?.)
Of course, the questions should not be off-topic for other reasons, like depending on individual factors. I would close at least I used a solution that I happened to already have on my laptop on an exam. Did I cheat? for this reason.
For what it's worth, the fact that my question covers the whole cheating tag isn't bad to me; I'm personally on the fence as to whether those questions are worthwhile here at all.
The issue covers more or less the whole [tag:ethics] tag, not only questions on cheating.
I agree with what you wrote, but I'm curious why you would close the "solution on the laptop" question and not the others. I thought that was a pretty good thread, and I'm not seeing a substantial difference between that and the other two @eykanal mentioned in the OP.
@Jeff: I freely admit that the solution-on-laptop question and the oral-exam question are both borderline with respect to closure. However, with the solution-on-laptop question, I do not think that we can answer anything substantially beyond “it depends (on the rules set for the exam)”, which is more or less confirmed by the answers.
I don't know, in so far as "ethics" is an appropriate topic of discussion here, it seems like "this is a gray area and will depend on the rules" is a valid response that doesn't make the original question inappropriate.
No, such questions usually can be answered, and should not be closed.
Ethics questions should not be answered based on the answerer's personal ethics anyway, but rather, based on their understanding of the consensus ethical standards of the overall academic community. Ideally, explanations should be given that help the asker understand academic ethics.
If an answerer believes there is no consensus on a question, then they can answer "no consensus" and explain why not. They should not take this as an opportunity to air their personal opinions on the question itself.
People may disagree on whether there is a consensus, or what it is, but votes can help resolve such disagreements.
I suggest that Yes, these questions should be closed.
My primary motivation here is that the voting-based nature of Stack Exchange will result in some answers being given more votes—sometimes many more votes—than others. Unfortunately, given that there is no "correct" answer in these instances, the votes really just indicate how many other anonymous internet denizens happen to agree with that answer, making the entire question simply a morality poll. The specific, appropriate answer may differ based on local norms, the individual's personal beliefs, and subtle nuances that people outside the questioner's culture may not recognize as important.
As such, rather than allowing the poll to occur, I suggest is that the user would be better served by being explicitly told to consider it themselves and ask individuals within their own social and cultural circle, rather than relying on the wisdom of the masses.
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3680 | Pedagogy question challenge
A comment thread on a recent question went as follows (saving for posterity):
Excellent question. IMHO, we don't have enough questions about pedagogy on this site. This is a great "how can I ensure my students are learning as much as possible?" question. – eykanal ♦ Feb 6 at 14:16
@eykanal “we don't have enough questions about pedagogy on this site” — Honestly, at the moment I see this as a good thing because the answers on those other questions are very bad. The visitors on this site aren’t professional educators, and most clearly know nothing about actual research on learning, instead sticking to old and wrong stereotypes. This leads to (sometimes highly upvoted!) advice that’s plain terrible and often has the exact opposite effect of what’s intended. I advise against seeking and giving teaching advice here. – Konrad Rudolph 54 mins ago
Unfortunately, his comment is entirely correct... people here are academics who happen to teach, not teachers who are also academics, and we all suffer for it.
To that extent, I wanted to propose a...
Teaching Challenge Month
The idea—in my mind, at least—would be a month where people are encouraged to (1) ask questions about university-level teaching and (2) post answers with citations that answer these questions.
The contest aspect would be two posts on Meta—one for questions, one for answers—where people could nominate their favorite question and favorite answer. The one with the highest vote would win reputation; I imagine I would simply open and immediately award a bounty of 500 points (the maximum bounty allowed) to the winner.
We would draw attention to the contest via a featured meta post (i.e., visible from the main Academia.SE page).
So, all that said... thoughts?
I like your idea, what you've proposed seems like a good starting point to launch some discussion about the best way to address the sentiment portrayed in your proposal, and, overall, I think it would be useful to try to make this site more teaching-friendly (after all, some of us take our teaching responsibilities as seriously as our research).
Perhaps in parallel to your idea for generating new questions focused on pedagogy, we could attempt to draw some much-needed attention to previously-asked questions with a pedagogical leaning. Here, I'm thinking of questions which haven't received a lot of attention, have existing answers which could be expanded on or improved, etc.
How to best proceed on my idea above is not clear to me. I'd welcome any discussion or suggestions.
The way these are typically done is via bounties. I imagine that this could work by a meta-coordinated search through old questions where people post links to ones they'd like to see expanded, and then some gracious high-rep users volunteer to donate their rep to the cause.
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1747 | Why was this question about the definition of a curriculum closed?
A user recently posted this question about the definition of "curriculum." The user was curious why the question was closed, and I'm posting this question to hopefully provide answers.
I voted to close the question as "unclear", because I have no idea what the OP is asking about. I have never heard of a curriculum as being described as a list of topics, never mind a prescriptive and/or descriptive one. The question in the body seems to be a yes/no question, while the titular question seems to require a pretty broad answer what a curriculum is. Neither seem a good fit and I think if he unclear part was clarified the good part of the question would emerge.
I did not vote the question down, because I think there is a good question in there, it just needs clarification.
I did not leave a comment to the OP because I thought the close reason was pretty clear and I saw that the OP he has 100k+ rep on the SE network so I figured if he was confused he would ask on meta, chat, or the comments.
To me, the question was closed for a few reasons:
It is unclear what is actually being asked. It appears very abstract and philosophical in nature, which is typically not the type of question asked on these forums.
The question is also only tangentially related to academia. The concept of a curriculum exists in education of all levels; elementary, secondary, undergraduate, graduate, certifications, online trainings, etc.
The question has a pretty simple answer. A curriculum is:
1: the courses offered by an educational institution
2: a set of courses constituting an area of specialization
source: m-w.com
It's not clear to me what your different subcategorizations even mean, and it's even less clear why I would want to begin a discussion using your classification scheme.
As one of the close-voters, I concur with #1 and #3, though not #2, since curriculum design is definitely a big part of the life of many academics.
@jakebeal - Definitely. It smelled a bit like boat programming to me, though, which is what I was trying to get at. You're free to disagree :)
I don't understand what is unclear in the question, but @jakebeal participated in the closing after he made it clear that he objected to the question because it came from a person who he believed had been guilty of writing a "rant" on a different occasion, when that other occasion and its topic were not mentioned in this question that jakebeale helped to close. That is the ad hominem fallacy. As nearly as I can tell, the item he considered a "rant" was a paper I have not written but that I said I may write. I asked what publication I should submit it to. I wonder if jakebeale....
....thinks that asking what publication would be a good place for it constitutes a "rant"?
So if a question is posted by someone whose beliefs jakebeale objects to, and those beliefs are not mentioned in the question, jakebeale will say that that question that does not mention those beliefs is a "rant".
@MichaelHardy I'm afraid that you are making a number of incorrect assumptions about my actions. My key reasons for down-voting and voting to close are spelled out in the eykanal's answer here, as modified by my comment (I was writing much the same when he beat me to it). I probably could have been more polite, but my basic issue with the question is as spelled above. When you've spoken more clearly and constructively, I've happily voted you up (e.g., I am your up-vote on this answer).
@jakebeal : I don't think I'm merely making an "assumption" when I've read your question that says "Is this about your same rant" etc. Calling a paper you haven't read a "rant", and doing so in a context that doesn't even mention that paper or the earlier question that mentions it, and bringing up that earlier question out of the blue in a context to which it is not relavent, makes certain conclusions about your behavior reasonable.
That I may have been thinking about the later topic for reason related to the earlier topic is my own business and not related to how anyone should judge the later question. It says "This question is bad regardless of its content because it's posted by the same person who on another occasion said he would write a paper that I would judge to be a 'rant'."
"I don't understand what is unclear in the question". I didn't participate in the close vote but what's unclear to me is how your question differs from "What is the dictionary definition of 'curriculum'?" You surely can't be asking what the dictionary definition is, because you'd've just looked it up in a dictionary. So you must be asking something else -- but what? I can't figure out what so, to me, the question is unclear.
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992 | Questions that are lists of things
Pete Clark recently asked a question which is, essentially, a list of things. In the past, we've had differing thoughts from the community on this topic (for, against). Thoughts?
@PeteL.Clark - See edit. "We've agreed" is shorthand for "this is how all SO sites work, the alternative is kinda unattractive, and last time we talked about it no one cared, so why change from the status quo?" If you disagree, go ahead and post! Last time you and I disagreed the community strongly supported your viewpoint, so historical trends are in your favor :)
As for the matter of starting the question at hand, I think the better procedure to have followed would be to ask about posting the question on Meta before submitting it to the main site.
@aeismail That feels somewhat contrary to the spirit of SE sites, and how they work. The entire format favors after-post editing, pulling, etc. over asking permission to post. Beyond that, how would you determine whether to post or not? A plurality of votes? 2/3rds? What the moderators say?
@Fomite: The goal of Meta is to discuss questions about the main site. If you want to know if it's a good idea to ask a question, Meta is the place to start the discussion. CW questions are also supposed to be exceedingly rare on SE sites-which means a consensus should be sought first.
@aeismail: Not in my wildest dreams did I imagine that my question would not be squarely on-topic for the site. Let me rephrase my previous comment on this, even more personally: the idea that it might not be is very frustrating to me. This (quite recently enacted) business about CW-questions supposed to be exceedingly rare is not the way that the other SE sites that I have used for years function. On a site like this one where the culture is not for all sufficiently reputable users to freely edit every question, it seems clearly poorly thought out.
Seriously, though: I am so tired of arguing over things like this. I asked a question purely out of a desire to create useful, extremely mainstream content on the site that would be of evident value to its users. If the moderators feel that the proper course of action would have been to first debate whether this was proper procedure: I don't understand why you're putting in so much effort to cancel out my own good-faith efforts and work. But if you feel that's a good use of your time: go for it. I'm sorry that our visions of what is useful and productive are so divergent.
@PeteL.Clark - See this blog post from August 2011 detailing the "new" use of CW. Perhaps the sites you frequent do not follow those guidelines, but many others, including this one, do.
I am not trying to "cancel your good-faith effort." I am saying what should have happened. There are other advantages to posting here first: you are also creating awareness for the question. and soliciting help. Ultimately, it's about checking if there's enough community support for making a question a community wiki.
I removed all the comments not pertaining to the topic at hand.
I'm rather in favor of this particular big list question for a couple reasons:
"Necessitate constant revision as facts change" and "My guess is someone has done a meta analysis" are actually mutually contradictory objections. Either a single, authoritative, static source can (or should) exist, or it's in constant need of changing. It can't be both.
There's a steady drumbeat of exactly these questions, and I think there's definitively a place for a thread we can point to and say "Find your field, consult the excerpt, and ponder whether or not you think you have a problem or not". This is, as far as I can tell, our "What book should I pick up to learn C/C++..." question.
"a list of excerpts and/or personal opinions about authorship will be of limited value." I don't think a list of excerpts from authoritative sources would be of limited value, and I'm particularly interested in knowing how that would differ from @Strongbad's proposed systematic review.
The list has the advantage of being potentially very wide ranging in terms of fields. My concern for these types of questions is always that the answer for one field might not match another, and if we don't have anyone in X field on while the question is active, we lose that information. A persistent collection of said information would avoid that problem.
Yes, you understand my intent quite well. It's a good feeling. :)
The C++ question is doing a sort of meta analysis in that it is weeding through lots of books and coming to a conclusion/recommendation. It also only has a single integrated comprehensive answer. With lots of "little" answers it will be harder to compare across fields. If they followed a template that would make it easier, if they were integrated together even better.
As pointed out elsewhere, the C++ question has had >90 edits, and that is all to a single answer, just adding new books, where thousands of people share a knowledge base (C++). In our case, this would be one question purporting to detail the submission policy of hundreds of journals, with maybe a handful of people who are familiar with each journal, oftentimes only the individual who posted. I fail to see how the two questions are similar at all.
@eykanal You're stretching the analogy. All I intended to say was that it's a question that's going to continually recur, and could use a "Go here, read this" answer.
@eykanal As for this: "to detail the submission policy of hundreds of journals, with maybe a handful of people who are familiar with each journal" the excerpt I posted applies to very nearly every medical journal, and most biomedical journals. That's neither a single journal post, and if we only have a handful of people familiar with an entire field, that's our failing as a community, not a flaw with the question.
"Lists of things" is a rather broad category, and there are many different kinds of list questions, I'll restrict my answer to this specific example and similar questions.
The important questions in my opinion here is whether the topic is better handled by a single CW question as proposed here, or by an individual questions for each field.
One large disadvantage is that the big CW question is unordered, the answers are sorted by score, which is pretty much meaningless in this specific case. To find the specific field you have to scroll through the entire list manually.
Another aspect is that I'm not convinced that just the statements of scientific societies are enough to actually answer such questions fully. While I think a good answer to such a question should reference such sources, it often should go above that. The official statements are rather general and might need more clarification or explanation to be really useful.
I think this subject would be better served by individual questions, with appropriate closure as duplicates if the situations and fields are similar enough to an existing question.
The fact that the list is unordered is a minor issue--that's what ctrl-f (search) is for.
@mkennedy That is not an excuse to make the whole thing unordered and confusing, suprisingly many people would not even think of using the search for this.
@mkennedy - There are hundreds of journals, each with their own standard. You'd be searching across numerous pages of answers.
The word "journals" does not appear anywhere in my question. I asked for statements of professional ethics. It seems to me that a journal is not a locus of professional ethics per se: they may set ethical standards for their own submissions, but that's much more localized and was not asked for. What to do when or (more likely if) a question like this gets "numerous pages of answers" is not a serious present worry.
@Mad Scientist: I agree that this question will not answer all possible questions about ethics of coauthorship. However I think it can be useful in answering many such questions, which is a much more reasonable standard. About statements of scientific societies not being comprehensive: first, there is more to academia than the sciences. But second: I fear you're right, that there is not enough written literature addressing this. This question gives us a way to find out. One could imagine using it in the future to try to draft a cross-disciplinary statement.
@PeteL.Clark The statements will probably all be roughly "all authors must substantially contribute to the paper", the more interesting question is where to draw the line on what is a substantial contribution and what not. That is why I don't think this CW post can answer any but the easiest of these questions (where an author as done nothing at all for the paper). And these details are better served by individual questions in my opinion.
CW for a list of things is tricky. (Personally I do like some big lists on SE if they are objective (e.g. list of software to do X).)
CW for a list of subjective things is very tricky. The same things holds for things that cannot be shortened to a single sentence. (While the problem is interesting, I don't feel it will work with SE system; however, I would like to see what happens rather than close it prematurely.)
I don't like big list question in general. In this particular case, I like it even less. My guess is someone has done a meta analysis, and if they haven't they should, on the authorship requirements of different societies/journals. A question about where to find and how to interpret field specific authorship norms would also be useful, but I think a list of excerpts and/or personal opinions about authorship will be of limited value.
The question does not ask for personal opinions about authorship. It asks for links to official statements of ethics. "My guess is someone has done a meta analysis, and if they haven't they should," This is rather ironic: I think someone should do this too! May I ask why you think amassing and collecting in one place information that people regularly ask questions about on this site will be of limited value?
@PeteL.Clark the question does not ask for personal opinions, but my guess is that they will creep in there. I am not sure what the added value of copying and pasting from a bunch of websites into a single webpage is. Maybe it would make it easier for people to compare across fields, but I am not sure many people want that comparison.
@StrongBad So flag those answers.
I think it is incredibly important to make comparisons across academic fields. To my mind that's one of the reasons that academia.SE exists. In particular, at the moment the answer to these types of ethical questions seems to be "Well, this is how it is in my field. Maybe this [behavior that seems horribly unethical to me] would be ethical in your field." By compiling the ethical standards across different fields one could imagine responding to this by saying "No, this is unethical in all of academia": see XXX.
@Fomite - That's the "constant maintenance" that I refer to. Keeping an up-to-date list is a lot of work, and it's work that's unlikely to be done in a volunteer setting like this, particularly if we end up making a number of lists like this one.
All questions require a certain amount of maintenance. This particular question is (I think) not of the type to draw off-the-wall answers, since what it asks for is very specific. I honestly think that maintaining this one question will allow for better and more efficient answers to hundreds of future questions. And anyway, maintaining valuable information is part of the work that we do on this site. If a big-list questions gets a lot of spammy answers, sure, we can address protecting it or even closing it. I see no big problem here.
@eykanal I'm not convinced the maintence cost of the list exceeds the cost of continually trying to provide high-quality, field specific answers to a steady stream of "Should this person be a co-author?" questions. Especially if those aren't allowed to have opinions creep in.
@Fomite - I do hear that point. However, I think the cost goes the other way. The C++ question you point to has >90 edits, and that's for a question that thousands of people can assist with. Each answer here will likely have only a handful of people are both (1) familiar enough with the field and (2) care enough to update the answer. I would rather us simply mark the questions as bad questions and leave it at that.
My thoughts are that these types of questions are not useful:
They necessitate constant revision as facts change
They are of questionable use, as few would use that question as the authoritative source
The ease of scope creep for the question makes it difficult to manage and requires constant maintenance to keep it clean
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1037 | Highly-voted comments have less contrast than low vote ones
The current CSS rules for the main site have highly-voted comments appearing in grey, while low-vote comments are displaying in bright red:
Not sure what the standard is, but I'm pretty sure that's not how it works on SO, at least (e.g., see the comments on this random answer). Can we have something similar here? It just seems visually off.
Yes, this bothers me too. The "cool" comments are gray, the "warm" and "hot" comments are red, and then the "supernova" comments are gray again.
This looks like it still hasn't been addressed; any comment from the community mod team?
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425 | Possible "not a question" post
Recently, someone posted the question "Fee surcharge for international students", which was an undisguised rant. Someone mentioned this in the comments, and the user tacked on a question. To me, the question as added is likely off-topic here; it's a legal question about academia, not an academic question. However, the fact that the question was tacked on as such indicates to me that the user is looking more for discussion than an answer. I would vote to close, but my vote is automatically binding, so I wanted to see what the community thought. Do you think this question should be closed as "not a real question"?
You might think of this as a rant. However, there are few avenues where I can get any input on this matter. acad.SE could probably provide me with input from various academicians from different countries. And I don't think it is a rant because I clearly note in the question that I am unsure if this is a fair or unfair measure by the university.
I agree that this as it stands this is not really a question. There might be one in there, but it is pretty buried. I am also think the question has a strong personal bias.
As for not using your mod powers, I think you are correct. We now have a fair number of users who can and do vote to close. I like thye idea of letting the community decide and bringing attention to possible questions with meta/chat like you did here.
To be fair to @Charles, it was his idea for me to post this here. Credit where credit is due and all :)
I did not vote to close this question simply because I was in the OP's shoes many years ago.
Personally I am on the OP's side. However, I believe this question is solicting opinions and could stir up endless debates, not suitable for our site.
It is more about public government policies than just academic one. If it is a decision made by state government, how do you overrule it?
For example, every state university in the US I know of impose tuition charges on in-state residents and out-of-state residents differently. From in-state resident's position, this is fair. Out-of-state residents feel this policy is unfair. Endless debate.
Thanks to those who voted to close. Save me a lot struggle.
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21 | Modifying the "Ask Question" page to include tagging recommendation
Based on my answer in this question, I propose that we modify the tag placeholder text (currently "at least one tag (graduate-school note-taking science), max 5 tags") to strongly encourage the poster to provide a tag identifying the field of research being discussed:
The proposed text is:
must include field of research (american-history mechanical-engineering), max 5 tags
My rationale for this change is that if the poster does not provide the field of research, 9 times out of 10 they will be asked for it in the comments immediately after posting. If they don't, then 9 times out of 10 the answer they receive will be too broad to actually help them. (I'm noticing that most people - myself included - don't realize how many fields of research there are.)
While the experience of individuals will be mostly limited to one particular field and likely a specific geographic area (e.g. Europe or U.S.A. or Australia etc.), I believe we should strive for answers that generalize across all fields and areas. Otherwise the utility of any particular question and answer is severely limited in scope.
In anecdote, so far on the site I haven't seen any general advice given by individuals in STEM fields that don't in large part apply to social sciences. In general (I suspect) were likely to find more similarities than differences.
Hopefully as the site grows differing perspectives become represented, so if pertinent differences between fields exist for any particular question they are noted, but I don't think assuming a priori that differences exist is a good idea. And forcing tags naturally perpetuates such an artificial division.
EDIT
To reify my perspective in address to the comments by @eykanal and @Henry, I think it best to be more specific about what I mean when I say advice should generalize to all fields. This does not simulataneously mean the answer is broad (and purportedly unuseable)!
The vast majority of posters on the site so far are not from social science fields, yet it is difficult to come up with answers that, at least in some respects (if not entirely) are applicable to my personal experiences (criminology graduate student in the USA).
For examples of questions/answers by people not within my field, but the responses IMO would be reasonable to generalize to my field;
How important are my grades to the rest of my PhD career?.
How do you judge the quality of a journal?
Teaching Assistanships and research
How do I select a graduate program?
You could arbitrarily insert into any of these questions specific field X (e.g. "How important are my grades to the rest of my PhD career in Mathematics"), but this immediately implies that experiences in other fields are not pertinent (which is not the case). Nor are the answers to the above "too broad to be useful" because they generalize across multiple fields.
It is difficult to say much more speaking widespread about the site (so far we have all made very general statements, and we could all find anecdotal situations as evidence for our positions). But I don't see how suggesting such a tag system is benifitial to the site, and I believe it could be harmful.
Asking for clarification on questions seems to be a regular occurence across the SE sites. Although it can be annoying at times, it is not a noxious enough problem to need such a novel solution as you are presenting.
As a side note, although I understand the motivation of the original poster, the proposed usage of tags in this instance is a "meta" tag. See the SO blog post by Jeff Atwood on the subject, The Death of Meta Tags for why such tags should be avoided. Although you could probably argue for their utility in other respects, they certainly don't describe the content of the question.
My only hesitation is that this seems to me to be an impractical goal. People asking questions will want to have their specific question answered, and the only way to do that is to have enough information. An answer which addresses the question broadly but not specifically will decrease the usefulness of the site. While we could just regularly request that people provide more info, I think we could save time by asking up front. @henry
My concern about asking up front is that it might cause people in other fields not to bother posting. Stackexchange is supposed to create a permanent repository of answers; today the person asking is from one field, but tomorrow it will be a different one. People shouldn't answer broadly---people should answer specifically, and we should end up with multiple answers reflecting different areas. (I also think there's some value, both to the asker and to future visitors, to having the comparison across fields.)
To paraphrase Einstein - "questions should be as broad as possible, but not broader". Sure, there are many similarities. But I would hate to have academia with questions either too general (gathering some common points, but in fact being useless for the asking person) or two specific (everything with "here is my life story, please tell me what I should do"). Surely, not always the asking person knows (or can know) about the generality (or lack of it). But if e.g. there are different answers to funding bases on US/UE then it ends up as a polling question, which is bad and counterproductive.
Totally agree @PiotrMigdal. IMO you should add as an answer, it is good to bring this up again, it still isn't a real settled debate and your comment is about the best perspective on the topic I can imagine (and agree with!)
I'm inclined to agree with Andy that we'd really like to have questions which make sense across field and location, even if the answers don't. In other words, it seems more important to have answers specify the field and location, but get multiple answers reflecting different areas.
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37 | Proposed FAQ "What kind of questions can I ask here?" entry
The In the spirit of how other SE communities expanded on their current FAQ entry of "What kind of questions can I ask here?", I propose that ours read as follows:
This site is for academics of all levels—from aspiring graduate and professional students to senior researchers—as well as anyone in or interested in research-related or research-adjacent fields. If you have a question about...
Life as a graduate student, postdoctoral researcher, university professor
Transitioning from undergraduate to graduate researcher
Inner workings of research departments
Requirements and expectations of academicians
... then you're in the right place!
To help people answer your question, please recognize that this forum is frequented by academicians from across the globe, from across diverse fields research, and with a wide range of experience, from first-year graduate student to tenured professor. State your question as much context as you can to help ensure that you'll receive a directed, relevant answer.
eykanal: Regarding your flag. The [faq] tag is used to mark the most frequently asked and answered questions on Meta (i.e. it comprises the 'faq'). It is not used to mark discussions about the faq.
@RobertCartaino - Huh. Learn something new every day.
"Enrolled in higher education" means undergraduate students as well. So I think you'd want to say
This site is for academics of all levels—from aspiring graduate and professional students to senior researchers—as well as anyone in or interested in research-related or research-adjacent fields.
This allows us to cover the full range of people, while making clear that we're not really addressing undergraduate admissions.
Good clarification. I'll take issue with one part: "post-graduate students", on first blush, reads as "post-doctorates". Unless you specifically mean something by "post-graduate", I think the term "graduate students" would be more clear.
I mean by "postgraduate" anybody who's beyond their respective undergraduate degrees. This would include MD-PhD students, and other disciplines that might not fall under the traditional graduate student rubric.
how about "post-undergraduate" then? Or, if the term "post-graduate" is the correct one and I'm just unfamiliar with it, let me know, as well.
"Postgraduate" means "after the first degree," so basically exactly the definition we want. Perhaps we point them to this definition as part of the FAQ.
@CharlesMorisset - I like your idea, and I changed the answer based on the comment. What do you (and aeismail) think?
I think "aspiring undergraduates" is exactly the group that should not be covered!
The sooner we get the expanded faq in place, the better its gonna be - there are some rogue users who really need to read it!
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45 | What kinds of questions are "too localized"?
I'm wondering whether we should loosen the criterion for "too localized" in this forum. My intuition is that many questions on this forum will be very localized, but the answers will be more general in nature. For instance, this question about social psychology + art seems very localized, but the answers will probably be relevant to both social psychology and art majors, rather than only the intersection of the two. I think this will be a common phenomenon. In fact, I can't really think up with a good case of "too localized" for our forum. Should we avoid closing questions as "too localized" at all?
It should be useful to someone besides the poster.
@EpiGrad - my argument is, almost all questions that we're hoping to attract would be of use to others in that field.
For fields that have their own stackexchanges, very specific questions about the practice of those fields could be deemed too localized. For instance, if I wanted to ask a question like "What is the equivalent of STOC/FOCS for theory B?" I think it would be better to ask at cstheory.SE than here, even though it is a question ABOUT academics (in particular conferences) so potentially on topic here.
In my mind, it should at least be possible for someone searching the site a month from now to find it helpful. It's a fine line, but there is a difference between "A question about me" and "A question about people like me".
This is exactly my viewpoint. Questions should have some applicability outside the original poster.
In my experience, "too localized" is code for "uninteresting," and questions that are sufficiently juicy but only useful to a specific person are almost never closed as "too localized."
I see it more as people being more willing to put in some work to fix up/generalize a question that is very localized, but also interesting.
I would cite as an example of "too localized" the following question:
Suggestions for mathematics courses that would be essential for research in homological algebra and ring theory
The original post asks for information on what courses to take for a specific concentration within a specific program in a specific university drawn from the same school's course catalog. That would definitely fall under "too localized" rubric, in my opinion.
shouldn't something like that be migrated to the Mathematics Stack Exchange anyway?
Even for that site it would be too localized, given the reference to a specific course catalog.
I get that the golden rule is not to migrate crap (and I admit I missed reading that in your answer), but in less egregious (and probably therefore more common) cases, whether a question is too localized is partly a decision for the target site's users, no?
In general, yes. However, we can also check with the moderators of a site if thwre's concern for its appropriateness or if there are multiple possible "homes."
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51 | Proposed FAQ "What kind of questions should I not ask here?" entry
It looks like most sites have boilerplate text for the "don't ask this", but given the recent discussion involving the "too localized" flag, I thought we may want to consider adding some text about the scope of the site. I like EpiGrad's description of appropriate questions:
You should not ask "a question that will help only me," but rather "a question that will help people like me." If your question is so limited as to be useful only to you, consider broadening the scope so others can learn from your question as well. As a general rule, if you're asking about a particular institution, course, or journal, it's likely your question is too limited in scope. Try to extract the fundamental question from the specific problem at hand.
EDIT: Incorporated wording from Charles's comment below.
@charles - revised wording, comments?
@aeismail - revised wording, comments?
@eykanal If you want people to be notified of your comments, you should post in response to their answers or in the same comment thread that they appeared in. See here for more info. :)
@AnnaLear - Thanks for letting me know. It's odd that the failure is silent; it shouldn't be. I just posted to SE Meta about this, please let me know there what you think about the suggestion.
@eykanal I updated the FAQ with the wording in the question here. There's no way to edit the "What kind of questions should I not ask here" section, since that is the same across all SE sites, but I included it with its own header. Let me know if you'd like me to change it to something else.
@AnnaLear - Thanks for updating, that should work fine.
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60 | Expand scope of site to include academics searching for info on industry jobs
I was wondering whether we should allow questions about academics searching for industry positions. This question on jobs outside of academia was closed, based on our brand-new FAQ, but I thought the question was a good one. Do we want to allow those sorts of questions here? This would include questions about...
Which industries may be a good match for a particular field of researchers
Networking with industry while in academia
Any questions from non-research master's students
I personally (and quite biased-ly) feel that this is relevant to academicians, as the move from research to industry is quite common, and it is something many academicians will want to know about. What's your thoughts?
I think we should allow these questions, as long as there's a particular link to academia in the question. This site is about academia, not people with advanced degrees.
But there are definitely some questions I can see being appropriate to this site that serve as examples as to why I don't think there should just be a blanket ban.
Dealing with, or working in, areas of academia with a heavy industry focus - engineering, pharmaceuticals, etc.
Transitioning to and from academia and industry. Are there ways to do research outside the "Ivory Tower"? How do Business-Academia partnerships work? Once I leave academia, can I come back? What's the environment like at research companies - or government labs, compared to universities.
Those are just two that popped to mind. I think since academia can lead into industry, and isn't solely devoted to the perpetuation of itself, questions about the interaction between the two can work on this site, as long as its not just a job question where the OP happens to have a Masters.
Certainly not. There's a risk as it is that there are several posters treating this site as a careers advice forum. That's only slightly mitigated by the fact that they're asking about academic careers.
Whereas the post in question, was seeking careers advice for a future career outside academia.
This question should be downvoted and closed.
Indeed, all careers-advice questions should be closed, whether about careers in or out of academia, as off-topic.
This is not a forum; nor should it be a careers advice centre.
There may be questions related to careers in academia which would fit under the usual StackExchange remit: that is, questions to which there are factual objective answers, that are of interest to the broader internet, and not localised to a specific place, specific time, or specific narrow readership.
But the example given is not such a question.
I disagree! Knowing answers to the first two example questions is part of my job as a professor. As part of my professional academic duties, I advise students on how to hunt for research jobs, both in academia proper and in industry. A significant fraction of my research colleagues and former students work in industry; they are non-academics only in the most pedantic sense of the word.
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8 | "advantages and disadvantages" questions
In reference to this question about being a professor, this is impossible to answer within the context of how SE wants us to answer questions. There's no definite answer, and even more so, there's no "right" answer. That being said, the question is valid, and probably fairly common. Should we allow that sort of question here?
Based on the example questions asked in the definition phase, I think Academia.StackExchange will have more subjective questions than technical questions. Many of the people who have committed to this site, including myself, seek advice and wisdom from those who have more experience in academia about people, institutions, etiquette, best practices, and personal preferences--all very subjective ideas. This is very different from the objective questions and answers about programming found on other StackExchange sites.
Some of these subjective questions will veer too far from the realm of usefulness. But some will be very useful. If you look at the top voted questions on many StackExchange sites, the open-ended ones are often the most popular. Nonetheless, the StackExchange blog has some general guidelines for which of these "subjective" questions should be allowed:
Great subjective questions inspire answers that explain “why” and “how”.
Great subjective questions tend to have long, not short, answers.
Great subjective questions have a constructive, fair, and impartial tone.
Great subjective questions invite sharing experiences over opinions.
Great subjective questions insist that opinion be backed up with facts and references.
Great subjective questions are more than just mindless social fun.
so what is your conclusion - should the question be opened or should it remain closed?
Yes, we should allow some of these sort of questions here. Occasionally.
But certainly not during the private beta, when we're trying to build up a body of exemplary questions and answers.
I think this question https://academia.stackexchange.com/q/49/96 , and any others like it, should be considered as deletion candidates during the private beta.
Well, I think it's a good question ;)
Ok, here are my 2c.
We all agree this SE can be more opinion-based than the rest of the club. Most of the stuff we deal with are relative to local lore, habits, or unwritten rules of conduct that may or may not depend on the institute, country, contract type, and professor attitude, and group mechanics.
About the question under discussion, yes, it is potentially less on-topic than the rest, but it's only one, not a class of questions. We take the tooth out once and for all. the question just sits there with its (mostly good) answers, it's technically "on-topic" for the site, and it's very likely to be asked in the future by anyone having this curiosity.
I voted to close on the particular example of the What are the advantages and disadvantages of being a professor? question, but I think that most of the time the question can be rephrased to focus on the specific case of the OP. Here, jeremy is considering moving to academia, he can be really specific and ask targeted informations.
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12 | Dealing with "In my experience..." answers
This particular SE has the significant problem that many answers will be "soft" in nature; there's no real literature on much of this, making many questions answerable only through "in my experience..." answers. This answer is a fine example of this... the answer may be correct, but only for a certain subset of the interested population, and there may not even be a "definitively correct" answer. That last point is the major problem... many of these questions will not have a definitive answer, but the "soft" answers will often do the job of addressing the question. This question about seminar attendance is similar... there's no real answer, but there are a few conjecture-type answers that seem to satisfactorily address the question.
So, how should we deal with "soft" answers to questions that demand them?
What about soft questions? Should we have a tag for them? Coming from StackOverflow, I was surprised when this was upvoted, http://academia.stackexchange.com/q/13357/8966 (though I had seen a lot of soft questions already).
Moreover, should we change the about page? It currently discourages questions which are primarily opinion-based.
@Blaisorblade - We generally don't create "meta" tags (i.e., tags conveying information about the question rather than the question's content). However, more to the point here, this question was posted almost two years ago, and we've been operating with this framework for a while. If you want to revisit this (which is fine!), I recommend you ask a new question.
There's nothing inherently wrong with questions that seek advice and wisdom from those who have more experience than themselves. And there's nothing wrong with sharing that wisdom here, if you can…
…back up your statements with constructive, sound reasoning.
But where these questions go wrong is when they become so generic as to stop soliciting hard-earned wisdom and veer towards simply polling the community.
The blog post Good Subjective, Bad Subjective should be required reading for this community.
The earmarks of bad subjective is when the answers fill with "I did this", "I did that", and "I did blah blah blah" responses. When answers don't even purport to explain why their solution is better than any other, it goes from being Q&A to just a poll of the community. Overly broad questions are just soliciting a collection of random answers. Folks will vote this stuff up, but it's just not good Q&A.
The Trouble with Popularity
It's a tough sell, but if you want this site to survive, you need a place where people are asking very interesting and challenging questions, not the uninspired poll questions that have all been asked 100 times before on every other site on the subject. If this site wants to rehash the same old conversations found in any random message forum, there's really no point in trying something different here.
If we can avoid questions that are simply asking, "Let's hear what everyone has to say about…", we can maintain the ideals of great Q&A in the face of completely subjective topics. This is especially true early in the beta when the site is new. The earliest questions on a site will set the tone and topic of the site for a long time.
When asking subjective questions, would it be useful to include a suggested rubric to be followed in answers? For example, in my question about citation managers, would it be improved by asking sub-questions that get to specific features about each citation manager? I think this might address #1 and #2 in the "Guidelines for Great Subjective Questions."
@dmahr No. I'm sorry, but this is exactly the type of question I'm calling out as a poor fit for this type of Q&A. You're asking everyone to list what software they use. It's a poll. There's no specific expertise involved and just about anybody can answer. The voting does nothing to raise the "best answer" (whatever that means here) to the top. It's just a popularity contest. Adding a bit about how to format the answers does not make the question any better.
What is an example of a really good subjective question you've seen so far in this beta? Sorry for pestering, I'm just unsure of how to implement the six guidelines when asking questions.
I know I'm answering my own question, but I want to put forth the argument that these style answers should be acceptable on this SE. In my mind, this SE serves the purpose of transmitting the "lore" of Academia to aspiring graduate students, new graduate students, new faculty, and the like. Much of this lore is not "official", but it is highly useful nonetheless.
That being said, given that the answer to each question is likely going to vary significantly based on the particulars, I think we should customize the use of tags on this site to specify the particulars. Specifically, each question should have a tag that identifies the field of research; if none is there, the poster should be asked to provide one. This will always be relevant to the question; answers to a question about note-taking styles will be different for mathematics and history, for example. Additionally, we may want to consider asking for:
BS/MA/PhD/postdoc/professorship
country
institution (not sure about this one)
I strongly think we should add some text on the "new question" page strongly suggesting that the poster includes tags for each of these, if relevant to the topic.
+2: Good question, good answer, nothing more to say :)
+1: A very good answer, especially since there's not going to be lots of hard numbers across academia as a whole. I'd like to avoid the Programmers-esq "Are there any studies about some obscure thing?" that are really just fishing for opinions. I find allowing soft answers of "lore" and experience to be far more honest.
+1 for excellent tagging suggestions
Many of my answers to advice questions tend to be of the "in my experience" category. For these questions, there is never enough information to be able to give a definitive correct answer. What we can do is give "in that case, I did X and the consequences were Y" type answers - then let the original poster determine which answer better fits their situation. Older folks have found that giving direct answers to questions to younger folks results in the advice getting ignored, so that more circumspect answers actually get listened to. As for your second link, I don't think that young folks understand just how much politics goes on in the real world.
What we do as a "community" will change over time. Some of the other sites here preferred such answers in the past, but now discourage them. This has lead me to quit visiting a number of other stack exchange sites.
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3661 | Community Promotion Ads - 2017
It is a bit late into this new year, being that we're already in the second month, but we are now cycling the Community Promotion Ads for 2017!
What are Community Promotion Ads?
Community Promotion Ads are community-vetted advertisements that will show up on the main site, in the right sidebar. The purpose of this question is the vetting process. Images of the advertisements are provided, and community voting will enable the advertisements to be shown.
Why do we have Community Promotion Ads?
This is a method for the community to control what gets promoted to visitors on the site. For example, you might promote the following things:
the site's twitter account
academic websites and resources
interesting campus story blogs
cool events or conferences
anything else your community would genuinely be interested in
The goal is for future visitors to find out about the stuff your community deems important. This also serves as a way to promote information and resources that are relevant to your own community's interests, both for those already in the community and those yet to join.
Why do we reset the ads every year?
Some services will maintain usefulness over the years, while other things will wane to allow for new faces to show up. Resetting the ads every year helps accommodate this, and allows old ads that have served their purpose to be cycled out for fresher ads for newer things. This helps keep the material in the ads relevant to not just the subject matter of the community, but to the current status of the community. We reset the ads once a year, every December.
The community promotion ads have no restrictions against reposting an ad from a previous cycle. If a particular service or ad is very valuable to the community and will continue to be so, it is a good idea to repost it. It may be helpful to give it a new face in the process, so as to prevent the imagery of the ad from getting stale after a year of exposure.
How does it work?
The answers you post to this question must conform to the following rules, or they will be ignored.
All answers should be in the exact form of:
[![Tagline to show on mouseover][1]][2]
[1]: http://image-url
[2]: http://clickthrough-url
Please do not add anything else to the body of the post. If you want to discuss something, do it in the comments.
The question must always be tagged with the magic community-ads tag. In addition to enabling the functionality of the advertisements, this tag also pre-fills the answer form with the above required form.
Image requirements
The image that you create must be 300 x 250 pixels, or double that if high DPI.
Must be hosted through our standard image uploader (imgur)
Must be GIF or PNG
No animated GIFs
Absolute limit on file size of 150 KB
If the background of the image is white or partially white, there must be a 1px border (2px if high DPI) surrounding it.
Score Threshold
There is a minimum score threshold an answer must meet (currently 6) before it will be shown on the main site.
You can check out the ads that have met the threshold with basic click stats here.
This looks like an ad for a ghostwriting company, why is is shown here?
Correct me if I am wrong, but isn't private beta a time when only those who committed to the Area 51 proposal can join. Also, private beta is usually pretty short, so you may want to lose that bit.
We're trying to promote the site becuase we have an unusually small number of users in the private beta due to some special circumstances. I will edit the ad when we leave private beta and delete it if we don't make it. You can view the site without committing or logging in by clicking the ad and then clicking the logo.
@GypsySpellweaver thanks. I missed that change.
This site is a blatant rip-off of https://physics.stackexchange.com/.
@Alan I am not sure blatant rip-off is completely accurate, but there is some sort of history between the two: https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/6196/what-is-physics-overflow-and-how-is-it-linked-to-physics-se
Ah, I understand now; thanks for the reference. Based on name, design, and content, at first glance it seemed very sketchy...
This is a demonstration post to indicate how this should look when an ad is posted. It also doubles as your twitter ad, but it's up to you if you wish to promote it by voting
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2148 | Community Promotion Ads - 2016
It's 2016 now, and we've made some changes to the sidebar size. As such, we can now restart the Community Promotion Ads for 2016!
Keep in mind, we have updated some of the guidelines compared to previously - the changes are marked in bold in the Image Requirements section.
What are Community Promotion Ads?
Community Promotion Ads are community-vetted advertisements that will show up on the main site, in the right sidebar. The purpose of this question is the vetting process. Images of the advertisements are provided, and community voting will enable the advertisements to be shown.
Why do we have Community Promotion Ads?
This is a method for the community to control what gets promoted to visitors on the site. For example, you might promote the following things:
the site's twitter account
academic websites and resources
interesting campus story blogs
cool events or conferences
anything else your community would genuinely be interested in
The goal is for future visitors to find out about the stuff your community deems important. This also serves as a way to promote information and resources that are relevant to your own community's interests, both for those already in the community and those yet to join.
Why do we reset the ads every year?
Some services will maintain usefulness over the years, while other things will wane to allow for new faces to show up. Resetting the ads every year helps accommodate this, and allows old ads that have served their purpose to be cycled out for fresher ads for newer things. This helps keep the material in the ads relevant to not just the subject matter of the community, but to the current status of the community. We reset the ads once a year, every December.
The community promotion ads have no restrictions against reposting an ad from a previous cycle. If a particular service or ad is very valuable to the community and will continue to be so, it is a good idea to repost it. It may be helpful to give it a new face in the process, so as to prevent the imagery of the ad from getting stale after a year of exposure.
How does it work?
The answers you post to this question must conform to the following rules, or they will be ignored.
All answers should be in the exact form of:
[![Tagline to show on mouseover][1]][2]
[1]: http://image-url
[2]: http://clickthrough-url
Please do not add anything else to the body of the post. If you want to discuss something, do it in the comments.
The question must always be tagged with the magic community-ads tag. In addition to enabling the functionality of the advertisements, this tag also pre-fills the answer form with the above required form.
Image requirements
The image that you create must be 300 x 250 pixels, or double that if high DPI.
Must be hosted through our standard image uploader (imgur)
Must be GIF or PNG
No animated GIFs
Absolute limit on file size of 150 KB
If the background of the image is white or partially white, there must be a 1px border (2px if high DPI) surrounding it.
Score Threshold
There is a minimum score threshold an answer must meet (currently 6) before it will be shown on the main site.
You can check out the ads that have met the threshold with basic click stats here.
Do we have to follow the template or can we use an <a href=""><img src=""></a>
Have to use the template
Edited version of this 2014 Physics ad. Inkscape SVG source.
Inkscape SVG source, working off of this image.
Inkscape SVG source.
Inkscape SVG source.
Earliest Detexify ad I know of. Inkscape SVG source for this one
This looks blurry
@becko it's a screenshot, you're welcome to contact the site admin to ask for a vector version.
They sent me an .svg. What do I do with it? How can I add it here?
Or I could send it to you?
@becko neat! upload on imgur and provide the link, I will edit my post with the better version.
@becko I don't know if you need a certain reputation to edit this post, but if you see the "edit" function below the post, then you are welcome to edit yourself.
http://imgh.us/logo_213.svg ... I cant edit, please you do it.
@becko did they really send this? It's not the same font as the homepage.
It's what they sent.
Edited from this 2014 Physics ad. Inkscape SVG source; requires the fonts Iconochive and Agfa Rotis Semi Serif.
Originally posted on the 2016 Physics thread. Inkskape source SVG.
cross-ref: http://meta.chemistry.stackexchange.com/q/2712/4945
Below text setting me bit of.
@Ankit Could you expand on that comment a bit? Are you upset that I cross-referenced the source?
no, i mean the text below the beakers, site address. Specially the font.
@Ankit we had a fair amount of talk about it in chat. You are welcome to grab the source and experiment yourself. It was the best I could come up with.
fair enough but i am not good with this stuff to start with anyways ;)
Hi. I've copied your ad over in Physics Meta too. I hope that's OK.
@TheDarkSide Sure. Thanks for the support!
Image file now at https://i.sstatic.net/HAnRi.png
Eh, I don't see much point in updating three-year old Community Promotion ads (as they no longer impact the live ads, but sure.
Inkscape SVG source; requires the fonts Iconochive and Agfa Rotis Semi Serif. Comments on the design welcome.
First arXiv Analytics ad I know of. Inkscape SVG source for this one.
Inkscape SVG source.
Inkscape SVG source.
thanks for the ad! We think doai.io is not really easy to use for now and we're working on a new version, which should go live in the coming months hopefully.
@pintoch Cool! This one isn't live, but this one is. I really like the project but I agree it can improve. I had some trouble with a particular doi some weeks ago (dunno if I can find it again, though), but I couldn't find anywhere to report it. Is there some issue tracker / support email / similar?
That's exactly one of the things we'd like to improve. For now you can use our issue tracker https://github.com/dissemin/proaixy/issues.
@pintoch Cool, I'll keep that in mind if I find a problematic one. Keep up the good work!
@pintoch Is this the place for that? It certainly needs a link on the doai.io front page that says what to do with links like that.
Note to the mods / admins: Maybe consider allowing the use of Area51 images instead of forcing us to re-upload to imgur, as this way, the number of followers is not updated on the community promotion ad.
You could have used an Area 51 image yourself – see my edit.
Huh, interesting, it didn't let me do that when I tried that exact code. Thanks anyway :)
The by SE staff in private beta closed Open Science community has been successfully revived outside the SE network at the German University of Bielefeld, where it is allowed to gather momentum at its own natural pace without being threatend to get closed again against the will of the community: http://meta.academia.stackexchange.com/a/2208/5904
Inkscape SVG source.
The chat room dedicated to this proposal
Edited form of the earliest SciRate ad I know of. Inkscape SVG source for this one.
This is a demonstration post to indicate how this should look when an ad is posted, now with 80px more width! It also doubles as your twitter ad, but it's up to you if you wish to promote it by voting.
Great! great! Great
I don't like this add since I have no idea from the image where I am going to end up.
Why? There is a google docs logo in the image, I think it would be self-explanatory that it leads to a google doc. Is it better to link to our website rather than the direct install page (an additional click away from install?)
Unless you already know the logo, from the image the most we can tell is that it goes to a google doc related to LaTeX and equations. Further, the link has a referral code which I also do not like. Why not build an ad around the logo?
It doesn't only go to a Google Doc; the doc is just a gateway to the add-on store (which is free anyways). The code does not track users in any way, just tells me that I got a website hit. What do you mean by "ad around the logo"? I want a simple, picture-based ad with minimal text, and don't want to compromise the design.
I mean something like the zotero ad with the logo and some explanation.
My color scheme is radically different from that ad, and I don't currently posses the design experience necessary to make it visually appealing. Got suggestions for color/background/sizing?
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1478 | Community Promotion Ads - 2015
The dawn of a new year, 2015, now approaches, or has already approached, either way it means that it is now time for the site's first new cycle of Community Promotion Ads!
What are Community Promotion Ads?
Community Promotion Ads are community-vetted advertisements that will show up on the main site, in the right sidebar. The purpose of this question is the vetting process. Images of the advertisements are provided, and community voting will enable the advertisements to be shown.
Why do we have Community Promotion Ads?
This is a method for the community to control what gets promoted to visitors on the site. For example, you might promote the following things:
the site's twitter account
academic websites and resources
interesting campus story blogs
cool events or conferences
anything else your community would genuinely be interested in
The goal is for future visitors to find out about the stuff your community deems important. This also serves as a way to promote information and resources that are relevant to your own community's interests, both for those already in the community and those yet to join.
Why do we reset the ads every year?
Some services will maintain usefulness over the years, while other things will wane to allow for new faces to show up. Resetting the ads every year helps accommodate this, and allows old ads that have served their purpose to be cycled out for fresher ads for newer things. This helps keep the material in the ads relevant to not just the subject matter of the community, but to the current status of the community. We reset the ads once a year, every December.
The community promotion ads have no restrictions against reposting an ad from a previous cycle. If a particular service or ad is very valuable to the community and will continue to be so, it is a good idea to repost it. It may be helpful to give it a new face in the process, so as to prevent the imagery of the ad from getting stale after a year of exposure.
How does it work?
The answers you post to this question must conform to the following rules, or they will be ignored.
All answers should be in the exact form of:
[![Tagline to show on mouseover][1]][2]
[1]: http://image-url
[2]: http://clickthrough-url
Please do not add anything else to the body of the post. If you want to discuss something, do it in the comments.
The question must always be tagged with the magic community-ads tag. In addition to enabling the functionality of the advertisements, this tag also pre-fills the answer form with the above required form.
Image requirements
The image that you create must be 220 x 250 pixels
Must be hosted through our standard image uploader (imgur)
Must be GIF or PNG
No animated GIFs
Absolute limit on file size of 150 KB
Score Threshold
There is a minimum score threshold an answer must meet (currently 6) before it will be shown on the main site.
You can check out the ads that have met the threshold with basic click stats here.
Are there any plans to create a new thread for 2016, or should we keep using this one?
@pintoch We're making some sidebar changes that'll affect the ad size, and those are coming out mid-January. We'll be resetting ads then.
In case someone was searching, the new thread is here: http://meta.academia.stackexchange.com/questions/2148/community-promotion-ads-2016
In 2014, this ad had far more clicks/day than any of the others (by a factor of ~5)
Academia.SE (and the whole SE generally) is already a procrastinating network.
Should we ask someone there for a high-res version of their logo?
You got there first! I was thinking of adding this this morning, but wasn't sure about the permissions on the logo...
The mouseover text for this ad is "Tagline to show on mouseover". Might want to get that looked at!
Academics often need data for research purposes. Also, data questions are sometimes asked on Academia, then moved to Open Data: Better let people know that Open Data is a better place for such questions.
A little blurry. Could use some improvements in readability.
@Compass If it starts getting upvotes, I'll get a higher-res image
Well if you gave it a higher res image it would get more upvotes :D
@jakebeal It seems those upvotes materialized.
@E.P. And back in mid-January when I tried to get a higher-res image, I failed, unfortunately.
@jakebeal I found the ad hard to read, so I took a high resolution image and made the text larger. (Unfortunately that meant changing the cover design.) The ad is double size (same as the bounty ad), which displays nicer on retina displays. Feel free to roll the edit back if you prefer the previous version.
@Earthliŋ It's great, thanks!
Hi. I have copy-pasted this in Physics Meta, with citation (of course).
@TheDarkSide Cool! That would be an obvious other fun place for it.
See all questions with active bounties http://stack-exchange-dynamic-ads.herokuapp.com/academia.stackexchange.com/bounty.png
This is an adaption of Community Promotion Ads - 2014
This is a demonstration post to indicate how this should look when an ad is posted. It also doubles as your twitter ad, but it's up to you if you wish to promote it by voting.
Yes, it's true!
My impression is that the Latin Language site would be happy to receive questions about current usage of Latin, including the usage of Latin-rooted terminology in academic disciplines.
Downvotes on proposed ads just mean, "This isn't something I want to support through advertising on this site." It doesn't have anything to do with rules.
@sepideh page not found
thanks, but I'll have to let you down. Sorry I can't help. I'm not in the field. And I don't downvote this.
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907 | Community Promotion Ads - 2014
You guys have gotten your own design and graduated, hurrah! And with that, you now have the opportunity to setup Community Promotion Ads for your own site, not just to apply to other sites.
What are Community Promotion Ads?
Community Promotion Ads are community-vetted advertisements that will show up on the main site, in the right sidebar. The purpose of this question is the vetting process. Images of the advertisements are provided, and community voting will enable the advertisements to be shown.
Why do we have Community Promotion Ads?
This is a method for the community to control what gets promoted to visitors on the site. For example, you might promote the following things:
the site's twitter account
academic websites and resources
interesting campus story blogs
cool events or conferences
anything else your community would genuinely be interested in
The goal is for future visitors to find out about the stuff your community deems important. This also serves as a way to promote information and resources that are relevant to your own community's interests, both for those already in the community and those yet to join.
Why do we reset the ads every year?
Some services will maintain usefulness over the years, while other things will wane to allow for new faces to show up. Resetting the ads every year helps accommodate this, and allows old ads that have served their purpose to be cycled out for fresher ads for newer things. This helps keep the material in the ads relevant to not just the subject matter of the community, but to the current status of the community. We reset the ads once a year, every December.
The community promotion ads have no restrictions against reposting an ad from a previous cycle. If a particular service or ad is very valuable to the community and will continue to be so, it is a good idea to repost it. It may be helpful to give it a new face in the process, so as to prevent the imagery of the ad from getting stale after a year of exposure.
How does it work?
The answers you post to this question must conform to the following rules, or they will be ignored.
All answers should be in the exact form of:
[![Tagline to show on mouseover][1]][2]
[1]: http://image-url
[2]: http://clickthrough-url
Please do not add anything else to the body of the post. If you want to discuss something, do it in the comments.
The question must always be tagged with the magic community-ads tag. In addition to enabling the functionality of the advertisements, this tag also pre-fills the answer form with the above required form.
Image requirements
The image that you create must be 220 x 250 pixels
Must be hosted through our standard image uploader (imgur)
Must be GIF or PNG
No animated GIFs
Absolute limit on file size of 150 KB
Score Threshold
There is a minimum score threshold an answer must meet (currently 6) before it will be shown on the main site.
You can check out the ads that have met the threshold with basic click stats here.
Academia.SE answers my concrete questions ("What's the solution to this problem"). PHD Comics answers my (equally pressing) but totally subjective questions ("Am I the worst PhD student ever? Should I just drop out of grad school now before I embarrass myself further?") with humor and companionship. I think this is a site worth sharing through community promotion.
I love PHD Comics, but shouldn't we focus more on things which: 1) are not already known by every PhD, 2) are more "for greater good", not only - fun? (Read: see other proposals and consider upvoting them. :))
@PiotrMigdal I think that a good sense of humour and availability of relax is important for a community to feel good :)
Shamelessly stolen from Physics SE.
Thank you for that! Now I can upvote it here.
Great, though this one from Physics.SE is IMHO even better.
OK, I posted it here.
And their wonderful Wayback MAchine immortalizing volatile websites.
Hi @PiotrMigdal, I used a similar picture on Phys.SE. The response I got was this. So since this image is not descriptive '-1' :-(
@user31782 I thought that this name is self-explanatory (and the sign is nice). Do you genuinely share this view (i.e. that it is better to have nothing than the above logo) or just copy the behaviour you have experienced/
I am familiar with archive.org so it causes me no problem to understand that it is the logo of archive.org. What to say, It would be good to have a more descriptive ad so as anyone totally unfamiliar with it could get a more insight view at the first sight. Keeping in mind that this is going to be an advertisement it should be improved. What do you think about my try below. I copied the layout from arXive :-p
@user31782 Let me reiterate: "Internet Archive" is self-explanatory. Adding "Library of Internet" or "It is archive of the Internet" is not necessary.
Could you somehow edit this post so that I can revert my downvote to an upvote. For some time I've been downloading and reading books from archive.org. I find it very useful. When I got downvotes on my post I was very much disappointed. Thank you very much for this post. Could you do another favor to me? Could you also post about archive.org on Physics meta. My similar post there is downvoted :-(.
@user31782 I upvoted you there (some time ago, when you send link). I also edited it. And added ]one more link (exactly to the Wayback Machine).
Hi @PiotrMigdal, would you mind us featuring this as a community promotion ad on PO too? I am asking because of copy right issues (?) ...
@Dilaton Any rights are due to Internet Archive, not me. It seems that it is fine (at least I think so; I it for endorsing/linking them, not any other product or so).
Shamelessly stolen form Physics.SE. I know there is one more arXiv, but it should be not a problem.
Well, I would just like to have the font of freely available not vertically stretched :-(
@tohecz I'll fix it in a few days. Image is a Fireworks vector PNG if you have software to read those layers.
@yo' So after a few days, here is the non-stretched version.
'+1', How I missed this :-p
It disappeared from imgur.com for some reason. Strange... I did uploaded it once again. In any case the png and the Gimp source is here.
It would be nice to promote the domain-specific academic sites out there… especially those in beta, which could benefit from the extra traffic/notoriety. So I'm proposing Chemistry's ad…
For a moment there, I thought StackExchange was advertising food. You might play that up with "Jello and marshmallows? No, you're just hungry for... Chemistry Stack Exchange".
the "SE" tail should be capitalized, right?
@Ooker You can IMHO pardon it by saying: design decision ;)
@yo' sorry, but I don't get your joke. Can you explain more?
@Ooker It's not exactly a joke, it's just a mere fact: in a banner, designed title or whatever, it is in general not necessary to follow the standard capitalization. So IMHO it is fine as is.
@yo' first time I know. Why not necessary?
@Ooker That's more a question for [GraphicDesign.SE], but in general: for short and highly exposed pieces of text, design wins over typography (these include banners, ads, various packaging such as boxes, book covers etc.). For longer text, design and typography need to cooperate. (I hope I'm at least somehow clear.) (Moreover, these comments are getting off-topic.)
Image is a vector Fireworks png.
@dgraziotin Great! So how about making one for http://opensciencefederation.com/? :)
Hi @PiotrMigdal do you have an idea how to get some upvotes here? I dont see what is so bad about a higher-level physics site. But there are some people giving us trouble elsewhere and I suspect that the downvoters here are a proper subset of the 7 scornful and hostil downvoters there who spoil the 9 upvotes ... :-/
@Dilaton I suspect people from elsewhere. I saw some negative discussions on Physics.SE (however, some of their critique raise important points; I can expand it on priv); here... well, it this tread not too many people visit it at all.
@PiotrMigdal thanks, I would be interested in what you have to say, maybe in a mail to my PO adress? Yes there initially were some issues, in particular with certain registering processes. But they are now solved. But some (or even quite a number of) people on P.SE continue their scornfulness, hostility, and attacks towards the site and its members, such that a quiet coexistance (not speaking about any constructive relashionship as the one between MO and Math SE) will probably never be possible :-/. We do our best to ignore these things and keep it professional.
Image is a vector Fireworks png.
This is a demonstration post to indicate how this should look when an ad is posted. It also doubles as your twitter ad, but it's up to you if you wish to promote it by voting.
Why is this being downvoted? Is there something wrong with it?
Some sites like the twitter account, others don't. It's mechanically run and so the exposure it provides doesn't necessarily match how the site feels it should be broadcast.
Source: https://gist.github.com/stared/017c8af055f79aa7480f
Image is a vector Fireworks png.
Image is a vector Fireworks png. I couldn't find a better resolution image of the logo - please sub one in if you have it.
The picture that I have added is not of proper size. I request to everyone who knows about archive.org to make a good descriptive image to add in this post. archive.org is a very good website for educational purposes.
Internet Archive is a great project, and it would be great to have it here. But we need a better picture!
OK, done. :) Please upvote this one.
A new image has been added. The downvoters may reconsider their downvotes.
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932 | 2014 Moderator Election Q&A - Question Collection
In connection with the moderator elections, we will be holding a Q&A with the candidates. This will be an opportunity for members of the community to pose questions to the candidates on the topic of moderation. Participation is completely voluntary.
The purpose of this thread was to collect questions for the questionnaire. The questionnaire is now live, and you may find it here.
Here's how it'll work:
During the nomination phase, (so, until Monday, May 12th, at 20:00:00Z UTC, or 4:00 pm EDT on the same day, give or take time to arrive for closure), this question will be open to collect potential questions from the users of the site. Post answers to this question containing any questions you would like to ask the candidates. Please only post one question per answer.
We, the Community Team, will be providing a small selection of generic questions. The first two will be guaranteed to be included, the latter ones are if the community doesn't supply enough questions. This will be done in a single post, unlike the prior instruction.
This is a perfect opportunity to voice questions that are specific to your community and issues that you are running into at current.
At the end of the phase, the Community Team will select up to 8 of the top voted questions submitted by the community provided in this thread, to use in addition to the aforementioned 2 guaranteed questions. We reserve some editorial control in the selection of the questions and may opt not to select a question that is tangential or irrelevant to moderation or the election. That said, if I have concerns about any questions in this fashion, I will be sure to point this out in comments before the decision making time.
Once questions have been selected, a new question will be opened to host the actual questionnaire for the candidates, containing 10 questions in total.
This is not the only option that users have for gathering information on candidates. As a community, you are still free to, for example, hold a live chat session with your candidates to ask further questions, or perhaps clarifications from what is provided in the Q&A.
If you have any questions or feedback about this new process, feel free to post as a comment here.
A user posts something you find (off-topic/wrong/offensive) and you (close/delete/migrate) the (question/comment). The user posts about it in Meta and the post gets a lot of upvotes. Answers are posted both in favor of you action and and criticising your action; both get upvotes. How do you decide what to do next?
(In case you're wondering, yes, this happens all the time.)
How will you use your "binding vote" moderator privileges?
Let the community weigh in first on most close, reopen, delete, undelete, etc. operations. That is, I won't use diamond mod privileges to unilaterally perform operations that can be done by the community (with a few very rare exceptions).
Let the community decide on things that could conceivably be subjective, but for things that are definitely not going to be controversial (e.g. closing a question on "Why doesn't this code compile") I will use diamond mod privileges. Why prolong the inevitable?
Vote as if I was a normal user. That is, I'll vote to close/delete/open/etc. according to my understanding of how this site works, without much special consideration for the fact that my votes are binding.
Use diamond mod privileges deliberately to keep the direction of the site on track. I have an idea of what this site is all about and I was elected because others agree with this idea, now it's my job to enact it.
What change would you like to make in how the site is currently moderated, and how would you go about implementing that change?
How would you moderate postings where your opinion or the community's opinion and official SE policy disagree?
I would hope that this would not need to be asked.
@eykanal This question was taken pretty much directly from the questions proposed for the 2013 CrossValidated election, where it proved interesting. And given this line on your nomination post: "We also feel deeply that we should set our own community standards—differing from the rest of the Stack Exchange network, if necessary" I'd rather like to hear your answer to it.
Huh. I would think that a more interesting question would be "how would you moderate postings where community opinion and official SE policy disagree", but that's just me.
@eykanal It's been edited to reflect that.
What is your time zone? What is the time period you are available for moderating our site everyday? Please specify the answer in UTC format.
Under what conditions will you delete comments?
This is a really stupid question.
The moderators in this site are really (some negative adjective).
This reminds me of a blogpost I made here.
Wow, it's been a long time since I last saw you here. How are the kids?
If you think this answer was helpful, then please upvote it or accept it.
Don't run. Walk!
What activities on the site suggest that you would be a good moderator? If you are currently a moderator, do you believe you've carried out the role effectively?
Been wrestling with this one, but I think the first bit is relevant for myself and one or two other candidates, and could probably stand to be answered.
What should be done with the popular "Don't walk. Run." comment that shows up on questions. If a user begins systematically flagging the comment as "non-constructive" what will you do?
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1233 | Proposed edit to "cannot be generalized" closure tag
Based on the positive response to the shopping closure tag question I recently asked, I think the best way to handle this would be to edit the "cannot be generalized" tag to incorporate this specifically.
I would propose to change the text of the tag as follows:
Questions that cannot be generalized to apply to others in similar situations are off-topic. In particular, "shopping" questions asking about recommendations for specific programs or universities are off-topic. For assistance in writing questions that can apply to multiple people facing similar situations, see: What kinds of questions are too localized?
I don't think "shopping" is generally a subtype of "Questions that cannot be generalized to apply to others in similar situations."
Many of the shopping questions we get are very general. For example,
What are the cheapest online degrees in Computer Science?
Where can I take online MBA courses without being admitted?
Good chemical engineering schools in US for Ph.D?
The fundamental problem with these questions is not just that they are too broad, because if they were narrowed down a great deal they'd still be off topic. The problem is that they are shopping questions. I don't think that "shopping" is a subtype of any of our existing close reasons.
On some other sites I might agree, but I suspect that on academia.SE, the biggest cause of the "cannot be generalised" closure is "Here is my specific situation in great detail. What course should I take / how should I deal with my supervisor / what colour of pen is it best to use?". Answering that with something that might be interpreted as "don't ask shopping questions" will just confuse.
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89 | Moderator Pro Tem Announcement
Throughout the beta, we need members from the site whose focus is to engage the community, both in community-building issues and site management. That's why we select a few members from each community to act as temporary, provisional Moderators. You can read about the program here: Moderators Pro Tempore.
I am pleased to announce that these members have stepped up and generously volunteered their time to help us assure that each community's issues are properly addressed.
We want to make this site a huge success, and these members are great examples of exactly the type of people we need to make this site succeed. Please welcome them for the hard work and time they contribute.
Did I overlook anyone?
Almost certainly. There are members who are actively involved and very deserving of recognition. My failure to account for everyone this early on is in no way a slight against them. Ideally, Moderators are elected by the community and that's why you'll have your elections after your site makes it through graduation.
Most of all, be respectful and understanding of the Moderators Pro Tem. Members of your community are volunteering their time and learning on the job. It's a learning experience for everyone.
Excellent choices!
I think the edits to this question created a mess. They hide the fact that one of these moderators was added later and is not part of the original announcement, and they removed the name of one of the original moderators (now a deleted user). This question today has mostly "historical documentation" interest, and the edits completely hide it. Please take a look at the edit history if you really want to know who was appointed moderator pro tempore in 2012.
I would have notified @StrongBad and Shog9, but someone at SE decided that I cannot at-notify editors. Bad choice. :(
@FedericoPoloni the mod essentially changed his user name. The flair normally updates and reflects the current status and not the status at the time of appointment. I think that the user deleting his account screwed this up. The idea of the deletetion was to disassociate his name from his contributions. This seemed like an odd remnant. That said, I didn't purge the history and if you think my edit harms it, we can roll it back. I don't feel strongly about it.
@StrongBad Oh, so my message did at-notify you? Interesting. Then it's just the auto-completion that does not work with editor names, but the functionality works. Anyway, if it were for me I would just revert to Version 2 and cherry-pick the changes from Version 4, but I also don't feel strongly about it (as long as a comment stays to point out that there is more to this). All this assuming that there is no particular story unknown to me behind CM's account deletion --- I can understand trying to hide it if he asked for it explicitly.
@FedericoPoloni Yes, editors are notified, see this faq on the main meta: "Any user who has edited the post (does not include pending or rejected edit suggestions)".
1 of your images broke, and is returning a 500 error
Congratulations to our new moderators!
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211 | Tag for closed questions?
Following up on our recent discussion on closed questions, I'm wondering if it might not be a bad idea to create a tag for closed questions. This might help us to "corral" them a bit better.
Thoughts?
Meta-tags are to be avoided…
Thanks for the link.
You can simply use closed:1 in the search query - no need to abuse tags for this.
See the "\search" page for more searching kung-fu.
You don't want to "corral" your closed questions.
Closed questions should be destined for one of two fates.
Deletion.
Reopening.
Time will tell which route a question goes, but having a "pool" of them around is defiantly not the idea you want to promote. As noted by TheifMaster you can already find them for the purposes of doing site cleanup using closed:1 as part of a search query.
If nobody has expressed any interest in getting the question whipped into shape to re-open (or if it's obvious that isn't going to happen from the get go), they should be deleted. Otherwise they need to be poked until they are ready to open.
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39 | What to do about belligerent users?
We have a new user who is being more disruptive than helpful:
First question
The initial question was not ideal for SE, so people voted it down and to close it. That sparked outrage and:
Second "question," closer to a rant
What is supposed to be done about users doing this? Are they supposed to be flagged as spammers? Is something else supposed to be done about that?
Spam flags on Stack Exchange sites carry a heavy penalty, 6 flags delete a post and the user gets -100 reputation for a successful spam flag against him. They should only be used for spam, posts that are purely promoting some product or site.
If there are direct insults towards other users you can flag those posts or comments as offensive, enough offensive flags will also remove a post. If there is a general problem with the behaviour of a certain user you can flag for a moderator and use the "other" reason to explain the situation. This site doesn't have any community mods yet, so it will be handled by SE employees.
Both questions have been dealt with, one is closed and the other one deleted, so there is no need to do anything there at the moment. If you notice any further disruptive behaviour, I'd just flag for a moderator.
This blog by Jeff seems to talk about such users, though I wonder whether it has been implemented in SE. Here's an excerpt:
But in the absence of some system of law, the tiny minority of users out to do harm – intentionally or not – eventually drive out all the civil community members, leaving behind a lawless, chaotic badland.
Our method of dealing with disruptive or destructive community members is simple: their accounts are placed in timed suspension. Initial suspension periods range from 1 to 7 days, and increase exponentially with each subsequent suspension. We prefer the term "timed suspension" to "ban" to emphasize that we do want users to come back to their accounts, if they can learn to refrain from engaging in those disruptive or problematic behaviors. It's not so much a punishment as a time for the user to cool down and reflect on the nature of their participation in our community. (Well, at least in theory.)
Timed suspension works, but much like democracy itself, it is a highly imperfect, noisy system. The transparency provides ample evidence that moderators aren't secretly whisking people away in the middle of the night. But it can also be a bit too … entertaining for some members of the community, leading to hours and hours of meta-discussion about who is suspended, why they are suspended, whether it was fair, what the evidence is, how we are censoring people, and on and on and on. While a certain amount of introspection is important and necessary, it can also become a substitute for getting stuff done. This might naturally lead one to wonder – what if we could suspend problematic users without anyone knowing they had been suspended?
I'm wondering whether it would work here or not - Mods(since being in public beta, I don't think any of the normal users are mods anymore) should act on this...
yes, timed suspension has been implemented across SE, and is available.
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776 | Create a community wiki on "Advice for starting a research group?" based on existing question?
Layla has asked a question on advice for starting a research group. While such a question at first does seem too broad, it also strikes me as exactly the kind of question that should be a "community wiki" question. It's a very pertinent and relevant question, but it should be a crowd-sourced solution, not an individual writing a single all-encompassing answer.
I thought I remembered seeing something somewhere once (I doubt I can be any more vague than that) suggesting that we shouldn't intentionally look to create CW questions. Can't seem to find that now, though.
What I meant here was that since the question is already there, it could be promoted to that status. . . .
Personally, since the question has no answers, I would close it as OT. If it was an old Q with lots of answers already I would convert to CW and leave it that way.
Just asked about this in the mod chat room, they linked to this blog post, which pretty clearly states that posts like this should not be converted to CW. The whole post is pretty interesting, actually.
But I don't see a question as: "What are important pieces of advice for new faculty members" as a subjective question.
@aeismail - I imagine that what you think is important is not necessarily what someone else thinks is important.
@aeismail , eykanal - i thought there was only one important piece of advice for new faculty members. Can't remember where I read this: an anecdote from someone's first fellows' dinner at their new Oxbridge college "Don't try to be clever. We're all clever fellows here. Just try to be a little kind"
I don't think it is a good question for CW. Any specific advice is going to be too localized. For example, if you are teaching at an undergrad only institute, your lab is going to be filled with RAs and postdocs while if you have access to strong PhD or MSc students you will want those in your lab. Same thing for equipment and resources. It depends on the existing departmental resources, your startup package, and needs.
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842 | Providing explicit examples in potentially subjective cases
As I already mentioned, some questions provide too much detail, making it a multi-thread open-ended requests for life advice.
However, in some cases the question lack enough details, and people are confused or ask for more details. Especially things dealing with social relations, norms, ethics, etc: levels of sensitivity varies by persons, laws varies by countries, different people have different first- or second-hand experiences, etc.
I am clueless when I see offensive, inappropriate, etc. So do many other readers, what end up in long comment ping-pong, people questioning if the issue is serious enough to call it. Or maybe actually OP downplays it and the behavior is not "a bit inappropriate" but deserves "Don't walk. Run." or legal actions?
For example, compare
What to do if advisor, when talking with me, holds my arm and I feel uncomfortable?
with
What to do if advisor, when talking with me, behaves inappropriately and I feel uncomfortable?
The first will start an idle discussion. The second won't.
Let us remember that Academia.SE has way more subjective questions than StackOverflow (or, say, MathOverflow). And the SE system works the best for clear, answerable questions. StackOverflow won't work with:
this library gives undesirable results, but let me not go into details.
The only exception I can foresee is privacy (but, I guess, more than often a different but of similar calibre example can be given). Otherwise explicit situations or verbatim phrases are the best (with, possibly placeholders to mask obscene words).
And as examples, questions which without explicit examples would end in guessing games (but, as they are, attracted good answers):
What to do if assignment is against student's religion?
Why do many talented scientists write horrible software?
This meta question was started because of Should professors intervene if a student is wearing offensive clothing in their classroom?
and being a sort-of follow-up of People denying the situation in the questions instead of answering.
In any case, IMHO, the most important factor is not my feeling about providing examples, but:
it is clear what is the question?
do they attract good answers?
do they minimize overhead (in people asking comments)?
What do you think?
I think that examples in potentially subjective questions encourage people to pass judgment on the examples.
If the question is one that asks people to pass judgment on the examples ("Is this kind of thing acceptable?") then giving an example of this is constructive.
If the question is "What should I do, given this?", then the example can become a distraction.
In Should professors intervene if a student is wearing offensive clothing in their classroom, I felt strongly about not giving the specific slogan not because of anonymity, but because I thought
some people might feel upset reading it (even in the context of an illustration), and
a few people might post things like "What's the big deal, that shirt is funny and you ladies should lighten up!" which would also upset readers.
I considered adding a link to the shirt in question (so as not to post the objectionable content on academia.SE directly) but even that seemed not constructive to me.
I think my characterization of the slogan in question as "indubitably demeaning and hostile towards women" was specific enough to answer the question, and indeed this question did get quite a few high-quality answers.
In any event, we got comments like:
AFAIK, mysogynic ideas came only from old, embittered thinkers, and are unlikely to be seen on someone's T-Shirt
and even a comment:
Without the content of the slogan in question, anyone attempting to make any judgement on said slogan is left chasing gremlins
The question didn't ask anyone to make a judgment on the slogan! Comments like these make me suspect that posting the slogan (or a specific example of one) would lead to people passing judgment on the offensiveness of the slogan, which isn't what the question was about.
In the other questions you mention, the example is unlikely to upset anyone reading it, so there is less of a downside to posting one (if the asker wants to). However, examples still lead to people passing judgment on the example .
For example, in What to do if an assignment is against student's religion, we had an answer that said:
Refusing to draw the human figure = ignorance and superstition. Avoiding listening to or playing music = ignorance and superstition.
And a comment:
How is music "bad" or "haram" is beyond me. Violent music could still be considered "haram" or even avoidable. But how do you justify neutral music by Beethoven as "haram" ?
both of which constitute nonconstructive judgment.
Thanks and I think I get your point. Mine are: 1. "It's offensive" has no agreed upon standard (for example, I do know in person people who would use "indubitably demeaning and hostile towards women" for any peer-reviewed paper (e.g. in neurobiology or evolutionary biology) not supporting their beliefs). 2. A clear question delegates idle discussions to some answers (e.g. this one, which can be downvoted), instead of making them prevalent everywhere.
@djechlin It's not clear to me what you're suggesting (or if you even are suggesting something) in that comment. Perhaps you can start a new meta question to discuss that suggestion(?) further.
Question posters should provide as much useful detail as they feel comfortable sharing. If people are posting anonymously or via a pseudonym, then they would like to maintain at least some level of privacy and confidentiality. The more details you reveal, the easier it is for others to piece together exactly who you are and who you're complaining about.
No. If you make allegations of sexism, racism or other bias, you need to provide some factual basis. Also there's a difference between asking a) "X happened, is it inappropriate?" b) "I feel [subjective situation X] is inappropriate, how should I react?" and c) "[Unambiguous set of facts showing that X is inappropriate according to rules/law in some environment], how should I react?" c) is rare, b) is common, sometimes the a) is unanswerable and indeed not relevant to the answer (an XY problem).
@smci - The word "allegations" doesn't make sense to me in the context of Academia SE. An allegation would be made in a grievance, formal complaint, lawsuit, etc. An allegation would include specific identifying information -- which we clearly do not want to be posted on Academia SE.
@aparente001: 'allegation', as in 'claim', that the student's behavior is motivated by gender, let alone that it might or does constitute a sexist act, or a 'clearly sexist act', to use her phrase. She made several conflicting claims, or allegations. (Nobody said 'formal allegation' or 'formal complaint'). Again, we do not necessarily need to go there to conclude the student is annoying and advise on how to deal with their complaint.
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960 | Multiple questions in one thread
Relatively often, especially new users, ask a few related questions in one thread.
It may sound natural for them (they treat it as a forum or want to solve all doubts in one question). However:
it takes time to read the question,
it is hard to answer,
it is hard to read answers (like respectively: no, yes, no, no, shift, attack),
it is hard to vote meaningfully (as e.g. I can consider some parts of answer good, some - not),
it is hard to recycle it / make it useful for another users.
So, what we should do in such cases? Once they are answers it may be wasteful to trash them. But I would suggest comment + close vote ASAP (but no down vote, if the subquestions are otherwise good).
Or, even better, adding close vote option with "multiple threads in one question" (it is not as common on other SE sites, but here it is very much).
A recent example:
Why do PhD students complain so much?
This is a problem among all the Stack Exchange sites. This almost always occurs with new users, and stems from their not understanding how we work here. The best solution is to (a) leave a comment informing the OP what they've done, asking them to open individual questions, and (b) do one of the following:
close as too broad, OR
if it's obvious that there's one main question and just a bunch of side questions, answer the main one.
That's how we usually handle this here and it usually works very well.
Personally, I think the "too broad" closing reason works just fine; I don't think another close reason is warranted for this.
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301 | How about allowing more localized questions?
Currently, most of questions here are very general. It also reflects in upvotes per question (which is very, very high, compared to any other SE site I know.)
It is good that we are able to produce high-quality content, appealing to a broad audience.
But... maybe it means that we are too unforgiving for valuable, but localized, questions?
Sure, some localized advice questions are hard to answer (because they are too subjective, or requires additional knowledge, or can't be answered with anything better that "check department website, and if it is not there - make a phone call"). But others may be valuable (even if only for a dozen of people).
And more importantly, restricting ourselves to only broad may lead to an end.
Related to: Why aren't more questions being asked?
This is a valuable comment. I think in general that field-specific questions could have some merit as questions.
However, anything that's tied to a specific program or school (or a field so narrow it's only offered at a handful of schools) is probably still too narrow for the board.
I think I'll let the board collective operate on this one before taking a final position on the issue.
IMHO the main criteria should be if the question is practically answerable by the community. If e.g. there is a specific question for a specific department by it's answerable - great. If only people can answer generic things, then the question should be generalized. If only suggesting visiting website or contacting department - closed. Agreed?
Do you mean by "specific department" a specific field, or one department at a given institution? The latter questions are always best served by directing a person to contact the department in question. I'm OK for now with letting the community decide about the former issue, though.
In principle, I have no objections about asking even about a specific department of a specific institute. Just naturally, many questions won't fit there. But e.g. if the question is "What is the admission rate for dept. X of Univ. Y" and is possible to find a table - why not?
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316 | Map of 32 Tags of Academia.SE
I made a map of Academia.SE, basing on tag co-occurrences.
Some more description e.g. on a respective post on meta.math.SE.
The project is on GitHub: https://github.com/stared/tag-graph-map-of-stackexchange/wiki (feel invited to tweak the plot to your taste).
I hope you like it! :)
What do the colours mean?
@gerrit Graph communities (groups of nodes which have a lot of connections between each other).
My first thought was, "what the what..???" My second thought was, "ooh, pretty colors." My third thought was, odd that 'professors' and 'postdocs' are in the same group as 'career' and 'career-path', but 'masters' isn't.
@eykanal Well, the graph is about how questions here are tagged (or mistagged). But (as I would (mis)interpret it), it's because master student ask about admissions, and not yet looking at the full carrier path (see, there is a whole group about admissions). Stranger, that 'undegraduate' are not with 'masters'...
I made an interactive version of the above, with always up-to-date data, TagOverflow.
You can check tag grouping - i.e. for the sake of eliminating synonyms or poorly-defined tags.
Code and a more detailed description is on Github.
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1583 | Migrate a question to DataScience.SE
I haven't find a dedicated "migrate question" thread, so I do it by case.
This question:
https://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/38813/how-to-deal-with-large-amounts-of-binary-data
is IMHO great, but on technical aspect of data, which are perpendicular to academia. I voted to close it (with the intent of migrating to https://datascience.stackexchange.com/).
How can move it and how?
I have migrated the question.
Note that at least SO does not encourage migration to sites in beta - from the accepted answer there: "Migrating to beta sites isn't something we encourage because beta should be all about a site figuring out its own voice rather than getting questions from elsewhere, but an occasional migration doesn't hurt much."
I talked about this in chat a few weeks ago (http://chat.stackexchange.com/transcript/message/20033769#20033769). Users cannot generally migrate questions. Just flag questions that you think should be migrated and a mod will take care of it.
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4630 | Resuming activity
It's really hard to do the right thing, especially when "the right thing" isn't even known. When I announced my leave of absence along with over 30 other moderators, I hoped that SE would to recognize that, IMHO, they were really screwing things up.
From the looks of it, SE has started paying attention. They've made some positive steps, such as setting up new communication channels, setting up committees to engage the community (blog post), and—for us moderators—talking to us a bit more before making community-wide changes and even making changes based on our feedback. They've also screwed some new stuff up, most recently with the inclusion of irrelevant but mandatory demographic questions on the feedback survey. Importantly (to me, at least), they've released their "fix things" strategy along with a timeline to the entire community (blog post again). That's not just a commitment to their users, that's something investors can now expect and demand of leadership.
Will they do any of the positive things they said they'll do? Most likely. Will they screw up even more stuff in the future? Almost certainly. However, are they trying? Yes.
Culture shifts are difficult. Publicly announced culture shifts are really difficult. I really appreciate SE's acknowledgement and public commitment to fixing an unhealthy culture. To that extent, I happily resume my duties as moderator.
This sounds promising. However, as a run-of-the-mill user who very infrequently looks into Meta.SE, your post is the first I heard of this. Naively, I would have expected a blog post or a featured Meta.SE thread. Is there anywhere for us run-of-the-mill users to learn about how SE plan on moving forward?
@S.Kolassa-ReinstateMonica The “loop” has arrived. What does the community think about it?. As you know, this is still going on: Stack Overflow is doing me ongoing harm; it's time to fix it!.
@S.Kolassa-ReinstateMonica - Sorry, didn't take the time to add links earlier. Note that this is on the sidebar... it's featured more heavily on stackoverflow, less on the other topical sites. Add that to the list of things they're still screwing up :(
Ah. Thank you. I have read that blog post. Honestly, if that is all we will get, it just adds insult to injury. ("One theme we examine is what you find most frustrating about using Stack Overflow" - with precisely nothing about what has a large proportion of serious users up in arms.) I was hoping for something I hadn't seen and been insulted by yet. Again, thank you.
Welcome back! I appreciate the nuanced take on the situation.
@Araucaria - I don't understand most of your comment. That said, regarding support, I'm not looking for support, I'm simply explaining my own actions. I have little to say regarding Monica beyond what I said earlier. If you wish to discuss further please feel free to reach out in chat.
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4588 | Leave of absence
The past few days have been kind of a whirlwind on the SE network. I'm not sure there's a brief summary of events anywhere, but this meta post provides the best I've seen yet. The tl;dr version is that StackExchange summarily fired a moderator for a very questionable reason in a very public and disrespectful manner, and then responded to the fairly enormous backlash with a pithy non-apology. There have been quite a large number of mods who have resigned, taken leaves of absences, or written public responses condemning the actions of SE, including a very well-written one by StrongBad elsewhere on this site.
With all that as background, I'm going to be taking a leave of absence as a response to these events. I hope that SE reconsiders its actions and thinks very carefully about the behaviors they hope to encourage in their communities.
Note: I returned to active status on 11/26 as described in this follow-up post.
I'm sorry to hear that you are feeling a need to take a leave of absence, and hope that you will come back soon. My own take on the situation is in an answer to @StrongBad's post: https://academia.meta.stackexchange.com/a/4589/22733
I am also quitting.
Are you back now?
@user111388 - Please see this post describing my return. Thanks for the nudge to add that follow-up to this one.
@eykanal: Thank you! I had indeed not noticed the other post, just only saw some comment or answer fromn you.
As a non-mod I don't have insights into what actually transpired here, so I can't well evaluate what's really going on. The bits and pieces I pick up (or read between the lines) are troublesome, but not enough for me to pick up the pitchfork. Especially - again, keep in mind that I can only read between the lines of what is written publicly - I am not sure I can agree with your statement that the mod in question was fired "for a very questionable reason", although I most definitely agree that it was done in an unnecessarily "public and disrespectful manner".
That said, people who I respect (like StrongBad and Eykanal!) with more information about the matter seem highly upset, so that's a strong signal for me. I'll keep my eyes open and decide how I want to relate to this community going forward.
In any case, thank you both StrongBad and Eykanal for your service to this community, and I hope to see both of you come back eventually!
Thank you, I appreciate it. I definitely plan on returning. Re: "what happened", you are correct, not everything is public. Still, we each must act as we see fit based on our understanding. That said, I strongly encourage people to take breaks rather than leave... remember, we serve the community, not the SE organization. I'd hate to see the community die because the landowner misbehaves.
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825 | Merging [career] and [career-path] tags
There are two tags, which are similar:
career and career-path.
Should we join them?
If not, how should we make a clear distinction?
(I fail to see a clear distinction, neither in their descriptions, nor in the questions asked.)
EDIT:
Mods, could you make one a synonymous of another? I have not enough points to vote in these tags, and as of now it is one of the most annoying collision. BTW the funny thing is that the word career essentially means path.
I proposed career to be a synonym of career-path about 6 months ago (along with a number of other proposals). They have been sitting in limbo at: https://academia.stackexchange.com/tags/synonyms
You can vote for existing proposals and propose new tag synonyms from the tag page. For example from graduate-admissions there is a link to the synonym page for that tag. From there if you have enough rep within the tag you can either vote on the existing proposals or create a new proposal.
BTW: How to propose tag merging?
@PiotrMigdal I added a little more info to my answer.
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287 | POLL: Should Academia.SE participate in the "Winter Bash" Holiday hats promotion?
In 2012, Stack Exchange would like to expand its 2011 Gaming "Winter Bash" to all Stack Exchange sites. You can learn more about last year's event at this kick-off blog post.
Since we're still a site in beta, I don't believe it's appropriate for the moderators to make an "executive" decision on whether or not Academia.SE should participate in this promotion without first seeking input from the board.
The basics of the "Winter Bash" are that completing various activities on the board will lead to the awarding of "hats," which can be "worn" by the gravatars. This promotion would last for about two weeks at the end of the year. Individuals can choose to opt out at any time by clicking an "I hate hats" button that will appear on all participating sites.
If Academia.SE chooses not to participate, then this would not affect the accounts on other sites, and vice versa.
To create a "poll" mechanism, I'll add two comments. Upvote according to your preference, and leave a comment or answer below to provide more feedback. We need to provide an answer by Nov. 28, so we'll "close" the poll no later than Nov. 26.
Yes, Academia.SE should participate in Winter Bash 2012.
No, Academia.SE should not participate in Winter Bash 2012.
I don't get the idea. Any link to SE blog or sth?
@PiotrMigdal for questions such as yours, a quick search of the relevant site's meta can find you the answer. And here's the relevant page about hats
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826 | Merge [us] and [united-states] tags
us and united-states
I think the later is better; in any case, both are synonymous.
The merge has been completed, and the two tags have been set up as synonyms.
In response to the comment, as a moderator I'm fine with people suggesting that we manually efect tag synonyms & merges. On a site like Stack Overflow with hundreds of thousands of visitors, the likelihood that enough people who meet criteria (>5 upvotes on tag) will view and vote on tag synonyms is pretty high; on a small site like this it could take forever. Also, we have tools to automatically remap one tag to the other, reducing required work.
That said, you can go here to see outstanding merge suggestions and vote on ones you like. For each tag pair, click on the leftmost tag as shown below:
From there, you can vote:
With that knowledge, in the spirit of mid-1950's organized crime, "vote early, vote often!"
In the spirit of "teach a man to fish" is there a way to encourage users to vote on tag synonyms? I am not sure we have any that have been created without the use of the diamond mod hammer.
@StrongBad - updated post with response
I think we should start using http://meta.academia.stackexchange.com/questions/645/vote-on-tag-synonyms in a similar way to how we used http://meta.academia.stackexchange.com/questions/215/which-of-these-posts-should-be-deleted
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1166 | What is the site policy for aspersions cast on the credentials of other users?
In a recent dustup with a user, I received the comment
And clearly you're not a PhD, otherwise you'd know that my last remark was not an ad hominem.
I find this remark somewhat distressing. Some points:
I post on this site under my professional name and with a link to my homepage.
On my homepage you can find my CV, in which I record having received a PhD.
You can also find that I am a tenured professor at an American research university, and that I have directed PhD theses. For this position I need a PhD: if anyone in my university became seriously concerned that I didn't have one, I think they would have to investigate. If in fact it turned out that I did not have a PhD, this would certainly be grounds for revocation of my tenure and termination from my position. Since I do have a PhD, this is not a worry of mine...but being investigated for this would still not be a positive experience.
A lot of people read this site who are not otherwise familiar with me or even with the American academic system. I can almost imagine a student somewhere who would be interested to come to my university and work with me but would be given pause by the idea that it is somehow "contentious" whether or not I have the appropriate credentials. Almost: such a student would have to be incredibly clueless, but "incredibly clueless" is not strictly incompatible with being a successful student.
So while a large part of me thinks that the appropriate reaction to this is simply "Fools say foolish things. They have the right to, because they're fools. Just rise above," another part of me is not completely sanguine about letting this go. While I feel honorbound to say that I would not in my wildest dreams consider suing anyone about this, spreading falsehoods about someone that could in principle jeopardize their professional life if they were believed seems....isn't the right word libelous? Should we allow such comments?
I am not sure how to reconcile your feelings about deleting comments with this question.
@StrongBad: I don't think that I mentioned deleting comments anywhere in this question. I am asking about the acceptability of the behavior, not the specific remedy. However, I have often flagged comments (and answers) for deletion: deleting comments is a form of censorship, and thus it should not be done lightly or unilaterally...but it should certainly be done in certain circumstances. If a comment clearly violates agreed upon site norms, it should be deleted.
We have certainly agreed that comments which are, e.g., offensive to minorities should be deleted. What I'm currently talking about is similarly specific. In general though, I find comments "rude" when they negatively address the person rather than what the person has said: e.g. to me "That's totally ridiculous" is a civil comment whereas "You're a ridiculous person" is not. I'm not sure whether others make that distinction as strongly.
It's so pity to see that someone has told something like that to you. I've seen how much respectful and perfect you answer to the questions, trying to fully answer the questions with good answering structure and deep reasoning and examples. I am not a professor but I can feel how you are bothered. I am not at your level of understanding and knowledge, but I want to point two things: 1) Don't care about such statements. Don't let others bother you by what they say. 2) I think that these types of bothering comments can be flagged under the "rude or offensive" to attract the moderation attention.
You didn't address the possibility that perhaps, indeed, it wasn't an ad hominem attack in your otherwise comprehensive enumeration. Was it?
Setting aside the other issues here, abusive and discourteous treatment of other users on this site will not be tolerated. I personally would want to be treated with respect, and that courtesy should be extended to others. If one can't make your point without belittling other members of the community, then one should find alternate communities which may tolerate such behavior.
In this particular matter, the poster in question has indeed transgressed, and has been dealt with accordingly.
Thanks very much. I consider the matter handled.
Is this a site where voting isn't allowed to work and quasi-dictatorship on how PhD's should behave within Academia? Apparently you took it upon yourself to take favor with one, but not another. Had you read the offending comment, you might have seen that he accused the speaker of making an ad hominem attack. That was not true according to definition. Further, you did not bother to clarify what was meant on suggesting the user was not a PhD. The person could have meant it in the sense of Socrates, rather than the modern and diluted version of being a "master of the field".
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559 | "proceedings" tag
I have created proceedings tag while i'm newbie to the tag thing. Is it identical to some other tags? I believe most of the questions related to conference publications will have this tag (i.e., conference, journals).
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1397 | Check the chance of getting scholarship for phd program
Dear stackexchange users!
I have a question and that might be weird to be asked in here. However if it's not the appropriate place to ask this question in this forum, please comment here and I will remove it. so the question is this:
Is it a right place to post my concise version of CV here so that you can tell me what is my chance to get an scholarship for Phd program based on your academic experience?
Also If it is not the right forum please help me to find the right one.
P.S. I have B.SC and M.SC in electrical engineering major in power system and would like to apply for phd as international student.
I think that you can ask general questions about scholarships if you wish, but, because Academia is not a forum, you should not post your CV to ask for the chance to get a scholarship. You can ask general questions and might want to post some informations about yourself but not your whole CV.
No, this is not the right place for such a question.
From the help center:
Can I ask questions about my specific situation?
You should not ask "a question that will help only me," but rather "a question that will help people like me." If your question is so limited as to be useful only to you, consider broadening the scope so others can learn from your question as well. As a general rule, if you're asking about a particular institution, course, or journal, it's likely your question is too limited in scope. Try to extract the fundamental question from the specific problem at hand.
Yes, got it sir, so I will ask my question in general in here.@ff524
@Electricman One might consider not addressing people generally as "Sir", especially given ff524's avatar.
That's right, it was a misstake @Fomite
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869 | My questions and answers are missing from my profile page
I have asked a few questions and answered some questions too, but when I click my profile name on top, I get this screen.
How can my reputation be 213, without asking, answering any questions.
@CharlesMorisset Shouldn't this be [meta-tag:status-bydesign], not [meta-tag:status-declined]?
@CharlesMorisset [meta-tag:status-bydesign] means Indicates that a submitted issue is actually due to the existing design of the system and is not considered erroneous behaviour. So, I'd say by-design, since it's not a bug.
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620 | Deleting misspelled tags
How can tags that are misspelled be deleted? There is a tag plagarism as well as the correctly spelled plagiarism. It seems setting the misspelled as synonymous would not be a useful way out.
Update: https://academia.meta.stackexchange.com/q/5056/68109
Posting here is exactly what you should do. I just set up a synonym so that anyone who uses the misspelling will automatically have it corrected. Do note that if it's an uncommon issue you can just correct the tag yourself.
Thanks. I was a bit confused when I could not suggest it myself (because the mispelled did not have enouh uses, as I understood it).
@PeterJansson - Super Sekrit Mod Powers™ strike again!
@Peter: note that if a tag isn't heavily used, you can just edit it out - the system deletes unusued tags once a day.
Can someone do the same for "united-kindom"?
@Stuart - that's a one-off misspelling, rather than a common misspelling. Those are corrected by simply correcting the tag. Tag aliases are intended to correct common misspellings and identify true aliases; in the case of one-offs, it's easier just to fix the offending tag.
no, it's been used several times and has an attached wiki, and bizarrely no one is using the correct spelling. http://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/united-kindom?sort=newest&pagesize=15
@Stuart - So weird. Anyway, fixed.
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2103 | Can I ask a question about Researchgate social network?
Some members expressed concerns and criticized RG network,
is it alowed to open special topic about Researchgate, and to discuss about this problems?
Examples:
There is actually an old ResearchGate question about this suggestion.
– agold yesterday
Why would you prefer ResearchGate? They have a terrible reputation for shadiness and spamming. – MJeffryes yesterday 1
No. No, no, no, no, no. Absolutely not. Do not post your data set on a site that spams its user base. – JeffE yesterday
@JeffE: Could you explain more about the spamming, I'm intrigued to know. – Ébe Isaac yesterday 2
ResearchGate are a commercial company with no clear method so far for making money. At some point, they're going to make a grab and try
to monetise whatever you do there, and it'll be a mess; there's no
guarantee that your content will remain there or remain accessible.
This is leaving aside the spamming problems that Jeff alludes to. –
Andrew yesterday
If you want to know whether your question would be on topic, it might help to say what your question is.
Why Researchgate have bad reputation according to members of this site? @ff524
That sounds like it would be closed as an opinion-based question - it's basically an invitation for others to share opinions, which is off topic here as described in the help center.
Besides, existing questions like ResearchGate: an asset or a waste of time? and Should I send a "cease-and-desist" letter to ResearchGate? already explain in great detail why so many academics dislike them.
Oh cool, I will take a look on it, thank for clarification
The specific question you described in a comment,
Why Researchgate have bad reputation according to members of this site?
sounds like it would be closed as an opinion-based question - it's basically an invitation for others to share opinions, which is off topic here as described in the help center.
Besides, existing questions like ResearchGate: an asset or a waste of time? and Should I send a "cease-and-desist" letter to ResearchGate? already explain in great detail why so many academics dislike them.
We have already a bunch of questions and answers about ResearchGate. So, if you have a new question, you can probably go on and ask. Be sure, however, that your question can be answered by the usual bunch of strangers on the Internet, who are just users of that service and for which certain details of its workings are totally unaccessible.
yes, but all this questions are general, nothing is discuss about security and reliability.
@SSimon from your meta question it wasn't clear that you were concerned about security and reliability. I don't think we can address these issues in a precise way.
No, you can't ask a question with the intent of having a discussion about any subject.
We're not a forum, and we're not here for discussion. We're here for specific questions with specific answers.
If you just want to chat, we have a separate place for that.
than why is there discussion tag?
@SSimon on Meta we have a discussion tag, to discuss the running of the main board. Having Meta and chat in addition to the main site, keeps the main site discussion free, just like we like it.
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1753 | Answering etiquette
I have some etiquette questions. Suppose you read a question that interests you, and you think you could write a helpful answer.
Is it your responsibility to read the answers that have been posted so far first?
If someone has already written a clearly-written answer that is in line with your own thinking, is it kosher to write an answer anyway, perhaps because you think your way of expressing it would be more useful for the OP or somehow better, or because you have more prestige in your paid employment or your publication list (and thus your answer might be more convincing and likely to give the OP peace of mind)?
Should you preface your answer with "I agree with So-and-so, and would like to add my thoughts."
Would it be kosher for the first answer writer to insert in the beginning or end of your post, "I agree with So-and-so, and would like to add my thoughts."
When I am deciding which posts I would like to upvote and downvote, am I supposed to take chronology into account?
I'm not posting a link to an example because I don't want to embarrass anyone.
These are all very good questions to get explicitly written down! I wonder if we should have a community wiki on answering etiquette?
@jakebeal - While not exactly what you're talking about, we do have the "how do I write a good answer?" section of the Help Center.
These two comments are both helpful. @jakebeal, it took me a surprisingly long time to figure out how to use the basic features of the site. I'm still having trouble figuring out how to use many of the features.
Yes, you should read through the answers that have already been posted, as an answer that largely duplicates someone else's answer might otherwise be flagged for plagiarism.
You should post a new answer when you have something new to contribute to the question at hand. Just reposting the same information under the claim of having more expertise is a waste of time. If all you're going to do is agree with the answer, then you should just state that in a comment. However, if your answer introduces a new viewpoint or information that extends what has already been written, then you can certainly post that as a new answer.
If you're developing an answer that someone else has written, then you should absolutely cite that person's answer in your own. That will save you time and make readers' lives easier.
This took a while for me to understand. If what you mean is to ask if the original author can add such a statement if the new answer appears to be a riff on her older answer, then I think the answer would be yes, that would be fair.
This is entirely a personal issue. Stack Exchange doesn't place any restrictions or have any guidelines with respect to whether or not to consider chronology.
Excellent answer, specifically (1). Many of the popular questions here end up with numerous virtually identical answers, as people see the question and immediately reply without checking whether what they're posting has been said. Do everyone a favor; read existing answers first!
I'm going to go ahead and accept this answer, and post a separate, related question. Thanks to all who helped.
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2043 | Merge [tagging] to [tags]
We have both tags and tagging here on Meta. Seems redundant. Can the smaller tag be synonymised?
tags refers to questions about the tag itself, whereas the one question (other than this one) labelled tagging talks about proper tagging itself. While the tagging tag is definitely uncommon, I don't think they're redundant to each other.
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2044 | Distinction between [proofreading] and [copy-editing]
Do we really need both the proofreading and copy-editing tags? Do copyeditors not usually take care of proofreading too?
If we need the distinction, can the difference be made explicit on the tag wiki and the two tags cross-linked?
No, authors proofread and copy editors do a host of things. They are different processes.
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1095 | How long should one wait before accepting an answer?
A question is posted and after two or three weeks, five or six answers are come under it. Should the user wait for more answers or this time is enough for the question to be answered and he has to choose one and put check mark beside it?
How much should the user wait for his question to be answered?
From the StackExchange FAQ:
Don't hesitate to accept an answer that is well-written, suggests a good practice and works for you.
Otherwise, even if there are answers that are good enough but that you're not entirely satisfied by, you might wait 24 to 48 hours to give other people a chance to give you a better answer. A question with an accepted answer isn't as likely to receive further attention as one without an accepted answer.
So, the SE recommendation is: if you're completely satisfied with an answer, accept it immediately. If you're mostly satisfied with an answer, accept it within a couple of days.
(Note that you can change your accepted answer if a better one comes along later.)
This is only a recommendation; you can accept an answer immediately, years later, not at all, etc. if that's what you want to do.
+1 for "you can change your accepted answer".
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4416 | Why can't I answer question about gender pronouns?
I found Am I conveying disrespect if I omit my gender pronoun from a conference nametag? through the Hot Questions list. I was interested in posting an answer, but I don't see the answer box. I have 101 reputation here, but there isn't supposed to be a reputation minimum for posting answers. I also see answers from people with 41 and 17. Are there extra restrictions because it's a hot question or because there are already lots of answers (13)?
Someone else with reputation = 101 posted this comment, implying that they're having the same problem: "I don't seem to have the permissions, so I'll comment my answer."
Is it because most of my reputation is just the association bonus? That doesn't count towards answering protected questions, but the question in question is not protected, at least not when I view it:
Sorry for the inconvenience; Protected questions should now show up as such: Protection banner missing when I don't have enough rep to answer; closed and locked banners appear in wrong spot
Thanks. The message with the explanation why I can't answer is perfect.
The question is protected. As you seem to know what that means, you are probably thinking to yourself it doesn't look protected, there is usually a notice. You would be correct, but somebody broke something ...
Protection banner missing when I don't have enough rep to answer; closed and locked banners appear in wrong spot
Yep, that's clearly the same bug. Unfortunately, we can't close this as a dupe, since it's on [meta.se] and this is [meta.academia.se].
That's OK. We'll keep track of it and let y'all know when it's fixed. Thanks so much for reporting this, @Barmar and sorry for the confusion it's caused. :)
That question is protected, which means you need to have certain rep to answer it. The association bonus doesn't count for that calculation.
Why don't I see the box saying "This question is protected" below the question?
@Barmar - refresh the page, maybe you loaded it a while ago? The question has been protected for a few hours now.
@Barmar - also, scroll down... the protection notice is near the bottom of the question, not the top.
I've refreshed several times, including with DevTools open (it's set to disable cache when open). looked at the top and bottom and used the browser's search function.
I even tried disabling AdBlock Plus in case the protected message was a false positive.
@Barmar it is right after the user name info and right before the comments. If it is not there, screen shot it and I will tag the question [tag:bug] so a CM looks at it.
I've added the screenshot. I've been here long enough that I know what a protected question looks like.
@Barmar yup, but I wanted to have a picture to show the people who can figure out what is going wrong. Thanks for the edit.
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1877 | Can we add something to the how-to-tag help box that warns askers not to misuse certain tags?
When you try to edit the tags when asking a question (or edit the tags of a question when having less than 2 k), a box how to tag appears on the right, showing some general help on tagging. The content of this box is site-specific, for example it is individualised on Anime & Manga.
Now, we have a handful of tags that are prone to being misused, namely phd, masters, thesis, research, publications, university, students, professors, conference and graduate-school. In fact I removed the research from what feels like 100 questions in the last months.
Would it be possible to add a paragraph or two to the how-to-tag help box warning users not to misuse these tags, do we actually want this and if yes, how should this help text be worded? With respect to the latter, you might want to cannibalise this help text I wrote on Welcome to Academia SE on the same topic.
Also see: Use of very general tags like "professors", "students", and "university"
I propose the following wording:
Use tags that describe what your question is about, not what it merely relates to. For example almost every question on this site is eventually related to research, but only questions about performing research should be tagged research.
Use tags describing circumstances only if those circumstances are essential to your question. For example, if you have a question about citations that came up during writing a thesis but might as well have arisen during writing a paper, do not tag it with thesis.
Implemented June 6th, 2017:
I think we don't need to worry about high-usage tags, if they are for general categories. A post can have multiple tags, so it's OK if one or two are quite broad.
For comparison, consider the following statistics on the top four tags of our site vs. a couple of the other major sites;
Academia.SE: publications (18%), phd (16%), graduate-admissions (12%), research (9%)
StackOverflow: javascript (9%), java (9%), c# (8%), php (8%)
SuperUser.SE: windows-7 (14%), linux (11%), windows (10%), osx (6%)
275K
We're somewhat more concentrated, but not so much that I think it's worth worrying about.
I am not worried about the fact that some tags are highly used; I am worried about the fact that some tags are overused to the extent that they are pointless. E.g., a lot of new questions about publications or citing are tagged research, when they are not about research at all. If you are searching for questions that actually are about research or if you want to favorite the research tag to answer questions about this topic, as you get a lot of noise. Also, I do not see such a problem with the publications tag, despite being the most popular one.
@Wrzlprmft Then I think you are not concerned about overuse but instead about misuse.
Well, it’s misuse in form of overuse, but you are right: misuse is more specific.
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4639 | 2019: a year in moderation
It's New Year's Day in Stack Exchange land...
A distinguishing characteristic of these sites is how they are moderated:
We designed the Stack Exchange network engine to be mostly self-regulating, in that we amortize the overall moderation cost of the system across thousands of teeny-tiny slices of effort contributed by regular, everyday users.
-- A Theory of Moderation
While there certainly are Moderators here, a significant amount of the moderation is done by ordinary people, using the privileges
they've earned by virtue of their contributions to the site. Each of you contributes a little bit of time and effort, and together you accomplish much.
As we enter a new year, let's pause and reflect, taking a moment to appreciate the work that we do here together.
And what could be more festive than a big pile of numbers?
So here is a breakdown of moderation actions performed on Academia over the past 12 months:
Action Moderators Community¹
----------------------------------------- ---------- ----------
Users suspended² 25 36
Users destroyed³ 391 0
Users deleted 15 0
Users contacted 54 0
User suspensions lifted early 1 0
User banned from review 2 0
Tasks reviewed⁴: Suggested Edit queue 33 1,690
Tasks reviewed⁴: Reopen Vote queue 0 1,040
Tasks reviewed⁴: Low Quality Posts queue 21 1,695
Tasks reviewed⁴: Late Answer queue 1 505
Tasks reviewed⁴: First Post queue 18 4,574
Tasks reviewed⁴: Close Votes queue 26 6,985
Tags merged 23 0
Tag synonyms proposed 6 0
Tag synonyms created 5 2
Revisions redacted 17 0
Questions reopened 23 36
Questions protected 77 158
Questions migrated 32 2
Questions flagged⁵ 83 2,719
Questions closed 382 1,972
Question flags handled⁵ 806 1,997
Posts unlocked 3 6
Posts undeleted 33 69
Posts locked 8 464
Posts deleted⁶ 528 2,848
Posts bumped 0 352
Escalations to the Community Manager team 22 0
Comments undeleted 250 0
Comments flagged 59 2,429
Comments deleted⁷ 6,643 3,565
Comment flags handled 1,553 933
Bounties canceled 1 0
Answers flagged 122 2,428
Answer flags handled 1,680 869
All comments on a post moved to chat 204 0
Footnotes
¹ "Community" here refers both to the membership of Academia without diamonds next to their names, and to the automated systems otherwise known as user #-1.
² The system will suspend users under three circumstances: when a user is recreated after being previously suspended, when a user is recreated after being destroyed for spam or abuse, and when a network-wide suspension is in effect on an account.
³ A "destroyed" user is deleted along with all that they had posted: questions, answers, comments. Generally used as an expedient way of getting rid of spam.
⁴ This counts every review that was submitted (not skipped) - so the 2 suggested edits reviews needed to approve an edit would count as 2, the goal being to indicate the frequency of moderation actions. This also applies to flags, etc.
⁵ Includes close flags (but not close or reopen votes).
⁶ This ignores numerous deletions that happen automatically in response to some other action.
⁷ This includes comments deleted by their own authors (which also account for some number of handled comment flags).
Further reading:
Wanna see how these numbers have changed over time? I posted a similar report here last year: 2018: a year in moderation...
You can also check out this report on other sites
Or peruse detailed information on the number of questions closed and reopened across all sites
Wishing you all a happy new year...
Thank you, Shog9
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24 | Publicizing the site
This site should be pretty easy to publicize; simply post flyers around the various departments. Would someone with design skills be willing to throw together a flyer to be around the various campuses by Academia SE users?
design skills... I pass. :(
Well, since no designers answered the call, I'm going to expand it to designers. Since I'm a member of the "not a designer" crowd, I figured I'll make the first poster.
Click here to see an Academia.SE poster, which you should print and stick in public places in your university
It's not going to win any awards for awesome design, but it is better than nothing. My requests to the crowd are twofold:
Please print these out and put them in public areas. I'll probably kindly ask you to re-post it when the fall semester starts and the new crop of grad students show up.
The original call for someone with some semblance of actual design skills still stands. Please feel free to make something that, you know, looks good.
Here's the same link again, just because I like writing links. Please post it wherever it makes sense to post it.
It's a very nice poster! just a small comment: many of the printers are black-and-white (one can forget we're already in the 21st century!). Do you think the background will work well when printed b/w?
It should print well to grayscale, I'm not sure about just b&w.
Is there a way to get a blurb on the Chronicle of Higher Education, or Inside Higher Ed ? there are some friendly bloggers there who might be willing to mention the site.
Not a bad idea at all. I sent off a short letter using the contact form on the Chronicle website asking them if they'd be interested in featuring our site.
Just to keep you folks informed, in order to not annoy these folks with a deluge of mail, the mods are taking care of the request.
I was wondering if there were any developments on this ?
Letters were sent out, I know I never received a response, I don't think the other mods did either. @suresh
Could we somehow get Academia.edu interested? They had something like ask-a-question back in the day. I'm not sure what happened to it, but there definitely ought to be some scope for cooperation. I'm not very good at networking or making contact with humans in general, but what do others think of the idea. Perhaps we could form a contact committee?
Another place to get grad-students, especially those in the depth of despair would be Phinished.org.
Would sending a short email to one of the mailing lists (listservs) count as spam? Perhaps more senior people can comment on the appropriateness of such an act. At the very least we could offer a suggestion to take the more flamey (but important) topics to stackexchange, something like the entire Elsevier situation, discussion of responses, etc.
I would appreciate hearing from the more experienced what they think of the appropriateness of these steps in terms of academic etiquette.
Good ideas. Right now, the contact committee consists of the site admins; myself, aeismail, and charles. We've reached out to some organizations in the past, we'll discuss this one as well. If anyone else wants to be involved, please let us know... we'd love to include you in the discussions!
thanks for the invite @eykanal I will try to join the discussions as much as possible and contribute what I can. I wouldn't mind putting up some posters, but I think colour would be more attractive for publicizing, and most of us would have access to a colour printer at work. I did inform some people on a mailing list, I don't know if it had an impact though.
I would suggest picking particularly good questions from the site, and making a poster that just has the question in its usual SE theme (so that users will recognize the site if they come from the poster) and then says something like:
Want to know the answer? Come to academia.stackexchange.com
This also allows you to make tailored posters for specific departments.
Great idea, if you do this please post the results here!
I think a lot of universities would be interested in this as a resource. At the University of Bath (United Kingdom) we have a small team devoted to generic skills development for postgraduates. Perhaps it's worth publicising to similar teams within other universities? PG student societies would also be interested, I think.
Another place to put a small banner is the side-bars of sister-SE sites, mainly TCS, MATH, physics, STATs, etc.
This is how I learned about the existence of other SE's (and also about the existence of meta.. :).
Good idea, how do we do this?
I have no idea. Anyone from the SE team? (@anna ?)
So, I brought this up in the mod chat room (link for the other mods), and long story short, our "hot questions" are automatically included as ads on other sites, and we'll look into getting a unique ad for some of the more content-appropriate sites like the ones you listed.
@eykana that's great news (: thank you for asking them.
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4049 | On the over use of "ethics"/"ethical"
I've been struggling recently with the use of "ethics" on this site - I think it's overused to the point of the tag itself being much less useful than it could be (it's currently our 12th most popular tag) as well as answers and comments being bogged down by disambiguating "Is X ethical..." are potentially meaning:
"Is X ethical..." in the proper sense
"Is X a good idea..."
"Is X nice..."
"Can I be upset by X..."
"Is my advisor/classmate/teacher/etc. a less than perfect individual..."
etc. Is there a good way to handle this? I think actual discussions of ethics are interesting, and a violation of academic ethics is often a very serious accusation, so I dislike that it's being heavily diluted in terms of its meaning.
Do we consider heavily editing questions/deleting tags for things that aren't actually about ethics? If so, do we need to fine-tune the current definition?
On the moral code or ethical policy of academia, including values such as avoidance of cheating or plagiarism;
Or do we just let it slide?
Some examples, per Wrzlprmft's request:
Is it considered rude to address a PhD holder as sir or miss? - I think this is a stretch to call this an "ethics" question. "Is this insulting?" isn't actually a matter of ethics.
Contacting EiC on social media - Again, this is far more "Is this a bad idea?" than is this ethical.
You're not alone in thinking that we receive too many questions asking about the ethics of an action or a situation, with these having nothing to do with ethics. I usually try to leave a comment when I notice.
We should have a common-sense tag. It would be best suitable for a lot of questions tagged with ethics.
@TheDoctor: That’s a horrible idea as it belittles the asker. You might as well call the tag stupid-question.
@Wrzlprmft Added some examples. Would dig up more from the annals, but need to pack for a trip
@Wrzlprmft In several cases the question was later reworded and the tag removed, but see e.g. this recent one: https://academia.stackexchange.com/q/104740/20058
@Wrzlprmft it was supposed to be a joke.
@TheDoctor: Well, Poe’s Law strikes again.
Frankly, I'm concerned that this entire discussion may be unethical.
@TheDoctor Only after I get my kremlinology and pis-are-not-unknowable-monsters-just-ask tags ;)
@Fomite that is fine for me. And since we have the united-states tag I would like to have the Gallifrey tag. No smile. I'm serious. ;) Wrzlprmft I know. that was completely my fault. After sending the comment I thought "Hmm.. maybe I should've put a smile at the end".
Short Version
Re-tag those questions that are clearly not about ethics.
Ask the asker whether it is really ethics they wish to ask about.
Ethics needs not be “heavy” ethics.
Long Version
Going by the examples provided, I see three kind of problematic questions:
Questions that are just mistagged and do not mention ethics in the question body at all, like: Is it considered rude to address a PhD holder as sir or miss?
We should just retag these and move on. It is the nature of this site that many questions are poorly tagged (also see this).
I have subscribed to research for some time just to remove it from questions that have nothing to do with research as per the tag’s definition at all – which is about half of the questions tagged with it.
You could do the same with ethics.
(Sidenote on this question: With etiquette, the line is quite clear to draw in my opinion: Etiquette is a codex, whose rules are mostly orthogonal to ethics. Either somebody asks what the etiquette is or what the ethics are. There may be questions about whether it is ethical to follow etiquette, but apart from that a question is either about one thing or the other. We should however not forget that some cultures hold etiquette to such a high value that it may be difficult for their members to distinguish between etiquette and ethics.)
Questions that explicitly asks for the ethics of a situation, even though it seems likely that this is not what the asker actually cares about or at least this is not what we would care about in this situation. (This is a variation of the XY problem.) For example: Is it okay to critique my already published paper? Here we should ask the asker as soon as possible whether they really want to ask about the ethics of the situation, and if yes, why they even consider that something may be unethical or ethically compulsory.
Now, if the asker confirms their interest in the ethics, I don’t consider this a big problem: The question and answers may not be as interesting, but the asker (or somebody else) can always ask a different question about other aspects.
There may be a slight problem with questions where the asker gives us no clue as to why they have ethical concerns and we can answer nothing but: “I see no ethical issues.” or similar.
I think we can close such questions as unclear on a per-case basis.
Questions which are not about “heavy ethics”, such as: Contacting EiC on social media.
In this example, the asker specifies an ethical concern (taking unfair advantage by exploiting their personal connection to the EIC).
In this case, ethics in the common meaning of the term certainly applies.
One might debate whether ethics in the sense of the tag description applies, i.e., whether we would consider this part of the common academic ethical policy.
However, the latter is unwritten and at least I wouldn’t know where to draw the line between “heavy” and “light” ethics and whether there is anything to be gained from it.
I certainly wouldn’t consider questions on “light” ethics off-topic.
In this respect, I would at most edit the tag description a bit (and particularly make the tag wiki a proper tag wiki instead of a Wikipedia copy).
I suspect some number of “ethics” questions are really “etiquette” questions.
But the big thing to remember here is that tags aren’t static. Users with sufficient reputation can edit tags if they think something is amiss.
So if something isn’t addressing ethics, feel free to adjust the tags appropriately.
Many questions asking about the ethics of some course of action are really asking whether the action is appropriate in a certain social, cultural, or professional academic context.
As aeismail says, ethics tags that are used in this overly loose fashion can and should be removed. But I would also advocate for liberally editing out the terms "ethics" or "ethical" and replacing them by "appropriate", "tasteful", "polite", etc. as applicable, especially in question titles. This is to avoid confusion about a question's actual substance, and to avoid dilution of the term "ethical".
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55 | Instanced versions of StackExchange/Academica for classes?
When I saw this new StackExchange site, it first reminded me a lot of a tool that's being used in an increasing number of college-level courses called Piazza. Each "instance" of Piazza is a single semester of a single course offered at a university where students can ask questions and other students (or the course instructor) can create a "wiki-style" answer.
Having been a user of it for a year, it has some terrible shortcomings (questions are sorted only by the date their originally posted, making useful threads terribly difficult to find; formatting of posts are limited to a small set of HTML; etc) that StackExchange has usually found elegant solutions.
This may be the wrong place to start this discussion, though it would be great to see StackExchange offer a service as a Piazza alternative. It would seem the current Academia software already exceeds the functionality of Piazza, it would simply need to be instanced for courses to have the ability to adopt it. Is this something we could expect in the future?
Anyone can start the process for initiating a new site, over at http://area51.stackexchange.com/
However, it's a fairly rigorous process, designed to ensure that only sites with a long-lasting, wide-area appeal, launch.
I think this would be very different to what you're after, which sounds like a short-term, narrow-area appeal. In that case, you're probably better off setting up a local install of one of the open-source stackexchange clones. For those, see the "Stack Overflow clones" question on Meta StackOverflow
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4915 | Should the definition of the tag "professors" be changed?
I noticed that the definition of the tag professors is:
Queries related to professors, a highly accomplished and recognized academic and an expert in their respective discipline.
I don't really like this definition because it seems to be (1) aggrandizing and (2) focused on tenured professors at research universities. Not all professors (ranked or adjunct) at the liberal arts college at which I teach are experts in their respective disciplines. The description is even less accurate for (most) community college professors.
While I know I could edit the tag myself, it seemed worth consulting the community for such an important tag.
As a starting point for discussion, here is a draft of an alternative definition:
Queries relating to professors, [faculty] members whose job responsibilities may include [research], [teaching], and [service-activities]. See also [assistant-professor], [associate-professor], and [professor-emeritus].
Update
Here is an improved definition, replacing "faculty" with "academic staff" (per @Anyon's comment) and removing references to other tags, which I have since learned do not belong in tag usage guidance:
Queries relating to professors, academic staff members whose job responsibilities may include research, teaching, and service.
I have made the edit.
Sounds reasonable!
Rather than aggrandizing, I think the current definition is more reflective of a common non-US usage of the word 'professor' (in many countries it only applies to the highest academic rank, and e.g. assistant professors would have some other title). Having a more international definition as you propose seems sensible, but in that case I would suggest replacing "faculty" with e.g. "academic staff".
Thank you, @Anyon, for the non-US perspective.
+1. In a larger sense, this tag seems very broad (1000+ posts), including questions about (1) the career path/goal of becoming a professor, (2) navigating the faculty hiring process, (3) being a professor, (4) how to interact with professors, (5) general research questions faced by a professor, and (6) general teaching questions faced by a professor. This tag seems so broad that it's almost useless. Maybe in addition to improving the definition, we should narrow the scope and give guidance accordingly.
"academic staff members" is the most accurate, please leave it in one way or another.
The term "staff" does not seem correct to me. In the departments I've been in, "staff" referred to support workers - HR, advising, marketing, and so on. "Faculty" seems far more accurate a term under the definition of "professors".
@Jeff I agree, "staff" is confusing because it usually means "not a professor." While I see the benefit of not using "faculty" to include lecturers and others that people may think of as professors but who are technically not, perhaps "university employees?"
@Anyon Could you please explain why you prefer "academic staff"? I'm inclined to agree with Jeff and Azor Ahai. Would everyone be happy with "academic personnel"?
@EllenSpertus Before learning about "the" US university system, I would've understood "faculty" to exclusively refer to a division of the university (typically called a "college" in North America), e.g. "Faculty of Natural Science", and not to its employees. A member of such a faculty isn't necessarily a professor - there can be "administrative faculty". But probably we won't find a universal term, so who knows what's best.... Also, I thought there's typically a distinction made between "staff" and "academic staff", but Jeff appears not to make it, so maybe it's not as common as I thought.
@EllenSpertus I'd be happy with "academic personnel", which coincidentally is what Wikipedia uses as a headline: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Academic_personnel
@Anyon "Faculty of" is common in Canada ... just to add another inconsistency. I think "academic personnel" sounds overly stuffy and doesn't really mean anything to someone checking to see if a tag is correct (but no one does anyway so)
@AzorAhai-him- Haha, that's true. I don't know if I ever read the tag definition prior to this question... Good point about Canada too. I think this whole thing is just so inconsistent that it probably doesn't matter much which specific wording is picked.
First, thank you for asking this! I think we should avoid as much as possible tag wikis describing titles and professions on the basis of accomplishments and recognitions. Actually, looking at the full tag wiki reported below, I would say that there is room for a few more adjustments (to be fair, the tag wiki was created in 2012, in the early days of this community, and a lot has probably changed here since then):
A professor is a scholarly teacher; the precise meaning of the term varies by country. Literally, professor derives from Latin as a "person who professes" being usually an expert in arts or sciences, a teacher of high rank.
A professor is a highly accomplished and recognized academic, and the
title is awarded only after decades of scholarly work. In the United
States and Canada the title of professor is granted to all scholars
with Doctorate degrees (typically Ph.D.s) who teach in two- and
four-year colleges and universities, and is used in the titles
assistant professor and associate professor, which are not considered
professor-level positions elsewhere, as well as for full professors.
Note : This tag wiki has content adapted from Wikipedia, used under
the CC-BY-SA 3.0 license.
Additional remarks:
We can probably try to write down a tag wiki for the term professor without reference to Wikipedia. Your proposal seems fine to me, and we probably don't need a long wiki such the one above.
"the title is awarded only after decades of scholarly work": decades to become full professor, maybe, but I would not consider such a strong statement for all levels of professorship.
Given the internationality of this community, I would avoid any reference to specific countries.
The middle para is not accurate for US/Canada, many PhD-holders who teach are called "lecturers," and "professor" is a different job that typically involves research.
@AzorAhai-him- That's also why I suggested to get rid of that paragraph.
The terms "professor" is completely meaningless without a context. It can mean anything from "anyone who stands in front of a class and attempts to teach them something" to "the highest level of academic rank at a university."
The description of the tag should be targeted to our community, not to some person who has zero knowledge of higher education. As such, the important part is to clarify what kind of academic positions (in an international context) are meant to be covered by the tag and which ones are not.
The original description sounds a bit like it is describing a UK professorship. My hunch would be that we're best off starting with US (assistant/associate/full) professors as all being included, which then leads us to include UK (senior) lectures/readers/professor, French maitre de conferences and professors, etc. On the other hand, I'd exclude US lecturers/adjuncts.
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1042 | Text shade is too light
I don't know if I share this experience with other members of the Academia.SE community, but for me text shade is way too light. For me, it makes it harder to read (and focus on content) plus, after not long time (~10min?) slightly painful (~dry eyes).
I know it has some positive consequences too (i.e. not spending too much time on Academia.SE), but I am not sure if it is desired effect overall.
Why I am writing it now? In general I prefer dark text (like #000000) to gray one. During the design phase I didn't want to be too biased (especially as I do like the design). I though that I would get used to it. But I didn't (it's not getting any better).
I know it may look nice. But I am here not for looking, but for reading.
Are you experiencing a similar problem?
(If it is only my, I will do some CSS hacking on my side, but if a non-trivial fraction of users share my pain, then it might be worth talking about tweaking it globally.)
I concur. I find the main text too light to read without some effort, and there seem to be other instances of text that are even lighter.
I strongly concur with the "complaint" about too-light text. I like to keep the screen brightness as low as possible...
Is there any evidence that the SE admins will be willing to fix any of our design issues now ?
A light-on-dark option would be great, too. I'm a big fan of light grey text on a nearly-black background. But I suspect this might be too much work to integrate into the rest of the site design.
@Suresh Still, it might be worth trying. I have always found SE team helpful.
What I mean is, how do we get them to look at this issue ?
On a related note, the ratings of the questions in the "what's related" list, displayed in white on a pale grey background, are almost completely unreadable.
I just ran across this link on the UX Stack Exchange site, and it made me think of our lack-of-constrast-y site we have here in Academia: http://contrastrebellion.com/
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891 | UPDATED (APRIL 14): Design for Academia.se
I’m Stéphane, senior product designer at Stack Exchange. First, I wanted to congratulate you because this site is now starting the process of moving out of beta to become a fully-graduated site! Well done!
Graduation and Your Site Design
Graduation comes with a few perks. I have already begun work on your site's design, which will give you your own unique theme that reflects your topic and culture. This will help brand your site as unique, even while you share common elements with other sites that show you are part of a bigger Stack Exchange family.
Once the design goes up, you will receive a link in the footer of other sites in the network, along with the ability to migrate content to and from other sites — and the notoriety of a public launch that says, "Congratulations, you finally made it!"
Design Concept
For our academia.se community's site design and branding, I wanted to have a "campus life" feel. I think it's most effectively conveyed with a hand-drawn illustration style. It has a personal and lively feel to it. I've gathered some artwork I found online for setting up a mood board.
Mood Board
Color scheme
This color scheme reminds me of autumn. It's warm and inviting. Fall is also when a new academic year starts. All the pastel colors bring calm and harmony and they are lighted up by the green and the red. This way we can balance our design from calmness to more contrasted and focused area.
Logo
All the knowledge has always been passed on by books through the years, they are the origins of teaching. The idea was to evoke some books in a bookcase but in a non figurative way.
I believe this modernized logo works in other mediums to promote our site as well.
Swag
Business cards / stickers / t-shirt
Click on the image to view it at full size.
Overall site design
Click on the images to view them at full size.
Main illustration
Click on the image to view it at full size.
I believe the design captures the mood I was going for. I'd love to hear your feedback. If there are no major design changes, we're hoping to launch the site soon. Thank you for being an awesome community!
Edit:
Thank you for your valued feedback! I've changed the badges based on your answers and comments. They now are mortarboards.
Click on the image to view it at full size.
Regarding the question list, I will tweak some vertical space and font size during the coding to have the most perfect rendering across browsers.
Hello Stéphane, and thanks for your very nice work on our design!
Mods can get swag?!?
Sorry for the lack of manners earlier—RL duties and SE commenting don't mix too well. But in spite of my comments, I really do like the general conception, and it's clear a lot of work went into it. I'm excited to see the (interim and?) final version(s)!
Oh; I am happy to see this post.
The badges look GREAT! love the update!!
I like this! Especially the logo; clean, simple but still fitting. The bell tower should probably be made from ivory, though.
I think less ornate would be better. Having things that resemble actual buildings might evoke negative connotations in some ("That looks like the building I was hazed in!"), while more generic representations are less likely to do so. Also I recommend more use of tools and some (perhaps less) use of mortarboards and diplomas, which many users may not have. Perhaps an abstract version of podium with microphone might serve instead of the books. Also presenting things as tools may evoke the idea that this forum is a tool, to be used to aid learning, and not replace it.
When can we put in an order for a shirt?
I would prefer a more "serious" looking design with different colors, but that's just me. Especially the door colors bothered me.
I was just thinking - the badges - would there be an elegant way to make the badge levels bronze - bachelors, silver - masters, gold - phd? I think it would be cool if you could pull it off, but I personally am having trouble visualizing what it might look like. Just an idea to throw out there. Side note, I love the elegance of the books in the logo.
I have just one word to say: BEAUTIFUL!
I just got shocked by the beauty and freshness of your design! Love this!
I just visited this site after a couple of months absence and I just wanted to say: great job! A nice, fresh look. Really like it!
I love it! The images, the fonts, the color palette. I particularly like the hint towards books in the site logo.
My one suggestion has to do with the medals. Not sure how the open triangle shape fits with the theme, and the thin lines make it blend in. I agree partly with what was suggested above... I think the medals should be mortarboards, similar to what is shown here:
I would suggest, though, to color the entire cap gold, silver, or bronze; the small icon size does do away with details. That being said, this sort of thing did work fairly well with the android community (see their little android-themed medals). I think we could do something similar here.
A quick sketch how this might look like in real badge size.
I messed up with the pixel grid, so here it is once more with a sharper rendering.
Mortarboards would be an awesome idea: I really hope the designers can incorporate this (notwithstanding the resolution issue mentioned)
Thanks for the design… and soliciting feedback: it's not easy, and you'll sure get lot of helpful yet contradictory advice from all around…
So, while trying to avoid the nefarious “design by committee” effect, here's some of my “gut reaction” to the look:
Very positive first reaction: elegant, clean design… calming effect
My eyes first went to the buildings. They don't shock my as odd or foreign on the site's design, but I do not associate them spontaneously with “campus” buildings. Maybe because campuses all around have very different styles, and it's hard to draw a “universally recognized campus look”.
Then I looked at the logo, and title font. Love both: nice logo, I immediately saw books; almost geometric font (academia, maths, geometric drawings), yet subtly rounded.
Front page is well balanced, clear focus on the questions… however, the questions lists seems somewhat unbalanced to me: I wonder what was feeling weird about it, but I think it's 1. the large amount of vertical white space, 2. the fact that numbers (votes and views) are so much larger that the question title itself.
Question page: not much to say, looks very good. I noticed a resemblance in “up and down” pen nibs with TeX site, but it doesn't bother me at all. Maybe one thing: the style of the “accepted” mark is a bit too geometric, or it's simply too large.
One final detail: the gold/silver/bronze chevrons should be bolder, as they're not very visible as it.
Thanks again for your very nice work!
I agree on the campus comment. It struck me as American.
I had a similar thought as well (before reading this answer), that the buildings don't suggest anything academic and thus they seem out of place.
I agree about the buildings, but the clock tower looks just like the University of Memphis clock tower.
The campus is lacking one essential thing: people! A campus is never empty. In particular, a queue in front of the canteen. And economics students sunbathing. ;)
@Raphael just had the same thought.. also Academia.se is all about the people... (:
It's spring break, campus is empty. See the bus in the footer? It's loaded with people headed to the beach. Kidding aside, we talked about adding little people figures, but it'd be too distracting(and hard!). Re: campus looking American... Stéphane is French. We talked about the visuals, and agreed the illustration should cover traditional brick buildings and something modern too. While it may not be 100% representative of every campus, but I believe it does capture a "campus" feel.
@Jin my thought was that the doors look a little too reminiscent of tiny hearts. So to me this header image suggests something to do with Valentine's Day.
@Jin Too bad. I thought that if birds are possible, people should also be.
Great work. A few small suggestions:
Reduce the vertical space taken up by each question on question listing pages. It seems that currently (24th April 2014; only about half the number of questions can fit on the screen as beta sites or stack overflow. Perhaps the vertical white space could be dramatically reduced. This is important when you want to quickly scan questions.
Increase contrast in between followed and not followed links. See for example the following two links. The bottom one I have followed; the top one I have not followed.
A few comments on the design so far:
The "medals" icons should perhaps be closer to mortarboards, with gold, silver, and bronze tassels.
I would personally prefer a somewhat more assertive font for the main body text.
Because of the abovementioned mortarboards, standard black is also an appropriate "academic-themed" color—as are strong "standard" colors (blue, red, green, yellow, purple, etc.) in the "hoods" awarded to master's and doctoral degree recipients.
The pen nibs are a little too reminiscent of the TeX SE site.
I support the idea of using mortarboards for the medals, though I guess that it is better if they are single-coloured, as the tassel will only amount for a few pixels.
I think that's a cool idea, however I'm afraid morterboards will be too detailed for an icon in such small size.
@Jin: It doesn't have to actually be mortarboards, but it should maybe at least suggest mortarboards.
@Jin: See my comment on eykanal’s answer.
Is there a way to increase the contrast between the text and background ? or use a darker shade of gray ? Maybe it's my (not-yet-!!)-old eyes, or maybe others have the same problem ?
I have the same problem. Light font & gray colour. Too little contrast. It is tiresome to try to read posts here. Please switch back to black text.
Very small point. I think of the clock tower as a quintessential icon of university campuses and in the design it captures my vision, which is a good thing. When the sky line is presented in a circular fashion the position of the clock tower at 2:00 invokes thoughts of the Mars gender symbol for males. I would suggest rotating the skyline so that the clock tower faces a different direction, maybe 10:00.
I doubt many people will see it this way, but it's a valid point, and changing the direction to 10:00 would fix this issue in an otherwise harmless way.
Huh. I associate clock towers more with churches and train stations than with universities.
Something is really going wrong (in America?) if one really has to consider that people are offended by the circular swag. (Also, it is arguably more likely that somebody is offended by the unavoidable phallicness of the clock tower – not that I would give in to that.)
@Gilles: Maybe it's an American thing. Every US university campus I can think of has a clock tower, or wishes it did, but hardly any of our churches have clock towers, and we have hardly any train stations, period. :)
I just noticed a layout bug (?) on FF 26.0 (running Ubuntu):
The green box indicating an accepted answer is badly positioned; the text should be vertically centered:
I notice that your screenshots above look more like this than the bad one above, so maybe it's a platform-specific thing?
I like it a lot. Thank you!
I especially like the "fallen book" logo.
I think the colour scheme, font choices and text layout work really well, but I question the way that lines that are not the first line in a bulletted list item appear to lose the indent that the first line has (does that make sense?)
I don't love the buildings, but I don't hate them either. There's a risk that trying to make them too "college campus" risks making them too twee and "My idealised American undergrad experience" ;-) I like the way that the logo and links are integrated vertically with the buildings picture, either side of the tower. Will this still work in narrow browser windows? (or more to the point, will it fail gracefully?)
I don't like the nibs for the upvote and downvote buttons. There's no handwriting or fountain pen motif anywhere else in the design, and it seems to reflect a view of academia that is... perhaps archaic? As well as, as somebody else mentioned, being a tad reminiscent of tex.stackexchange. I don't have any bright ideas for what to use instead, though. (maybe the mortarboards? Not sure... maybe just arrow in a circle, to reflect the !-inna-circle that you have in the top right for "Community bulletins"?)
Thanks again for all the work :-)
I suspect the discussion over the design is over, but if it's not I personally find the yellow-ish highlighting of quoted text quite unpleasant. I understand it's part of the color theme, but I think it's esthetically sub-optimal in this context.
Alternatively, we could use a larger indent, a smaller font and quotation chevrons.
Overall, I like the look a lot. One criticism: in the related questions list, the white question score on a pale grey background is almost impossible to read.
First off, thanks a lot for the work so far, it looks pretty amazing. A few comments:
Love the color scheme, I certainly see the association with autumn, and semester start. I think it's pretty cool whether it was a design criteria or something that came up after you had an working concept already.
Logo: The concept with the books and the simplified representation is clean, neat and will work fine in many context, my only concern is whether or not it resembles the logo for the telecom company Ericsson. Although the coloring and the orientation of the bars create enough distinction, so I suppose it's not an issue really.
Logo text: I feel that the font used for 'ACADEMIA' is a bit weak when used side by side with the logo. The line height of the logo and the text is not the same, so that the text looks like the little sibling, both on height and weight. Considering that we are going with all caps I find it slightly disturbing geometrically. Maybe that's just me with my symmetry obsession. Did you consider experimenting with bolder fonts?
Badges: I was going to suggest that the "book" resemblance with the badges wasn't really coming through, but many have already commented on it. I love the mortarboard concept! :)
Main page: I agree with the previous assessments on the votes/answers are taking too much space in comparison with the title. Otherwise it's really nice
Question page: I also agree with the criticism regarding the use of fountain pen illustrations for up/down-votes. It both resembles Tex.SE and lacks any direct connection with doing research (IMHO). Unfortunately I don't have a better suggestion at this point. I will get back to this answer, if I do come up with something.
I have to mention that the general idea of a campus is a bit lost on me when I look at the main illustration. Despite being very crisp and elegant, I do not associate it with a campus, a university, or being a student/academic in any way.
Maybe an illustration with some items commonly used in academia could be a better fit? Some suggestions: a blackboard, a microscope, textbooks, computers...
Overall great stuff, looking forward to the end product :)
I find the question-page's low contrast quite tiring on the eyes. The question body text, and the "share | edit Edited ..." link text, aren't that comfortable to read.
Oh, and the circle of buildings on some of the swag just looks weird.
The text looks that awkward because it isn’t properly hinted. As hinting is done by your system anyway, it’s hard to say how this aspect will look like for you on the final site.
what @Wrzlprmft said. Photoshop really renders text poorly for mockup purpose. Real system font rendering will be more clear and readable.
I actually really like the circle buildings; Academia is multinational, and the graphic conveys that sense.
I have a thought regarding the up/down indicator. Since we spend most of our time grading, why not have a check mark for up, and an X for down. For an accepted answer (which used to have a check mark), we could instead use a gold star.
This will be very confusing for almost anybody used to other Stack Exchanges. Also, what do we do to with favorite questions?
Hmm. There is that.
What are the current up/down indicators? Pen nibs? That seems really off to me (maybe it varies by school or department, but I don't think I've ever seen anyone in academia use or discuss fountain pens), so I'd be happy if we could replace them with something else.
Note that the tick and cross symbols are not universal. For example, in Finland and Sweden, the tick symbol means "wrong". (OTOH, this is an English-langauge site and tick/cross seems standard in English-speaking contexts.)
@AnonymousMathematician I agree that it's not a strong association but I've known several academics who've used fountain pens and I used one myself for a while. On the other hand, I imagine the same would be true if I were in any other profession where people spend a reasonable amount of time writing.
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4501 | What is our stance regarding questions asking for survey of institution’s regulations?
What is our stance regarding questions asking for survey of institution’s regulations? Are they on-topic or off-topic?
For example, the question When an academic researcher receives a gift funding from an industry partner, does the academic researcher's university take a cut? asked for a survey
if the answer depends on the institution.
Ask for a survey = ask for pointers to existing surveys (I'm not talking about surveying Stack Exchange users).
I think you are asking about questions that are requesting a pointer to, and brief summary of, a somewhat difficult to find systematic evaluation of an aspect of academic life. As we all know, finding literature on a new topic can be hard, and very time consuming, if you don't know the right terms to search for. A good answer to such a question would either (1) provide a link to the study, a brief summary of the key findings, and maybe some of the key terms to help future searches in the area or (2) explain the key issues in the area, the relevant databases, and that a search of the those databases did not turn up anything. The answer might then go on to explain why such a study is difficult. A bad answer would say what an individuals experience is with a particular university, or small group of universities.
I think these types of questions are nominally within our scope. The problem is the questions tend to attract lots of bad answers and rarely provide good answers. They then often get swamped with attention and makes it hard for the community to manage them. I think a narrowly defined and clear question asking for leads regarding literature relating to academic life are on topic and should be left open. Broader and less clear questions should be actively closed and the OP encouraged to refine the question. Questions that are surveying the community about their experiences should be nuked.
Thanks. It looks like the question When an academic researcher receives a gift funding from an industry partner, does the academic researcher's university take a cut? was closed for the wrong reason then (""The answer to this question strongly depends on individual factors such as a certain person’s preferences, a given institution’s regulations, the exact contents of your work or your personal values. ") since a survey aims at giving a reflection of a diversity of situations. Do you agree?
@FranckDernoncourt I am lost. Should that question be [tag:reference-request]? If so maybe it is on topic, if not it seems more like a poll of our community. I am lost on the specific application of this meta question to your original question.
sounds good I added reference-request (I hadn't done so before as it's only a reference request if the answer depends on the university). Does this clarify the application of this meta question to my original question?
For a survey to be meaningful you need to make sure it is somehow representative for some well defined population. The answers such a question on this forum will illicit are very unlikely to get anywhere close to that. In that case it just becomes a shopping question and should be closed. This forum can answer many but not all interesting questions.
The way I understand the question is that there is a tradition on this forum to close shopping questions and Franck is of the opinion that this definition is too broad and results in closing potentially useful questions. In particular questions asking for survey of institution’s regulations. The idea is that each individual answer is too specific to be useful outside that particular institution, but all answers together give an overview of the kind of regulations available. So the key characteristic that differentiates such a survey question from a regular question, is that it is the entire collection of answers that gives useful information rather than the individual answers.
As stated in my answer above I don't think that this is a good idea: we know quite a bit about surveys, and this is really not the way to do it.
There are some high-quality answers to survey questions, e.g. Reference on availability of source code used in computer science research articles?. A question shouldn't be closed on the grounds that people might write some low quality / shopping answers.
The fear that some questions are low quality was not my argument. The argument was that the question cannot be answered. I suspect we are not talking about the same thing. I will edit my answer to define what I am talking about. If your question is about something else you can edit your question.
yes we're talking about different things. Ask for a survey = ask for pointers to existing surveys (I'm not talking about surveying Stack Exchange users), as exemplified in the link in my previous comment.
What do you think the value is in such a question? As i see it, it will just produce answers that are too specific to be of any use to anyone outside their institution.
A survey would give some trend amongst a fair amount of institutions: it wouldn't be specific to one institution.
Now I am confused, do you or do you not want a survey?
if the answer to the question depends on the University, then yes, I would like a survey.
Then my answer applies.
Your answer states "So the key characteristic that differentiates such a survey question from a regular question, is that it is the entire collection of answers that gives useful information rather than the individual answers." -> my point is that 1 answer can point to 1 survey. I'm not talking about having Stack Exchange users giving an answer specific to their institution.
OK, as you have seen it must be very carefully worded ad it is easily misunderstood.
"question asking for a survey" sounds to me quite different from a question surveying users. But anyway, how would you phrase it?
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3381 | What is our stance on questions asking about MOOCs?
What is our stance on questions asking about MOOCs? Are they on-topic or off-topic?
To put it otherwise, are MOOCs regarded as part of academia by this Stack Exchange community? (or do you prefer to wait a few years before?)
Also see Studying by MOOC on-topic or off?
It depends on what the question is about. Questions asking about pedagogy, organization, and similar matters that aren't course-specific are fine. Questions that are too closely tied to a given course are probably not, as would be questions that are platform-specific. ("How do I enable feature X in course Y?" is probably not appropriate.)
FYI see comments on this question for context.
In my view, MOOCs are services that are sometimes used in academia and sometimes used in a totally non-academic context (e.g. for self study for fun, for training in the workplace.)
I consider questions that are directly relevant to those using MOOCs in higher education to be on topic. I don't consider questions about MOOCs outside the context of academia or academic people to be on topic.
This seems consistent with the community history here. For example, is it possible to master one topic by starting with a MOOC course? was closed by the community for this reason.
I disagree that your view seems consistent with the community history. E.g., How are instructors compensated for teaching a Massive Open Online Course (MOOC)? was well received. (and it is about payment to the MOOC instructors, who are not necessarily affiliated with an university.) The question you linked to had other issues.
@FranckDernoncourt Clearly you are defining "within the context of academia" much more narrowly than me. The vast majority of MOOC instructors work at a college or university, and the content of that question indicates as much ("does teaching these come with compensation of any kind? Salary/bonus? Teaching load reduction? Release from service? Teaching assistants for the courses? I'm interested in compensation either from one's university or from the MOOC provider")
The study focused on Coursera and edX websites, which I think contains more academics than some other places. That being said, in my opinion, MOOCs are pretty much some online media to teach, and, I agree with you, often involving traditional, physical universities, so questions about MOOCs should be on-topic (aside from the issues that aeismail pointed out, which also apply to traditional universities). As a side note, I have always found pay-walled studies about MOOCs to quite quite ironical :/
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643 | Do we have spell checker?
There is at least one user on our site who constantly provides good/excellent answers. However, I can almost always find typos in his answers. Those typos do not impact the overall quality of the answers. Still, typos are typos.
I myself always want to have the spell checker available on our site. My workaround is to use my own word processor off-line to check the typos before I post an answer. This causes extra efforts.
My question is,
Do we have spell checker available on stack exchange sites? If yes, how do I use it? If not, why?
While I may be that user, Firefox has a built in spell check.
Use your browser’s built-in spellchecker. All three browsers I use (Firefox, Safari, Chrome) have it, and it does work for Stack Exchange's text boxes.
If you browser does not come with a spellchecker, there are free plugins for that.
I use IE. Believe or not, there are still many IE users.
@scaaahu I believe you, but I find it hard to believe that IE does not have a built-in spellchecker. Searching the web reveals that there are plenty of such free plugins, however
The computer I am using is Vista. I am using IE9. My problem is, the machine is my wife's. She can have it anytime she wants. I am retiree. No budget to get a new computer. My own one is XP. I cannot even install IE9.
@scaaahu another free spellchecker, compatible with Windows XP and IE ≥ 6
Thanks. I am going to try.
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5372 | How are "poor reviews" leading to Review suspension identified?
Because of a comment I recently had a look at some FAQs in the "help" section and stumbled upon
this post about review suspensions. It states the following:
Review suspensions are not penalties, but temporary holds on your reviewing privilege. The purpose of this is to give you time to learn more about how to review correctly. Poor reviews negatively affect the community and the site’s content. If you take incorrect action on multiple tasks, your reviewing privilege may be temporarily suspended and you won’t have access to the Review Queues during this time period.
So I wonder what constitutes a "poor review" that would end up getting a user suspended from reviewing. From how I understand reviewing, is is quite often subjective (IMO) and I would not necessarily consider someone who votes differently from myself to have voted wrong or to have poorly reviewed. Because very often, voting is not straightforward and opinion based, or hinging on small details. Also, in the overwhelming majority of voting, voters just use a preexisting voting button, making it hard to judge if someone just has a different opinion than other voters or if they really don't know what they are doing or being destructive on purpose.
So I am seriously interested in what makes a review a poor one and how this is judged. To me this feels like almost impossible to do. Or is this a remnant from earlier times and not really enforced anymore?
Review suspensions on this site are handed out manually by moderators. On other Stack Exchange sites, they can also be done automatically via review audits.
Review suspensions are usually issued for things like:
not reviewing blatant spam negatively,
accepting destructive edits,
systematically one-sided decisions, such as voting to leave open every question in the close queue because you think that closing questions is inherently wrong,
“robo-reviewing”, i.e., going through the queues as quickly as technically possibly to earn some badge or whatever,
consistently leaving misleading canned comments (from the low-quality queue), e.g., suggesting that questions posted as answers should be posted as comments.
So, it’s nothing that I would consider very subjective. If you review honestly and diligently, there is little chance you will even get near a review ban.
Fortunately, we rarely need to review-ban users on this site, but it does happen. By the way: If you suspect any bad review patterns, please feel free to cast a custom flag (on any related post).
Regarding the first case, is R/A flag considered spam flag? For example, there was a post I raised R/A flag because it was Chat-GPT-sh. Then the OP added spam link. I could not retract the flag because both spam and R/A flags are red flags. So, did my action fall into the first case in your answer ?
Also, we had a weird case today that a user sent an answer which looked spammy, but no spam link. Later, the user added spam link in the comment section, it became an obvious spam. What action should I take when I reviewed it before the user added the comment ? What would the mods do if I gave it "Looks OK" ?
@Nobody: I don’t think any moderator would even consider review-suspending you for any of this. What you shouldn’t do is choose Looks OK for something that is obviously spam, gibberish, or blatantly off scope at the moment you are making this choice.
Got it. I think your keyword is "at the moment". Thanks.
Thank you for the detailed answer! And just to clarify, I didnt really feel in danger of being blocked for doing a poor job at reviewing, just genuinely curious.
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1048 | Problem with tag editing window
I just noticed in editing a tag wiki entry the following interface "bug." Note that the text entry window overlaps with the "What is a tag wiki excerpt" text at right. Resizing the window does nothing to eliminate the overlap.
@balpha: Why isn't this also a "user-interface" issue?
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3755 | How should questions about citation managers be tagged?
I have notice that there is a separate tag reference-managers with the following tag-excerpt: "Questions related to various reference/citation management software used for recording and utilising bibliographic citations."
However, it seems that some questions about citations managers are tagged by (citations) and (software) instead of (or in addition to) the tag (reference-managers).
What is the correct way to tag questions of this type? Should we use all three tags? Or perhaps reference-managers and citations (if reference-manages would be considered as "a subtag" of citations)?
Should we add the tag reference-managers to older questions about this topic which do not use this tag in order to make them easier to find? (Perhaps they were asked before the tag was created - or maybe simply the OP was unaware of the tag.)
There is no agreed consensus on this. SE has no concept of "sub-tags", for now. If you are below the 5-tag limit, I suggest using all three, which is the most helpful choice.
If you must choose, I would go with the most specific one, because it looks like the most helpful one to a potential searcher. (In addition, doing this is future-proof: it does the right thing automatically if sub-tags and taxonomies are added to the platform one day.)
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1178 | Should we create a "shopping question" closure tag?
Given that we get a lot of "shopping questions" that we have decided are off-topic, should we create a custom off-topic close reason along those lines?
For instance, we could have a reason such as:
Shopping questions asking for recommendations for specific programs and universities are considered off-topic on Academia.SE.
Note that we can only have 3 custom off-topic close reasons, currently they are "cannot be generalized", "undergraduate", and "specific advice". If you want a new reason, please also mention which reason it should replace/modify.
I think the site needs such close-reason tags, because not only will help the users to find why the question is closed; but also the asker will have the chance to see other questions like his question and understand why his question is closed. Despite the moderation benefits this tag (and also similar tags) has, it will help users (specially newer users) to become more familiar with the website policies.
I agree that currently, there is no single close reason that applies universally to shopping questions.
Sometimes they are too localized or seek specific advice for a very specific situation ("Here is my profile, what university should I attend?") but not always.
Sometimes they are too broad or have too many potential answers ("I want to do an M.S. in Computer Science, which universities should I apply to?") but not always.
Sometimes they are opinion based ("What are the best departments for this subfield?") but not always.
Sometimes they are none of these things, but just straight-up shopping ("Is there an inexpensive online MS in CS that's a reputable degree?")
I often find myself closing shopping questions with "off topic"->"Other (add comment)" and writing out a comment with a link to this meta post. I would very much like to see a "real" close reason for shopping questions.
I would suggest to replace the undergrad close reason, since I find myself closing "shopping" questions a lot more often than undergrad questions.
I don't think we need a closure reason, but we could modify the help center to make this cleaner so that when we suggest people look at the help center there is a clear example.
That was what UL did
As a lower rep user I try to flag off-topic questions as much as I can. Of the ones that I believe to be shopping questions I usually flag in the other for moderators attention box with a note saying I think it's a shopping question. I am not sure if I am putting undue work on to the moderators by doing it this way. I think either a close reason as per aeismail's suggestion might be a good idea or alternatively a community decision on using one of the other closing reasons for such questions.
@CharlesMorisset I didn't know the mod had sole decision on a question flagged this way. I agree with the sentiment that it's better that the community takes care of these questions. I'll be wary of flagging by moderator attention in future. As an aside I was one of those user that lost my close vote privileges after beta.
Flagging a question as "needs ♦ moderator attention" because it is potentially off-topic is not generally desirable behaviour (cf. http://academia.stackexchange.com/help/privileges/flag-posts) since it only alerts diamond mods to the issue. Much better is a down vote and comment or mentioning it on chat to call attention to all high rep users. The best would be to post a few more high quality questions and answers and get your vote to close privileges back.
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517 | Questions about Computer Science - please, make it explicit
There is an abundance of questions relating to Computer Science, which is great.
However, when a question is discipline-dependent, IMHO it is crucial to advertise this fact in the title (unless it's otherwise clear) AND in tags (in this case: computer-science).
Otherwise many questions and answers for things like publishing and conferences are misleading, as (in some cases) practices vary among disciplines (and in some cases, e.g. publishing=conferences, CS is rather an exception than a typical example).
Do you agree with it? Or do you propose an alternative approach to this issue?
(That said, I think that discipline-dependent questions are important.)
@AndyW No, it is clearly not a duplicate. I don't say that we should require tag questions by the asking person (as they may be less aware of the tagging specifics plus now aware whether the issue is general or issue-specific (perhaps except some related to funding in US)).
The discussion is more general than whether tags are required or not in the prior questions, it is about whether we should have discipline related tags at all. No need to repeat ourselves about a topic that has come up multiple times. Feel free to add to those discussions, they are currently in the negative in regards to discipline specific tags but not strongly so.
Care to share a misleading example? I agree it occurs, whether it occurs enough to justify a set of meta tags is another issue. How conferences and their proceedings are treated in CS is not that confusing IMO!
@AndyW If you add "in CS" its great. But for example in most other disciplines (e.g. mathematics, physics, biology, ...) their function is very different (i.e. they are for dissemination, but not for publishing, and if some publishing occurs, it is of secondary aim & value.)
I know! Social sciences are slightly different as well, with differences between peer-reviewed, and invited proceedings, and open proceedings, so whats the point (this doesn't intrinsically make things I say about conferences in my field misleading about conferences in other fields)? We can find various minute differences between fields all we want, how is being clear in questions and answers about the discipline or where an answer applies any different than other aspects of the question? I've already stated why I'm opposed to discipline specific tags in the linked question.
I thought we discussed discipline related tags in the past. All I can find is a question about country-related tags
I do not think discipline/country related tags are appropriate because I think they lead to bad/narrow answers. My feeling is that knowing what is done in a particular field in the absence of context is not particularly valuable. Instead of an answer that says "In CS we do X", I would like to see answers that describe X, Y, and Z along with their advantages and disadvantages.
With the broader context in place, if the OP asks about a specific field and you know the answer to that field, you could add something like: "You asked specifically about CS, where it is generally done by method X." This would hopefully be such a small part of the answer that if you don't know someone else could easily edit your answer to add the field specific answer.
On contrary, I think that discipline-related questions (of course, if the answer depends on the discipline) are crucial. Otherwise we will end up with questions too general (with large variance of answers, and in fact being of little use, or sometimes - misleading) or to localized (all of type "here is my life story, what I should do in that specific case").
@PiotrMigdal I didn't say the discipline related questions were bad. I said that tagging them as X is bad since it will result in narrow answers.
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441 | Merge "Citations" and "bibliography" tags?
Is there a distinction between the citations and bibliography tags? Both refer to either citing something or adding it to the bibliography, which are essentially one task (everything cited is added to the bibliography). Are there any counter-examples or edge cases I missed? Can these be merged?
The citations tag is written up as
Queries related to citing or referencing published or unpublished sources.
used for questions about citing and citations, not necessarily in th econtext of a bibliography (reference list). The Bibliography tag says
Questions related to the structure, building and typesetting of a bibliography comes under this tag. Bibliography is an organized
So both are useful as I see it. I think that the citations tag may be used wrong and so there is probably reasons for checking tagging more carefully. There are also quite a few tag wikis that are not written up which may contribute to confuion since it is unclear what they represent.
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3961 | Community Promotion Ads - 2018
It's almost February in 2018, which isn't supposed to be the proper time to cycle these, but for this year it'll be once again, so we'll be refreshing the Community Promotion Ads for this year now!
What are Community Promotion Ads?
Community Promotion Ads are community-vetted advertisements that will show up on the main site, in the right sidebar. The purpose of this question is the vetting process. Images of the advertisements are provided, and community voting will enable the advertisements to be shown.
Why do we have Community Promotion Ads?
This is a method for the community to control what gets promoted to visitors on the site. For example, you might promote the following things:
the site's twitter account
academic websites and resources
interesting campus story blogs
cool events or conferences
anything else your community would genuinely be interested in
The goal is for future visitors to find out about the stuff your community deems important. This also serves as a way to promote information and resources that are relevant to your own community's interests, both for those already in the community and those yet to join.
Why do we reset the ads every year?
Some services will maintain usefulness over the years, while other things will wane to allow for new faces to show up. Resetting the ads every year helps accommodate this, and allows old ads that have served their purpose to be cycled out for fresher ads for newer things. This helps keep the material in the ads relevant to not just the subject matter of the community, but to the current status of the community. We reset the ads once a year, every December.
The community promotion ads have no restrictions against reposting an ad from a previous cycle. If a particular service or ad is very valuable to the community and will continue to be so, it is a good idea to repost it. It may be helpful to give it a new face in the process, so as to prevent the imagery of the ad from getting stale after a year of exposure.
How does it work?
The answers you post to this question must conform to the following rules, or they will be ignored.
All answers should be in the exact form of:
[![Tagline to show on mouseover][1]][2]
[1]: http://image-url
[2]: http://clickthrough-url
Please do not add anything else to the body of the post. If you want to discuss something, do it in the comments.
The question must always be tagged with the magic community-ads tag. In addition to enabling the functionality of the advertisements, this tag also pre-fills the answer form with the above required form.
Image requirements
The image that you create must be 300 x 250 pixels, or double that if high DPI.
Must be hosted through our standard image uploader (imgur)
Must be GIF or PNG
No animated GIFs
Absolute limit on file size of 150 KB
If the background of the image is white or partially white, there must be a 1px border (2px if high DPI) surrounding it.
Score Threshold
There is a minimum score threshold an answer must meet (currently 6) before it will be shown on the main site.
You can check out the ads that have met the threshold with basic click stats here.
Could we get an option to vote for "no ads"?
@FedericoPoloni I think then we just get auto ads. As it stands, none of the ads have enough votes to run.
@StrongBad I mean, "no ads", not "ads automatically chosen by the SE network". Just nothing in the page instead of a community ad.
@FedericoPoloni I guess I can't see the objection to ads in general. The ads are very unobtrusive and I can't picture a negative to almost any community approved content being displayed.
@Tyberius That's just, like, your opinion. Mine is different. A big block of green or orange/blue looks quite distracting to me, and it pushes down further into the page other content that I am interested in. Since ultimately no one gains money from these ads, I find quite pointless to have them displayed very prominently in the home page.
@FedericoPoloni thats understandable. I was just curious of your reasoning. It should arguably be an option then, though the question then becomes what the criteria would need to be for that option to win.
This is a demonstration post to indicate how this should look when an ad is posted. It also doubles as your twitter ad, but it's up to you if you wish to promote it by voting
I love the Physics Overflow concept! That said, there're a few implementation shortcomings that make it difficult to up-vote the ads just yet. The largest is just that account migration isn't so convenient. It seems like you'd have a lot better conversion rates if it were just a few clicks to extend one's account, or at least the question of migration were addressed more clearly.
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798 | Why was this answer locked and deleted?
The answer at https://academia.stackexchange.com/a/17086/64 has 19 upvotes and no downvotes, and yet was locked by Community then deleted.
I'm not pushing for the answer to be unlocked and undeleted. I'm just curious to know why it was locked and deleted in the first place.
@CharlesMorisset Yes, I think it was automatically deleted following the failed migration (otherwise, the deletion would explicitly appear in the moderators' timeline view)
I undeleted the answer, as I couldn't find any good reason for it to be removed.
Thank you for the response.
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188 | Are US-specific questions OK?
Are questions that are US-specific on-topic on this site? (i.e., only relevant to academia in the United States)
(Do people want to see those kinds of questions tagged or marked in any particular way?)
What would make a question US-centric?
@DanielE.Shub, a question might be US-specific e.g., because it is only likely to be of interest to US readers, and/or because only US readers are likely to be able to answer it. Anyway, I think I got my answer. Thank you!
Yes, these questions are fine. As of now we're not tagging these questions specifically as such; just indicate the target audience in the question.
US specific questions are fine. They're frustrating when a question doesn't indicate that it is US specific, when it in fact is. It is a sign of cultural and institutional arrogance not to indicate the culture of institutional-system for which your question or answer applies.
Ideally, if the site's traffic is high, system specific questions should be tagged to allow users to ignore or favourite tags.
Ideally, we might think about whether each particular question that appears to be system specific, is, in fact a useful opportunity to supply a full answer for all major systems.
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118 | Health of the site
I was looking over our stats on area 51, and we're doing poorly on two counts: #questions/day and number of visits. I'm more concerned about the latter than the former for now (because fixing the latter will probably fix the former).
I was hoping this could become an open thread for ideas on how to boost the visit numbers, so we don't go the way of econ.SE and theoreticalphysics.SE.
And if a mod could make this CW, I'd appreciate it.
I think the visits will grow once the application season starts in Aug-Sep. Google should automatically lead students to ASE :)
But we'd like more than just grad applicants, I think.
One of the stats you see on area51 is the number of daily users. If you've been watching that number, it's been steadily rising over the past few months. There are a few mod tools that show statistics, and it definitely looks like we're growing, albeit pretty slowly. I don't think we're at immediate risk of being shut down.
That being said, we could probably benefit significantly from some in-house advertising. Personally, I'm a fan of posting flyers, as they're cheap, easy to post, and pretty visible (in the right areas). I posted a pretty mediocre one earlier, and if anyone else wants to make one that looks more professional (or less professional, I'm not judging you) please go ahead.
One of the highlighted questions on the SE blog was from biology.SE that has worse/comparable stats. Not sure what to make of that :). I did notice the slow growth in #users, but it's hard to see if this is a permanent trend
@Suresh - Well, the site is only ~2½ months old, so it's hard to tell "permanent" trends, but it's definitely steady growth.
We just got highlighted on the SE G+ feed. maybe that will help. https://plus.google.com/101120115153580954446/posts/VMk99beDA7K
I think the causation is reciprocal, but that "we" can choose to ask more questions.
Web traffic ultimately tends to largely be driven by Google. And this is generated by having lots of unique and high quality content. If you look at http://stackexchange.com/sites#questionsperday you'll see that the ratio of questions to visits seems fairly predictable. It does vary, presumably based on the content domain, but as a rough ballpark it is often around 1 visit per day for each question on the site.
Thus, I think active users should be encouraged to ask more questions. The site has an excellent answer rate. I don't think the site would be overwhelmed.
I notice that there are some members - especially those with very high 'scores' - who have 50x as many answers as questions.
Perhaps those members, who clearly know a lot, could be encouraged to ask questions for which they already know the answers. After all SE sites allow you to answer your own question.
Also, in case anyone feels it is being arrogant to post a question you already know the answer to, I would say that my greatest concerns are that I might not even know enough to know which questions I should be asking and I would not consider it arrogant to ask and answer a question that you know many people should be asking.
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4217 | Should this question on the OSF system be reopened?
There is a closed question on the OSF system: Is there a way to move a preprint from one service to another within the OSF system? that has spawned a number of comments as well as two meta questions:
Are questions asking technical issues on academic services on-topic?
Is there a consensus if there is only indirect evidence?
Both meta questions are quite general and I am not able to understand how to interpret the votes in regards to reopening the original question.
I am not sure another meta questions (i.e., this one) is really needed since there does not seem to be conflicting votes: it is not as if the question has been closed and then reopened and then closed again.
I guess I am asking because I would like to bring closure (even if that means reopening the question) to the issue.
Shouldn't people just use reopen votes on the question to reopen it, if they think it should be reopened?
@ff524 I think, if people upvote on (1) but don't vote to reopen it, then there must be some conflicts that make them not doing so?
In case the number of votes on the yes answer doesn't outnumber the no answer, then we will have a consensus problem here ;)
@Ooker I voted to re-open before. That vote expired. I voted to re-open again and upvoted the yes answer. This is the best I can do. Let's see what's going to happen.
@scaaahu thanks. As I'm its OP, I won't vote (or didn't vote) on any answers on these meta questions to avoid bias
Yes, this question is a good fit for our community and should be reopened.
No, this question is not a good fit for our community and should be left closed.
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3417 | What should we call our chat room
Our chat room has the default name of academia. Some sites have come up with creative names for their chat rooms. It was suggested that we rename our chat room.
Should we rename our chat room and if so to what?
UPDATE the chat room has been renamed. We can change it again whenever we want, so keep proposing names and keep voting for the ones you like.
Suggestion on the procedure from experience: Should one wish to keep the current name, add another answer defending this option to be voted upon.
I propose The Ivory Tower, as this is the place where academics of all sorts clichéically and metaphorically live.
As much of academia (profs, TAs) has them (or uses them in the case of undergrads), another option might be 'Office Hours.'
What about the common room?
Exist[s] to provide representation in the organisation of college or
residential hall life, to operate certain services within these
institutions [...], and to provide opportunities for socialising.
Seems to cover it to me. Every UK university I tried Googling used it (or a derivative such as JCR, MCR and/or SCR) in some form, most in the above sense (Bristol, Cambridge, Durham, Exeter, Kent, Lancaster, Leicester, Nottingham, Oxford, Reading, St Andrews, Southampton, York, UCL, Birmingham, Hull), some as the name of a physical social space (Imperial) or events facility (Cardiff). Some universities have named their online student communities or e-learning sites after it (Manchester).
It is also used in the US, although less common. Where used it seems to carry similar connotations, for instance the stated purpose of MIT's recently opened Quantum Information Science (QIS) Common Room is as a
venue for impromptu technical discussions and [...] social
events
(link).
My only concern is that it might be biased towards the UK and other English-speaking countries.
Before visiting a university in the UK I thought that was a Harry Potter thing.
@Davidmh Yes, I've just edited to mention that one downside is that it might only really make sense to UK people. It is occasionally used in the US, Canada and Australia (if Wikipedia is to be trusted) but it's less common.
If we're leaning a little more towards a research theme we could go with The Lab.
I'm sorry I wasn't able to get your homeworks graded today, I was up late working in the lab.
If there isn't at least a spectrum analyser, it's not a lab :-p
@MassimoOrtolano The high-containment virus labs here would beg to differ :)
To throw another suggestion into the den:
The social event typically¹ refers to the excursion or similar at conferences, where attendees can talk about things other than the topic of the conference.
¹ at least in the my fields
I propose... ehm, cough cough... The procrastinators' den.
I think this title can apply to virtually any chat room on the Stack Exchange network, though :)
[productivity.se]’s chatroom is already called Procrastination Station.
@Wrzlprmft Ach, they beat me by far.
I'll vote for this when I get around to it; after writing my exam questions, doing the next set of powerpoints; completing the textbook draft, but first I'll just have this cup of coffee and read ....
@Wrzlprmft ...which hasn't had activity for the past 86 days. They really need to learn how to procrastinate over there ;-)
Let's go all Oxbridge and make it a Senior Common Room....
Oxbridge is a shorthand for "Universities like Oxford or Cambridge" - c.f. Ivy League. Senior Common Room implies "no undergraduates" in such institutions, and thus matches the remit for Academia.SE
I propose The Quad as they are often a popular hangout on university campuses.
Reminds me of the discussion about our site design... just as with the campus clock tower, a Quad seems to me to be a very specifically US thing.
@StephanKolassa they are common in at least the US, UK, and Australia, but I am not sure about non English speaking universities.
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161 | Are questions about preparing for industry on topic?
Lots of people go to "grad school" to get a job in "industry", where industry might include business (MBA), medicine (MD), and law (JD). Even many who are pursuing a PhD want an industry job afterwards. Are questions about how to use grad school to prepare for an industry job on topic? Has this been discussed already?
faq of Workplace SE states that "Questions should be about problems you are encountering or have encountered in the workplace, and not the learning/applying of specific job functions." Please see http://workplace.stackexchange.com/faq
@scaaahu I removed the comment about workplace.sx. Clearly they are not the right place.
I believe that such questions are on-topic. However, remember the general principle that your question should not be specific to you: make sure that your formulation allows other people to benefit from your answer. If you have any doubts, you could post a sample version of your question here before sending it to the main board. . . .
I agree. I think academia.SE is likely to be one of the best places to find answers for these questions.
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307 | "Don't walk. Run." tag
In the spirit of JeffE's frequent answer, do we need a "Don't walk. Run." tag. It really is such a simple and great answer and I could imagine wanting to easily find all the questions about things that should be run away from.
In the end this can cover everything in academia, if the advice was followed by enough people this would lead to lots of people running (probably in circles, while screaming) with no certain direction until they fall out of academia (for the good or for the bad). I think we would also need a tag: "Keep calm and ___" to compensate.
I like JeffE's "Don't walk. Run." phrase too.
However, it is not a good candidate for a tag as:
it describes an answer, not a questions,
it is a subjective, meta-tag.
On the other hand, IMHO adding a tag like personal-conflicts or interpersonal-issues would be beneficial.
I agree (except for the first sentence). I like JeffE's "Don't walk. Run." comment. But I don't see the relevance of making it a tag.
@JoelReyesNoche Sorry, I meant "I like [...] phrase too.". Clarified.
I think "[tag:abuse]" would be a better choice for tag.
Also, wouldn't we then have to delineate "Don't walk, run.", "Don't walk. Run." and "Don't walk. RUN!!!" tags?
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5332 | Moderation strike
There is currently a moderation strike on this site:
Academia.SE Moderation Strike
Which is part of a moderation strike network-wide: Moderation Strike: Stack Overflow, Inc. cannot consistently ignore, mistreat, and malign its volunteers
Normally this type of key information about AC.SE would be posted in meta and featured on the main site. The community deserves to know when big changes are happening.
But since SE employees are taking it upon themselves to circumvent the community standards, and removing the featured tag, I thought it would be appropriate to post that information here.
Note: this was originally posted to the main site since the company's leadership was suppressing meta posts about the strike. The strike has since finished successfully, and so we have decided to move the post to meta so as to keep it around long-term without introducing confusion on the main site.
Full support! Corporate SE must understand that the community is front and center.
Since I'm the GOAT presently, let me agree with the concerns of the moderators. Large language models, not just ChatGPT, can do a lot of damage here, since they have neither intelligence nor a moral sense.
"Academia" moderator should know better. Working for free for a for-profit company ( https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prosus ) is bound to a lot of suffering.
Hey, wait, the Academia is the same structure that provides the big editors free peer reviews, after making extremely expensive to publish open-access!
@BryanKrause I know. I have been in the first programmers helping Couchsurfing to grow so big. And I have been burned repeatedly. See here a long trip, which is the reoad that SE is undergoing:
https://brenontheroad.com/the-end-of-couchsurfing/
@BryanKrause Have you mods ever used "Academic Freedom" to reject their policy to decide what to say and what not to say on this site ? We are Academia.SE after all.
@Nobody StackExchange/StackOverflow own this website, it's their property, we have no enforceable right to such freedom here. However, and my fellow mods likely agree with me, I see this site as very useful to fellow academics, and have put a lot of effort towards keeping it that way. The protest is not "bad company is bad!", the protest is "this policy will destroy our community." I feel it is best for the quality of content here, and therefore best for the company, that they listen and change course on this policy.
Whatever do you mean by "moderation strike?" Do you mean that if I post something that is not ordinarily on the accepted opinion list that it won't get silently deleted?
@BobaFit - I only see one of your answers that was deleted by a moderator, the first sentence of which was "it's not an answer to your question, but....". If you're referring to comments, yes, it is well known that comments are ephemeral; the answer box and chat are the places to put things that you don't want to be "silently deleted."
@BobaFit no guarantees, but the elected mods have said they will not do cleanup while on strike. Users can still do what they want and the SE employees can also. That said, I would guess the SE team will have their hands full.
Right this second, this is the top question on the network hot list, so well done @StrongBad
This is really a clever way to circumvent it. Joined here in solidarity. +1.
@Nobody my guess is that if the community votes to close it, others will vote to reopen it. If a CM comes in with a hammer, then there is less we can do.
@StrongBad Thanks for the advice. Our site got three spam posts in 5 hours today. I just left a comment on Meta.SE to warn them SE would become the heaven for the spammers if this thing continues.
@Nobody I doubt they care. SO has something like half the mods on strike and no bots to cleanup spam.
Is utilizing the site currently by submitting new questions something that would "cross the picket line" so to speak? I do not want my actions to impede this effort, or call into question my solidarity with those striking. I'm more than happy to log off until this is resolved, if that is meant to be a part of it.
@ChristopherRodriguez I think posting questions/answers is not part of the strike, only moderation actions (like voting, flagging, review queues, etc)
@Esther Alright, thanks for the clarity!
Great move here. SE has been removing the Hot Meta Posts block on some sites in response to these posts getting hot after being unfeatured. Either they're unaware that they can manually remove posts from that block or they did so deliberately to keep those items out of post histories.
@gparyani I agree it is not a good look with the timing, but at this point looking at the bug reports on MSE it does not seem this was intentional (see comments like https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/389886/hot-meta-posts-section-is-no-more#comment1300841_389886 ). Unfeaturing meta posts has been intentional, however.
To me, the real question is whether a federated open-source alternative exists (i.e. what's the Mastodon to SE's Twitter?), because there's nothing like actual competition to scare a company into doing the right thing.
@ShernRenTee the open-source alternative exists: Codidact, founded by users that left during the previous debacle.
even as non academics i value stackexchange sites as where people help other people, if you want to make people check AI's generated text or something like that do that elsewhere , not here
@openletter.mousetail.nl -- Excellent idea for a bounty. Someone please write an answer that fully explains the situation! Well worth the bounty and upvotes.
Note that Phillipe has just recently posted GPT on the platform: Data, actions, and outcomes on the network Meta site. I've read it, and recommend anybody else who's interested in some of the reasons for the company's actions, at least among those that they can provide publicly, also read it.
good to know - following
"SX/SE own this site" - yes, the legal documents claim they own it. It's not like the millions of people who contributed for free to these sites for over a decade, and are mainly responsible for making the network what it is today, had any real choice in the matter. You can argue that unfair contracts should be disregarded even if valid, and judges sometimes void contracts when they feel enforcing it is against the public interest.
If anybody else had posted something like this here it would be immediately downvoted, closed and possibly the user reprimanded, for not posting this in meta. So its ok to post things like these when it fits certain narratives? Why not do the same on all stackexchange sites?
@user13267 I think we might be the only stack with all moderators on strike so it is really important news, regardless of if you support the strike or not. The CMs un-featured the meta post, so we are on uncharted ground here about how to get news out. Finally there are no mods to reprimand me :) If the post gets deleted or I get suspended, so be it.
Doesn't really justify it
I do support the strike, but do not support posting questions like this as it will be slippery slope. I believe removing featured from the meta posts by staff is vandalism as I commented under Philippe's post on MSE. But we don't need to scope down to that level.
@user13267: "Doesn't really justify it" Well, that's the point about a moderation strike, isn't it? It doesn't matter if a post is justified or appropriate - if moderators and many other users refuse to perform moderation tasks, the post just stays open.
@JochenGlueck Here's something to think about, if it is some other agenda or cause that I want to raise awareness to, but something the 3 or whatever number of moderators this website has do not agree with, will I be allowed to post something similar here or not? If not why shouldn't I be?
@user13267: It's not only about the opinion of the three (fromerly four, one resigned recently) moderators of this site, though. There are currently 463 users with at least 3000 reputation on this site and each of them has the right to cast close- and reopen-votes. Five votes suffice to close the question and five reopen-votes are then necessary to reopen it again. As far as I've seen, this post has been closed once so far and very quickly been reopened. The post wouldn't have a chance of staying open if it weren't for hundreds of users who clearly support this, as you call it, "agenda".
(In fact, after the question was closed it was reopened within less than an hour, and none of the five users who voted to reopen it was a moderator.)
@JochenGlueck Still doesn't make it right, just shows that some people with enough reputation to vote to close or delete support this agenda, and the rest either don't care or don't want to get involved. And it doesn't answer my question either. If I have a cause, a valid cause, that I want to raise awareness to which these people don't agree with, will I be able to post something similar? And if not why shouldn't I be?
@user13267 my guess is if your cause was "feature' worthy and the CMs suppressed it, a post like this would be acceptable. My guess is also that your "cause" would not be important enough to the community to make an exception.
@user13267: Another thing that would normally be "immediately downvoted, closed and possibly the user reprimanded" would be a long series of discursive, argumentative, and repetitive comments -- but with the moderators on strike, look, they're allowed to stand.
@StrongBad I see so there are some causes that are important enough that posts like these would be warrented and some not. But only a select few users are special enough who get to decide which is which
@DanielR.Collins so anyone commenting that they disagree with some agenda being pushed by a certain group of users (and mind you just comments, not a post that belongs on meta but has been forcefully posted on the main site just because certain users think that they are important enough to get away with it) is considered "discursive, argumentative, and repetitive". Got it. That's how it normally happens in academia SE I suppose.
@user13267 again, if you post your issue on meta, get it featured, get it un-featured by CMs, then it might be reasonable to post on the main site. I also did not think I would get away with it. I thought a CM would either delete or migrate the post and possibly suspend me. Failing that I thought regular users would downvote and close the question. As it stands there are only 5 down votes and 5 votes to close. The community apparently does not think that I have abused the system.
I think you think this is reasonable because you yourself are needing to do it now. Under different circumstances, had some other user posted something like this before now, i dont think you would have been feeling the same way. And as some one commented above, this question was closed first to be repoened later, just because moderators dont want to do the job they volunteered for, which is move something like this to meta. Just because the company staff removed the featured tab doesn't mean a meta post now belongs on the main site
as to your comment about closing, someone commented above that the question was closed, just reopened later. And as i replied to it that doesn't justify anything, "just shows that some people with enough reputation to vote to close or delete support this agenda, and the rest either don't care or don't want to get involved."
@user13267 we have never had a CM remove a feature tag before and we have never been without moderators before. Even ignoring the uniqueness of the situation, as a former moderator here, I don't know what I would do with this question. It is clearly off topic and it is clear the community wants it on the main page. I would probably ask on meta to solicitate opinions about what to do (migrate, delete, historical lock, etc).
if "It is clearly off topic" it clearly shouldn't have been posted here in the first place. if you were a former moderator I think you very well know that this should have been posted on meta, feature tag or not. And its not like there are no moderators, they just dont want to do what they do normally. so assume a normal day scenario where all the mods were unavailable for a certain period of time. That wouldn't have made posting something like this any more justifiable.
And the word "community" keeps being thrown out a lot whenever an agenda is being pushed like this on SE. Like i said already, the fact that this post didn't get reclosed or deleted does nothing to justify it. it only shows that a group of people with enough reputation to close/delete want to keep it open, and a lot of the others dont care to get involved. Doesn't mean there aren't many users who disagree with it. I myself would have voted to close if I had enough reputation instead of dragging out the comment section
There once was a site StackExchange
Which did well-writ answers arrange
A corps of free mods
Would even the odds
Against porn and spam and 'net rage
One day to the website did ride
The Large Language Models blank-eyed
While they did perchance
Write like (noob) humans
They oft bullshitted far and wide
At first StackExchange said, "No way!
No AI answer can display
The hard-earned merit
And empathic wit
Of a real human's repartee."
But then the mods heard from on high:
"We now take answers from AI!"
No reason was given
For this fall from 'net heaven
Just orders to change and comply
Receiving such stone-faced rebuff
The mods can but show themselves tough:
Until management
Should cleanly repent
The mods' great lights shall stay snuffed!
Was this written by a human or AI?
Either way, it is amazing. If I were StrongBad, I think I'd accept this answer when the time comes....
It was written by a neural network. Not saying which sort. ;) what do the GPT-detectors think?
Nobody knows what the GPT detectors think, because all of us stopped using them back in December 2022.
To be clear, a human brain is also a "neural network", so the above comment is a joke, not an admission that this post was AI-generated.
I am "NotAMod(tm)" and ZeroGPT thinks "Your Text is Human written - 0% AI GPT*"
@cag51 - can you please not murder the jokes by explaining them? I know this is academia, the realm of unfunny, but still...
Normally I would agree, but this page is being visited by SE staff, and I would not want them to mis-interpret the above comment as an admission rather than a joke.
I feel like an AI would find better rhymes than "arrange / rage" or "management / repent". But maybe that's proof of an AI writing it? I'm genuinely curious what others' experiences are of how strict / loose AI gets with rhymes.
@Davor I'm baffled that many people find explaining jokes to be murdering them. For me it's the exact opposite, it makes it much better by highlighting all the cleverness in the joke!
@justhalf - explaining why something is funny instantly makes it not funny anymore. That's why you'll never see a comedian explaining their jokes.
@justhalf How is telling a joke like skydiving without a parachute? Well, if you have to ex-plane ...
But you have to ex-plane in order to sky dive, no? =)
Writing an answer in hopes that it helps the algorithm to make this question network famous
Success!
6/7/23 (after close and reopen of this question):
Still available on 6/8/23, the puzzling stackexchange post is no longer on front page tho.
6/9/23: No longer on HNQ :c
Generally, the easiest way for a question to hit Hot Network Questions is when it is well-received (e.g., lots of positive votes) and has multiple well-received answers. I suspect answers posted by community members would be well-received if they explain why they support allowing local communities at Academia.SE and other SE sites to set their own quality standards, or explain why they feel unattributed AI-generated content is contrary to academic ethics and/or the quality of content on this site.
I came here from the hot network questions, so I believe your efforts have worked
Given that SE staff is actively unfeaturing posts about the strike, will efforts to keep this on the Hot Network Questions list mean anything?
Hum, is this another Here we go again –
OrangeDog towards a Mods cleanup!
Sadly, this post was briefly closed (by Academia.SE users, not by staff), and so is no longer an HNQ. Even so, it had a good run -- already the 10th-highest-scoring post of all time on this stack.
@cag51 it's back!
I'm posting to point out at this writing that @StrongBad's question is the top network hot post. Plus, thanks to @StrongBad's return, they immediately became the #1 top network asker. So, well done crafting this.
(And it's only secondarily that I accidentally bumped this question from the top of SE Academia and wish to make penance.)
Thanks @StrongBad for bringing this to the main page by these means, an excellent idea! I am very sad that a few people on top are making such bad decisions that are so disruptive for a great community and Ressource that I have been very happy and grateful to have joined and discovered.
Let's hope that this strike has a positive outcome! And as others gave said, non-moderators, join in on the striking!
IMO this is an excellent idea and I think this development has potential to greatly improve the site.
Is there a chance the strike could spread to other sites on the network as well, so that they could benefit from its positive consequences?
Also, I think an even more efficient way to provoke action from SX management would be to popularize competing, alternative sites. It's not 2008 anymore when StackOverflow was the only game in town. Lots of other people have copied the model, even improving the software, their only disadvantage is being dwarfed by SO/SX's pre-existing reputation. I'm sure word of mouth would naturally drive users away from here to better managed sites, but this strike is a great opportunity to accelerate that.
Kind off topic answer, but I'm expecting no downvotes since there is a moderation strike :)
Indeed, the strike is already active on many sites, though it’s perhaps more visible here since all of our mods are on board. As for alternative sites, there are a few, but it’s hard to build a user base from zero.
@cag51 StackOverflow itself was built from zero, once. I think there's plenty of users here who would happily use something else if they were only aware of it. My point was that now is a good time to spread knowledge about alternatives to people who don't know about them. Reaching critical mass is also much easier when everyone is interested in alternatives at the same time, as they are now.
I'm amazed by the number of strikebreakers on this website. I was sure there would be, I wasn't expecting that many and that intense strikebreaking. The rest of SE demonstrates the same trend. If we strike, we must not give up and "get back to work". Having said that, I'm thinking what to do if we loose. And with that in mind, your post comes in really handy. I have never heard of the alternatives to SE. Would you mind listing them in your post please @gomennathan?
@gomennathan 76 sites have some moderator(s) striking. Including SO, where it's effectively a complete strike. (Only a majority are formally signed on, but SO moderators handled single-digit flags today in aggregate; their average day sees over a thousand flags come in.)
@IvanNepomnyashchikh One which gets mentioned a lot is https://codidact.com/, which was started in the wake of the previous catastrophic schism between SO the company and the community on their sites, called Monicagate. Monica herself is active on Codidact along with several of the moderators who resigned to protest.
OrangeDog wrote, Here we go again. I can't help but get a feeling, even if remote, that perhaps the approach to the new AI policy was a smokescreen for 'another' #purge
Inbtw, I'm not a mod but I participate actively as much as I could. In the process, I get bewildered on some of my answers that are struck down and I couldn't get valid or very good reasons for.
By and large, we all need and want quality contents on SO/SX. May the (AI) strike works well (#fruitful) and may the mods also reflect on some of their acts!
PS: there's a mod strike, hence no downvote on this!!!
Regarding AI generated content, one danger is truth value and provenance. AI ain't infallible. Indeed, we've seen how they can be: Even more so with research. IMHO, ChatGPT is almost a disaster with academic references. Perplexity AI fare better but still untrustworthy.
[Out-of-scope] My view on generative AI/LLM is summarised in my LinkedIn post: Digital Pedagogy: Towards a Policy for ChatGPT
I do not see a single one of your answers that has been deleted or closed by a mod (or anyone else), so not sure what “striking down” you want us to “reflect on.” But thank you for your support of the strike.
Something that I would like to clarify is while the AI policy was the final and quite large straw, it is not the sole perpetrator of this strike. It is also about the general refusal to listen to our feedback. Then, of course, there’s the vote arrows, the AI integrated into the site, the prompt design site, and the removal (and eventual reinstatement) of the data dump.
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1105 | Sort questions by number of views
The available options to sort the questions on academia.stackexchange.com are newest, featured, frequent, votes, active, and unanswered. While the option votes does reflect quite well what are the important or good questions, there are also several questions which have received a relatively high number of views but still not so many up-votes. Would it be possible have an option of sorting the questions according to number of views?
Or maybe this is not just specific to Academia, but SE in general? I am not very familiar with the other sites.
See: http://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/113042/can-we-have-a-sort-by-view-count
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1369 | POLL: Should Academia.SE participate in the 2014 “Winter Bash” holiday hats promotion?
In 2014, Stack Exchange will continue its tradition of the "Winter Bash". Winter Bash is an annual event that can run on any Stack Exchange site that chooses to participate. Users earn “hats” for their gravatars by completing certain tasks (analogous to badges). Certain actions trigger the user receiving a hat, which their gravatar can “wear”. We track everyone’s progress earning hats in a leaderboard that looks something like this:
Stack Exchange sees Winter Bash as a a fun and lighthearted way to celebrate the amazing people who make the sites awesome, as the year draws to a close. Three things to note:
Any user can opt out (clicking an option in your profile means you won't see any hat at all).
Apart from the wearing of hats by avatars, the site is otherwise unaffected (there is no “holiday” theme of the site's design, for example)
After the event ends, the hats disappear without a trace.
You can see FAQs from last year's promotion here.
This being said, we (as a community) also have to choice to opt out entirely and have the Winter Bash completely disabled on Academia Stack Exchange (not hats for anyone). In 2012 and 2013, we chose to participate.
To decide whether we will participate in the Winter Bash 2014 Edition, I've created a “poll” below this post, with two comments. Upvote one of the comments according to your preference. If you want to discuss further, leave an answer or comments to other answers.
The poll will close on November 28, 2014.
Yes, Academia.SE should participate in Winter Bash 2014
No, Academia.SE should not participate in Winter Bash 2014
Blank vote (aka "I don't care").
Given the vast set of votes in favor (84% in favor as of 1 Dec 14), this winter we will don our silly hats once more. Thanks everyone for participating in the poll.
Related: Meta StackOverflow's thread about hats
If you want to see how a relatively chaotic Meta site handles the question.
It's in the same vein as how during April 1st, people got generated unicorn avatars. It's just a bit of harmless fun for StackExchange. With hats.
Edit: Hats are now live. You can opt out by selecting the snowflake in the top left and selecting "I hate hats"
This is where you can enable hats
This is where you can track our hat-domination progress
+1 for mentioning relevant sources, but not as an agreement with your point.
We should also track for abuse. If it turns out people are literally breaking the rules or doing stupid stuff to get obscure hats, then it's not such a great idea. For a large SE like Stack Overflow, there's a huge moderation queue that allows for fast management and burying. Here, it may look bad.
In past years, we have not had a noticeable upswing in traffic—generally speaking or in terms of moderation. If anything, I think that the goal of the promotion is to give people an extra "incentive" to visit SE during the holiday season, to keep traffic at about "level."
You have to opt in to see the hats - This is not accurate. Hats are enabled by default here.
@ff524 I'm confused then. I had to jump through several hoops to get my hats enabled on Stack Overflow and here.
On StackOverflow, they are opt-in. Here, they are enabled by default.
@ff524 magical O_o
@ff524 I've updated with how to opt out, and with the proper infos.
Call me a stick-in-the-mud if you wish, but I have to say I find these sorts of seasonal promos rather dreary and artificial. It's like when people wish you happy birthday because Facebook told them to, rather than because they actually remembered and cared on their own.
I rather tend to regard Winter Bash as a sort of carnival that could happen at any time of the year but just so happens to happen around the winter solstice (and everything that is connected to it). Apart from the occasional santa hat and similar it thus is a rather refreshing relief from holiday promotions than a holiday promotion.
@Wrzlprmft: It's certainly no big deal either way, but: in my opinion, not doing anything with silly hats would be yet more refreshing and more of a relief.
@PeteL.Clark if it makes you feel better, this is your auto-generated unicorn gravatar that I see when I browse from home :P
@Mike: My statement stands, but your point is a good one. Indeed I cannot complain too much about the silly hats if I can click them away. In my memory, the path to removing the hats is not completely obvious. It would be better if we could toggle this once and for all in our user preferences page. (It would be better if the user preferences page had more user preferences. In general the SE attitude has usually been "We know what's best for you", which I find a bit annoying.)
@PeteL.Clark it's a single link, usually with the text "I hate hats" - click that, and they're gone for a year.
@EnergyNumbers: In my memory and as described in the FAQ, there is a snowflake icon that you have to click. This is not very transparent, and in fact it seems designed in a rather "gamey" way to give the typical user a puzzle to figure out. Note also that disabling the hats was not an option the first year the promotion was done. As I said, if user preferences were really respected, then it would be something that we could easily take care of once and for all, rather than playing a little game with the rules modified every year. It is truly slightly annoying.
I have said it before and since the time of year is back and the question of hats is back, I will say it once more: Put whatever stupid thing you wish on your smart heads, as long as you make it such that I don't have to look at it.
Is the Opt Out feature sufficient?
@Compass Well, I don't quite remember from last year if it hides the hats of others, too. If yes, then of course it is sufficient ;)
Opt out does hide all hat-related events, including others' hats.
@ff524 Perfect. Thanks.
I think it is a good fun idea. Life without any fun is not a life. Smile, make others smile and laugh. Go for hats friends!
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3889 | On the failure of downvoting
How to prevent students from using modified calculators to cheat on exams?
We had a (now-deleted) answer to this question that was at +28 with the author requesting that it be un-accepted so he could delete it. On the other hand, the comments explaining how it was bad had been upvoted to the fifties.
This is not the behavior voting should result in. The answer was known bad, and yet yielding upvotes, but the votes in the comments were logically outweighing the votes in the answer showing its badness. But the answer downvotes didn't come.
What have we done wrong?
Two answers; both miss the point. There is no problem with deleting the answer. There is no problem taking awhile in identifying the answer was bad. There's an obvious problem when the comments on why the answer was bad got more upvotes than the answer ever did and the answer is still net highly upvoted.
I'm not sure what you mean by "what have we done wrong?"
@aeismail: That answer should have been sitting in the negatives, not at +28. It was deleted with a really high score.
First note that the answer in question has 51 upvotes and 23 downvotes right now. So there is a considerable amount of downvotes already.
The main reason for the discrepancy between downvotes and comment upvotes is probably this:
Downvoting requires 125 reputation; upvoting requires only 15. So there are just more users who can upvote a comment than who can downvote the question.
As of this writing, the question is a hot network question. It’s safe to assume that most of its ten thousand visitors come from other sites of the network and thus have 101 reputation (from the association bonus). Therefore they can only upvote and not downvote.
"Hot Network Question" ruins everything.
At the beginning, the author of the answer thought it was a good idea (of course he did). Many other people probably thought along the same lines.
Once the possible flaws have been pointed out, some people might still have thought that it was a good idea nonetheless; others might simply haven't come back to the answer to rethink about it; and those who wanted to cancel or revert their upvote would have found the vote locked until the next edit.
I don't think we did anything wrong, after all.
The answer was deleted at the answerer's request:
Update: after further thoughts I agree with the downvoters that this is not a great idea. This is probably not a workable answer in practice. I would no longer recommend it, though I cannot delete it, since it is the accepted answer.
As for why the question wasn't "rated" lower—I think the kernel of a good idea was there (not using your own calculator), but the execution wasn't right. So it's not necessarily worth downvoting to oblivion, but it probably shouldn't have been the accepted answer, either.
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681 | Formatting sandbox — please test stuff here
This post is provided so that people can, in the answers and comments below, test formatting features of Academia Stack Exchange.
what formatting features are we talking about, have I missed something?
@posdef Markdown formatting… italics bold both etc.
so nothing "new"?
@posdef no, nothing new… this is a sandbox so newcomers in particular can experiment with the Stack Exchange syntax without disturbing regular posts…
apparently using edit tags still causes the question to get bumped.
Hello World\
Single ` back-quote, and a bunch ``` of them.
Backquote marked inside code: `ABC`DEF` (Does anyone know how to make a code start or end by a backquote?)
Numbered
List
with a code
and with sublist
Well, you can add
bullet sublist, if you wish
Please, don't forget
Proper titles
And subtitles
Pieces of text can be seperated by horizontal rules, too. (And the previous text is bold, huh!)
Last, but not least, you can quote someone,
even with a code
Do you mean \foo, bar`, and `foobar``? If so, the answer is here. You need to do different things in questions/answers and comments. In comments you use \ to escape the tick, while in questions/answers you use double ticks and spaces
Hеllo
And this is a community wiki answer, so people can try things out.
Test est Test
X
@DanielE.Shub welcome to the dark side :)
[Chat] [Academia] [edit] [main] [academia] [academia.se] [ac]
http://meta.stackexchange.com/a/94000/139256
[help] [help/dont-ask]
@eykanal those are cool shortcuts.
$2x + 8 = 4$ Why not LaTeX tag?
It isn't enabled on ac.SE. I don't think it would be that helpful that often. I think people have mentioned reasons in the past way it is not enabled site wide, but I don't remember the reason.
The necessary JS library is fairly large, adding to page load time and increasing bandwidth requirements. This was discussed a while back and was determined not to be necessary on this site.
Testing YouTube URL Embedding
Regular https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gocwRvLhDf8
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gocwRvLhDf8
Timestamped https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gocwRvLhDf8&t=22
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gocwRvLhDf8&t=22
Shortened https://youtu.be/gocwRvLhDf8
https://youtu.be/gocwRvLhDf8
/Embed https://www.youtube.com/embed/gocwRvLhDf8
https://www.youtube.com/embed/gocwRvLhDf8
Embedded HTML <iframe width="854" height="480" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/gocwRvLhDf8" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen></iframe>
Mobile https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=gocwRvLhDf8
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=gocwRvLhDf8
Flash Player https://www.youtube.com/v/gocwRvLhDf8
https://www.youtube.com/v/gocwRvLhDf8
YouTube TV https://www.youtube.com/tv#/watch/video/idle?v=gocwRvLhDf8
https://www.youtube.com/tv#/watch/video/idle?v=gocwRvLhDf8
See Which sites have YouTube embedding on?
Do you mean \foo``, \The answer is [here](http://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/55437/how-can-the-backtick-character-be-included-in-code). In questions/answers you do double backticks with spaces, but in comments you need` to escape \foo``, bar`, and `foobar`
| Stack Exchange | 2025-03-21T12:54:48.839111 | 2013-10-25T14:17:37 | {
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283 | Keeping track of our stats
Moderators have a view of the site's statistics, but they cannot share the specifics. So, I'm starting this post to keep track of the evolution of our statistics over time. Please feel free to update it every now and then:
Date Qs/day Visits/day A. ratio Total users Avid users
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------
2012-07-04 4.6 448
2012-10-04 4.0 700
2012-11-12 4.0 994 2.5 1986
2012-11-19 3.7 1005 2.6 2048 184
2012-11-28 5.2 1068 2.6 2123 190
2012-12-03 5.7 1068 2.6 2154 192
2012-12-10 3.9 1093 2.6 2194 195
2012-12-17 4.4 1109 2.5 2275 200
2013-01-01 3.1 765 2.6 2361 207
2013-01-07 3.5 772 2.6 2402 209
2013-01-14 4.9 1056 2.6 2471 212
2013-01-21 6.1 1308 2.6 2549 216
2013-01-28 6.0 1392 2.6 2640 222
2013-02-04 6.1 1397 2.7 2786 235
2013-02-11 6.1 1452 2.7 2835 237
2013-02-18 5.5 1312 2.7 2903 240
2013-02-25 4.5 1361 2.7 2978 244
2013-03-04 4.9 1449 2.7 3101 248
2013-03-11 6.2 1533 2.7 3173 254
2013-03-18 6.5 1557 2.7 3240 262
2013-03-26 5.8 1653 2.7 3324 271
2013-04-02 5.0 1651 2.7 3486 283
2013-04-08 5.7 1621 2.7 3545 288
2013-04-15 6.0 1572 2.7 3612 292
2013-04-22 6.6 1497 2.7 3684 293
2013-04-29 6.9 1485 2.7 3749 296
2013-05-14 4.5 1458 2.7 3861 303
2013-06-10 5.7 2008 2.7 4142 318
2013-06-18 4.6 2008 2.7 4198 322
2013-07-15 5.4 2139 2.7 4465 329
2013-07-29 6.8 2392 2.7 4656 339
2013-08-19 6.6 2503 2.7 4914 351
2013-08-26 7.1 2739 2.7 5049 356
2013-09-09 7.0 3127 2.7 5188 369
2013-09-17 7.6 3251 2.7 5279 372
2013-09-23 7.8 3256 2.7 5341 372
2013-09-30 6.9 3350 2.7 5414 390
2013-10-07 6.9 3568 2.6 5504 392
2013-10-14 7.4 3572 2.6 5595 401
2013-10-21 6.9 3863 2.6 5666 408
2013-10-28 6.1 3954 2.6 5754 411
2013-11-04 5.9 4229 2.6 5851 419
2013-11-12 6.5 4408 2.6 5951 425
2013-11-19 7.1 4711 2.6 6082 430
2013-11-25 7.9 4938 2.6 6180 438
2013-12-02 6.0 4452 2.6 6284 443
2014-01-10 9.5 3932 2.6 7118 473
2014-01-17 10.3 6332 2.6 7408 487
2014-01-24 9.3 6409 2.6 7603 493
2014-01-31 9.3 6264 2.6 7832 501
2014-02-07 10.9 7012 2.6 8109 507
2014-02-14 11.9 7351 2.6 8308 518
2014-03-14 10.9 8138 2.6 9418 565
I use the Area51 page as source for those stats.
Graphs of the visits/day, number of users, and questions per day:
And here's the Quantcast estimate of site traffic, with a sparkline for the last 6 months, mean number of visitors per month, and highest and lowest daily visitor count in the last 6 months:
Why do we have historical Qs/day and Visits/day, but not A. ratio and Total users?
@gerrit because I found those mentioned in a chat room message and in a meta post… but only questions and visits were quoted.
If I recall correctly, the answers/day has been constant at 2.5 for a long time.
I think more people need to get involved. As of now its just a site to get your questions answered by 'a very select few' people. Not everyone answers questions here. Its typically 5-10% of the entire set of people who answer the questions. This is unlike other SE sites.
@Naresh it is not that select for a beta site. We have 24 users with 2000+ rep which suggests that at least 24 people are/were regularly answering questions.
@F'x many thanks for your work in keeping this updated. It's great to see our progress
We seem to be in the green for everything except Q/day which is "okay". Does that mean we can graduate from beta soon?
I have taken the liberty to add the tag "feature request". I hope that it is not going to far. I am surprised that these data aren't already available on area51.
@ArtemKaznatcheev - See this answer for some clarity on getting out of beta.
@DanielE.Shub - Unfortunately, that tag isn't going to get any attention here. Try posting it on the main SO meta site, which also serves as a general meta for questions like this for all the stack exchange sites. If you haven't posted there before, though, do note that they can be a bit rough on the newbies; they don't hesitate to downvote over there. Take it in stride :)
Surprising how the traffic increases during summer.
@gerrit I wondered about that… maybe because there is less work to do? :)
how we keep tracking our stat after graduation?
This question appears to be off-topic because it is now obsolete, a historic artefact from the beta
I didn't want to make the post overlong, so I paste here the Mathematica code used to make the graphs from the raw data (multiline string stored pasted in variable s):
t = StringSplit /@ StringSplit[s, "\n"];
time = ToExpression@StringSplit[#, "-"] & /@ t[[All, 1]];
values = ToExpression@t[[All, 2 ;;]];
GraphicsColumn[{
DateListPlot[Riffle[time, values[[All, 2]]]~Partition~2,
PlotStyle -> Directive[Red, PointSize[Large]],
PlotRange -> {All, {0, Automatic}},
DateTicksFormat -> {"MonthNameShort", " ", "YearShort"},
FrameLabel -> {None, "Visits / day"}],
DateListPlot[Riffle[time[[3 ;;]], values[[3 ;;, 4]]]~Partition~2,
PlotStyle -> Directive[Red, PointSize[Large]],
PlotRange -> {All, {0, Automatic}},
DateTicksFormat -> {"MonthNameShort", " ", "YearShort"},
FrameLabel -> {None, "Users"}],
DateListPlot[Riffle[time, values[[All, 1]]]~Partition~2,
PlotStyle -> Directive[Red, PointSize[Large]],
PlotRange -> {All, {0, Automatic}},
DateTicksFormat -> {"MonthNameShort", " ", "YearShort"},
FrameLabel -> {None, "Questions / day"}]
}]
Any news on the stats? It feels like we are getting more traffic these days
I added in data for today and ran some quick "stats". We are at the highest questions/day ever recorded in the table. The questions per day as a function of time is about equally well fit in terms of SSE by both a 1 degree polynomial and a 1 term exponential, although they obviously make different predictions about our rate of growth. The linear model says the questions/day increases by 2.6 questions/day per year.
@DanielE.Shub nice! Thanks :)
| Stack Exchange | 2025-03-21T12:54:48.839378 | 2012-11-12T10:15:24 | {
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3963 | Is this a shopping question?
The original version of this question How will the academic boycot of Israel (BDS) infulence my career if I get a PhD in Israel received two close votes (among the other votes) for the following reason:
""Shopping" questions, which seek recommendations or lists of
individual universities, academic programs, publishers, journals,
research topics or similar as an answer or seek an assessment or
comparison of such, are off-topic here. (See this discussion for more
information.)".
The question is about political implications of getting a PhD from a specific country.
Does it qualify as a shopping question?
Often times once the first person chooses a close reason everyone jumps on that reason even if it is not the best. The original version of the question was not worded in the best way and I would have been inclined to vote to close it as either unclear or depending on "individual factors", but I would not have called it a "shopping question". The edited version makes it much easier for me to see and understand what the question is.
In summary, we often do not use the best close reason, which is obviously not as helpful as we can be.
To expand on StrongBad's answer, the original question was not a "shopping" question. It wasn't asking directly about what university to attend; rather, it was asking about the impact of a particular phenomenon on people studying in a particular country.
The problems with the original question are that
the actual impact of boycotts is mostly a matter of opinion; people have been talking about boycotting Israeli academia for at least as long as I've been in the business and nothing much has really ever happened;
the question of whether it's better to take this potential risk or wait a few years and do a PhD elsewhere is very much an individual factors thing. For some people, there might be little down-side to waiting; for others, it could be a disaster; for most, it's probably somewhere in between.
| Stack Exchange | 2025-03-21T12:54:48.840017 | 2018-01-29T11:03:12 | {
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4607 | The code of conduct has been changed
The SE Code of Conduct has been changed in regards to the use of pronouns when referring to users.
There is a fair amount of discussion at MSE What does the Code of Conduct say about pronouns? and on the blog https://stackoverflow.blog/2019/10/10/iterating-on-inclusion/.
The changes can be summed up as "Prefer gender-neutral language when uncertain" and "Use stated pronouns (when known)".
In addition to the public discussion, there are also private discussion about how to enforce these changes. Based on these discussions it seems SE's take on the situation is that if you are trying to avoid a user's pronouns, then you are on thin ice regardless of if your objection is on religious, grammatical, or thought police grounds, or any other argument.
I'm honestly so confused how a change that can truly be boiled down to your one-sentence third paragraph is generating this much angst.
@AzorAhai The issue is that a moderator was dismissed, and that dismissal has been linked to these changes by the community (although SE's stated position is that she was in violation of the previous CoC, since this one was not yet in effect nor even written). Unfortunately, people seem to be taking out their displeasure with the dismissal on the CoC changes themselves.
@BryanKrause Most of the answers on the "Official FAQ" link are about pronouns, not Monica. That is what I was referring to, sorry for the confusion.
@AzorAhai Yes I know, but I think a lot of the sentiment shared there is based on opinions about the mod dismissal. That is, if people are upset about what happened to Monica, and perceive these changes to be what's behind it, then they are more apt to find criticisms and lawyer around the stated policy. Someone might say "Well what about (x)?" when they really mean "All Monica did was (x) and she didn't deserve dismissal for it." It's the ultimate XY problem.
@AzorAhai I think there must be enough users across the network who don't see use people's pronouns as a subset of be nice, that they needed to state it outright. I hope for us it is not an issue, but we will see.
Some of us were trained to write reports in the 3rd person singular as part of striving for clarity, so tend to write answers the same way: “this should be checked” instead of “you should check this”...
@AzorAhai I agree, but there you go ;-) Any CoC change will tend to generate angst, though, because (a) SE tends to have a lot of rules-lawyers, and (b) A good CoC does not try to set everything out in rigid rules.
It's funny... The most important problem in this world is to use preferred pronouns of the people?! OK... I believe it's just some sort of geeky people's game that admire far left wings factions not so realistic ideas... See here: https://politics.stackexchange.com/q/46630/22857
@AloneProgrammer there are many problems in the world; it is worth paying attention to more than just the most important one(s).
@AloneProgrammer I wonder where you got the impression anyone considers this "the most important problem in the world."
@AzorAhai - I guess it depends on your own lived experience. I'm glad to hear this has not been a major (or even a minor?) problem for you.
Thank you for this update!
I know it's a touchy subject at the moment, but just taken at face value I am actually rather happy about this new CoC and the thought behind it. Especially:
Based on these discussions it seems SE's take on the situation is that if you are trying to avoid a user's pronouns, then you are on thin ice regardless of if your objection is on religious, grammatical, or thought police grounds, or any other argument.
I have to say that I support this line of thinking. If we want Stack Exchange to be a truly inclusive community, avoiding the use of a preferred pronoun because you don't agree with them isn't good enough.
That said, it seems almost like a theoretical issue on this Stack Exchange. From the top of my head I can't think of a single question / discussion here that did not fall into either "person clearly identifies as male -> use him", "person clearly identifies as female -> use her", or "no identifiable gender -> use them". It's my understanding that this is still completely ok with the new CoC.
It's my understanding that this is still completely ok with the new CoC. No, as far as I understand it's not. Every time you post you have to check the user's profile, and if they state that their preferred pronouns are ve/vir/vis, or Autobahn/Leberwurst/Schadenfraude, then you have to use them. See Q4, Q8, and Q9 in the FAQ.
@FedericoPoloni My understanding is that I have to not go out of my way to figure out what a user's preferred pronoun is (although checking their profile does not seem too much to ask, imo), and if I learn / am told that their prefered pronoun is "ve" you can bet that I will use it going forward.
@FedericoPoloni And regarding the "Autobahn/Leberwurst/Schadenfraude" example - I guess flagging for offensive would be my starting point, since it's fairly clear what the intention behind such a "preferred pronoun declaration" is.
@FedericoPoloni while lots of users are claiming you have to check profiles, all the official responses have been that you do not. I can assure you that the mere presence of pronouns in the profile is insufficient for you to be formally reprimanded.
@StrongBad The FAQ also does not talk about "formally reprimanding" at all. For instance, Q4 says "we encourage you to gently correct them in a comment" if you see that somebody was not using the preferred pronoun. So it's not that you will be hunted down like a wild animal for not spotting that somebody has an unusual preferred pronoun - but of course if you make a point out of using the wrong pronoun on purpose, things may (and should) be different.
@xLeitix I agree with you completely in spirit, but I don't think you can flag a user profile as offensive.
@FedericoPoloni Was thinking about a comment, but fair enough. I guess there is some way to report a user, but I can happily say that I never had the need to figure out how to do it.
@StrongBad Could you please share a link to one of these official responses? I couldn't find one. There isn't anything in the FAQ (which looks like it should be the place to put it), and actually Q5 seems to point to the opposite direction: if I misgender users 10 times because I don't routinely look at profiles before answering, I might get suspended.
@FedericoPoloni If you find a user who has something offensive in their profile, you can flag any post of the user for moderator attention, explaining what's wrong.
@FedericoPoloni I can still see the comments by clicking on the links I posted, not sure what's going wrong. If it helps, I'm talking about comments left by employees under this answer and this one.
@ArnaudD. Thanks, found these comments.
@FedericoPoloni it looks like you found the comment
@FedericoPoloni your example is a little more involved. If you misgender someone 10 times and on the 11th they correct you, that is essentially the same as if they corrected you the first time. If you misgender some 10 times and after every time they correct you, and on the 11th time they flag you, you can expect a mod message, but you might not get a mod message if the incidents are spread out over a couple of years and/or the user has changed their username/avatar.
@StrongBad The literal meaning of Q5 in the FAQ is that I can get expelled for repeated violations, even if they are not voluntary. Your comment essentially states "don't worry, the mods will apply these potentially ambiguous guidelines in a sensible way". While I do trust the mods (at least on the SE sites I am familiar with), I would prefer that the laws were written in a sensible way in the first place.
@FedericoPoloni I agree that a literal reading of the CoC leaves this possibility open ("willful, repeated, or abusive behaviour). It's not uncommon to have CoCs be written a little fluffily given that one does, in practice, want to enable mods to deal with particularly egregious behaviour without enabling rules lawyering. Two months ago, I would have no problem with that, but I understand that given Monica's recent CoC-related expulsion the community is not trusting SE to apply these rules in their actual spirit. So, yeah.
(that's why I specifically wrote that I like the new CoC at face value - if it turns into a fig leaf to get rid of inconvenient community members - which it might - I am clearly much less thrilled about it)
@FedericoPoloni "[I]f they state that their preferred pronouns are... Autobahn/Leberwurst/Schadenfraude" This is just the same argument that allowing people to use the toilet of their identified gender allows men to say "I identify as a woman" and be sexually abusive in the women's toilets. If that starts happening, we'll deal with it. For the time being, it's not happening and this slipperly slope is a non-argument. You don't, for example, object to addressing StrongBad as "StrongBad": I'm pretty sure that's not their actual name, but you're OK with that made-up noun.
@DavidRicherby It's definitely happening now, it's not a hypothetical. See the section "people being obnoxious" here, for instance.
@FedericoPoloni OK. They're clearly being jerks so ignore them. How hard is that?
@DavidRicherby Does the CoC tell that I should ignore them, or that I should use their preferred pronouns anyway? It's not so clear to me. How does one determine if it is a jerk or a legitimate request, in borderline cases? As argued in the comment here and here, for instance, it may be impossible to tell sufficiently advanced trolling from reality. It's a can of worms I'm not sure we want to open, but the moderators are requested to judge.
@FedericoPoloni In borderline cases, you ask. "Those aren't pronouns I've seen before -- is there a link where I can learn about them?" It's always impossible to tell sufficiently advanced trolling from reality, and it's impossible for the policy to specify the exact boundaries of what is and is not acceptable.
I only became aware of this policy and the controversy surrounding it yesterday. I wholeheartedly agree that the intent of the policy is admirable -- StackExchange should be inclusive of all gender identities. However, I am astounded by how poorly this has been implemented.
I think there are three issues that are causing uproar across the SE network:
Under the new Code of Conduct, gender-neutral language (e.g., using name only instead of pronouns) is not acceptable in certain circumstances.
Details of those circumstances are unclear. Where is the line drawn with respect to bad-faith pronouns? How do you decide if the intent of gender-neutral language is to avoid preferred pronouns?
StackExchange's management of the issue has not been reasonable. One moderator was summarily "fired" for unclear reasons (allegedly for repeatedly violating the CoC, but this is disputed). Several other moderators have "resigned" or suspended moderation in protest, including one moderator here.
I really appreciate what SE offers and I am saddened to see this issue becoming so acrimonious. (We hardly even use pronouns.) So I hope that these issues are resolved amicably soon.
My response to your second point (and possibly even the first) is "that's why we rely on moderation in the spirit of the rules rather than rules-lawyering, thanks to the excellent moderators on this site". Re your third point, I agree, but I don't think it's actually germane to the adoption of the new CoC on Academia.
You should read this: https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/335074/why-are-the-code-of-conduct-changes-received-so-negatively-and-what-can-could to have a better idea of the overall tension and animosity that is currently present in MSE but above all among SO users. The users whose contributions made Academia.SE possible. If the flagship sinks, we all go down with her.
| Stack Exchange | 2025-03-21T12:54:48.840197 | 2019-10-10T18:52:50 | {
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3863 | Why has this controversial answer been deleted by a moderator?
https://academia.stackexchange.com/a/98458/958 ? I don't see any outstanding reason for deletion. It's been downvoted, but that doesn't mean it has to disappear from the website.
This answer is not nice to:
the asker, who is implied to be insecure and lack social skills:
I think you are blaming your STEM professor status instead of your insecurity and lack of social skills.
Furthermore, there are some pretty trite geek clichés here, that are just silly on their own, but make me question whether the post is serious:
How about you hang out in book stores and try to chat up the first girl that smiles at you?
Also, if I were the asker, I would be put off at least a little by being suggested to acquire a partner through trickery. Finally, unless I missed something, the asker did not indicate their gender or sexual preferences – which is fine as they are completely irrelevant to this question.
women in general, who are implied to fall for very stupid advances, false compliments and waffling:
[let them know] that they have beautiful eyes, you think they are really intelligent, bla bla bla)
Just ask them where the sugar is
Moreover, tricking a woman into a relationship is considered acceptable behaviour:
one will fall for it after a few tries
Not to mention that the only part of this that addresses the question is the general gist of “try to get a relationship”. Specific dating advice is beyond this question and I strongly doubt that the asker was looking for this (it’s like elaborating the “look into your examination guidelines” part of an answer into a reading 101).
Now, of course all that is inappropriate or beyond the scope of the question could just be edited out of this answer, but that would only leave something along the lines of: “Try to get a relationship.” While that would still make for an answer on its own, it has already been said (in a better way) in other answers.
The only thing that I find odd about its deletion is that the answer was just deleted and not hammered with a rude/abusive flag instead.
Normally, I try and write answers explaining my moderator actions, but in this case, it would just be this answer.
What exactly is rude or "not nice" to the asker? It's just saying "you may have social anxiety", matter-of-factly, without adding insults. I think you are conflating "I don't like what it says" and "it's rude". 2. Yes, that's blunt against women (though it never tries to generalize -- it just says "there are women that will fall for you in superficial ways"). But does that deserve the censorship? I think we are getting overboard. There is no need to jump on the 'it's offensive' train here. Downvote it if you don't like it, but don't delete it.
It does answer the question: the answer to "how does a professor deal with a lonely lifestyle" is "dude, stop being a loner, go outside and meet girls". It's an answer we may disagree with, but I don't see what is the reason it deserves to disappear.
@FedericoPoloni maybe you fail to see it as not nice because of your insecurity and lack of social skills. Does using the quote from the answer in this way make you see the ad hominem attack? Just to clarify, I do not think you are insecure or lack social skills and I understand that sometimes people disagree with things that are rude.
@FedericoPoloni: 1. It's just saying "you may have social anxiety", matter-of-factly, without adding insults. – I see no may here. 2. It does answer the question: the answer to "how does a professor deal with a lonely lifestyle" is "dude, stop being a loner, go outside and meet girls". – Yes, but that’s about it. Specific dating advice is totally misplaced in this question and arguably on this site in general. — For everything else, see my edit.
(1) Clichés are a reason for downvoting, not for closing. And so is "answers the question, but then goes into too much detail on a tangential point". (2) If compliments and attempts at conversation are now an unacceptable way to "trick a person into a relationship", our jails might be overflowing soon. (3) @Strongbad: that does not offend me at all. In a question specifically about difficulties in socialization, lack of social skills should not be a taboo topic. The answer does not say "ha ha you are a loser"; it just goes to the point.
Also, apart from the "bro" style, what is the difference between writing I think you are blaming your STEM professor status instead of your insecurity and lack of social skills and My suspicion is that this is not so much about "professors lead lonely lives" as it is about "I am lonely," or "I fear leading a lonely life." But this need not be so. You can learn to be more outgoing (currently in this answer)? Should we close that one, too?
@FedericoPoloni I disagree. I think the community disagrees, but please post an answer why you think the answer should be un-deleted (basically a summary of your comments) and we can get a better idea through the voting.
@FedericoPoloni: 1. Clichés are a reason for downvoting, not for closing. – That’s not the argument I was making. 2. If compliments and attempts at conversation are now an unacceptable way […] – Nobody said that. The problem with the post is not the broad direction it’s taking, it’s the tone and the details. 2. "trick a person into a relationship" – The post in question explicitly took this stance, not I.
In a question specifically about difficulties in socialization, lack of social skills should not be a taboo topic. – This is not about raising the topic, or even suspecting lack of social skills, this is about asserting them. You can tell somebody asking a question about differentiating on Math that they may need to refresh their calculus skills. You cannot tell them that they are bad at calculus. 4. apart from the "bro" style, what is the difference between – Actually, what you call bro style is a huge part of the problem. Also nothing of what I listed applies to that answer, AFAICT.
I think the answer should not have been deleted by a moderator. It is OK for me if it is downvoted into oblivion, but I do not see a reason to take explicit action to delete it.
Summarizing my comments to this answer, let me counter the arguments in favor of closing it.
The "you lack social skills" part seems acceptable to me. In a question specifically about difficulties in socialization, suggesting lack of social skills should not be a taboo topic. The answer does not say "ha ha you are a loser"; it just goes to the point. In fact, apart from the "bro" style, I see little difference between saying I think you are blaming your STEM professor status instead of your insecurity and lack of social skills and My suspicion is that this is not so much about "professors lead lonely lives" as it is about "I am lonely," or "I fear leading a lonely life." But this need not be so. You can learn to be more outgoing (currently in another answer). Should we close that one, too?
The attitude about women suggested in the answer seems acceptable to me. Not that I support it, but I see no reason to censor it. If compliments and attempts at conversation are now an unacceptable way to "trick a person into a relationship", our jails might be overflowing soon.
The answer does answer the question. The (blunt) answer to "how does a professor deal with a lonely lifestyle" is "dude, stop being a loner, go outside and meet girls".
It's assuming OP's gender (uhm, no, it's not actually?) and sexual preference. No big deal --- people often do that. The proper way to deal with it is leaving a comment, not using special moderator powers and nuking the answer from orbit.
You don't like the style of this answer, I get it. A part of it probably is there just for the shock value. There are lots of other strongly formulated answers and comments on this site, though --- JeffE is famous for his cutting style, for instance, and it seems very well received. I see nothing so offensive in this answer that deserves immediate deletion, instead of going through the usual path of getting downvotes. There are no direct attacks to the OP. There is a shade of misogyny (is there? I see no attempt to generalize "all women are gullible") that we may find despicable, but the proper answer if you disagree is downvoting, not preventing the answerer to express his opinion.
(And, just in case you are thinking it: there is no relation between me and the answerer. His name sounds Italian, I am Italian, but I have no idea who he is. And I am using male pronouns here because that's a masculine name.)
As I said, I disagree, but if the community wants it back, I am happy to undelete it.
@StrongBad By the way: please don't see this thread as an attack to your person --- I respect you and thank you for your work as a moderator. The fact that I disagree with you on a single episode does not detract from it.
I already replied to most of this in the comments under my answer, so just two things: 1) A part of it probably is there just for the shock value. – That’s quite a thing to say in defence of an answer, but we can take it from that angle as well: Shock value is not nice and thus nothing that answers on our site should have, at the very least it should be removed with an edit – which applies to many of the other points as well, but then what would be left? (See also my last edit to my answer.)
2) Going at this again, because it is probably the most important point: "trick a person into a relationship" – I am not exactly sure why you are using quotes here, but this is something that the author of the answer in question said: “one will fall for it”. If you ask me, this states that the described strategies are intended deceit – which, by the way, is also the tone in which this was written (“bla bla bla”).
As Italians should we point out the meaning of the fake surname? :-)
@MassimoOrtolano I noticed it too, but I could not be certain it is fake. I have heard real names with similar features. There are other hits on Google for this one, so at the very least is a fixed "internet identity", not a name designed for trolling.
Personally I find that "a part of it said for the shock value" is already a strong indication that the answer should be deleted. This is not what Stack Exchange should be about. Sure, if it was a small part, it could be edited out, but very few would be left of the answer if we removed everything from it that appears to be mostly trolling / provoking. Personally I am happy that this thing is gone, and see no reason to get technical about whether it should have rather been voted into oblivion instead of being deleted.
Just as someone wandering by, I've certainly never thought of JeffE as "edgy."
@Azor-Ahai It might just be me choosing the wrong adjective here --- English is not my native language. I'll try a replacement.
@Wrzlprmft I'm not a native speaker, but can't you read "fall for it" the way you do in "fall for someone"?
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1986 | A tag jungle: formatting, typography, typesetting?
I have noticed that we have got three tags with very similar topics:
formatting (61×)
typesetting (17×)
typography (18×)
(Only very few questions are tagged by more of them.)
I see a large overlap, surely between typesetting and typography. To me, it seems that these two topics are identical, and refer to the same thing: How to change the "raw text" into "typeset text", and I suggest these two to be synonymised.
I'm not sure though about formatting, I can see some differences between formatting and the other two tags; formatting is more general and can refer to more than just "putting text on paper". However: (1) the difference is small and probably quite subjective; (2) people do not distinguish the tags, it more seems that they simply choose one of the three tags for their question, quite arbitrarily. But as I say, I'm not sure.
I would suggest to synonymise all of them with the master being formatting.
On Stack Exchange, tags have mainly two purposes:
To help users who search a solution to some problem they have (so they do not ask a duplicate question).
To help users who want to answer question about a certain topic, in particular by enabling them to favourite or subscribe to certain tags.
Most users from the first group will not be aware of the nuances between formatting, typesetting and typography and thus synomysing will help them. While in theory there could be users in the second group that care only about one of the topics and for example would subscribe to formatting but not to typography, I would be surprised if one actually exists – who is interested in one of these topics in an academia context is also sufficiently interested in the other ones to at least want to read the title of the corresponding questions.
Note that there is altogether only 2 followers on the three tags, both on [tag:formatting].
Since you had previously suggested a synonym pair with [tag:typography] and [tag:typesetting], it wasn't possible to suggest either of those as a synonym for [tag:formatting]. I went ahead and deleted your typography-typesetting pair and set them up as formatting synonyms.
@ff524: I would have suggested a synonym with master formatting myself, but I did not have the required score in that tag … You may also want to tag the question status-completed.
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347 | Should we delete too questions which have too extensive answers, but it's difficult to know that beforehands?
Sometimes we get questions which can be deemed too broad. Broad not precisely because the question is too general and thus would have many specific partial answers, or be subjective, but too broad because the answer is not simple - a book could be written about the topic. However, these could get asked frequently. Should we delete such questions, or keep them in order to at least explain in the answers specifically why the question is non-trivial?
This question is inspired by the discussion we had here.
While Robert Cartaino understand the SX network, I don't know if he understands this particular question. In fact, I am surprised the question was even closed, and am surprised that we are discussing deleting it. In the interest of disclosure, I did provide an "answer", despite not having that expertise to really answer the question (I attempted to skirt the issues and point the OP in a direction.)
The question in fact contains two questions:
What can a department do to make studying computer science more
appealing to women?
Are there any studies on the ways of improving the working
conditions for women in academia?
The second is concrete, focused, and definitely answerable in a few words. I don't see how it is anything but a good fit for our AC.SX. The first is broader, possibly subjective, and maybe requires a long answer, and therefore may not be a great fit. That said, my guess is that someone who understands gender issues in the workplace could provide an excellent, evidenced base, concise objective answer. We just don't happen to have that someone here yet.
I would hate to see questions like this deleted and I am even surprised that this question has been closed. In fact, I am voting to reopen now ...
I don't know what prompted Robert to close it, but I would still vote to close because the question as currently worded is far to broad. More friendly in what context? Getting research positions? Teaching positions? Graduate student openings? The term "associated" is too broad to work withl each subpopulation will likely need their own specific answer. Maybe with some edits it could be a good question, but not as is.
If you want to edit it into a question on seminal or reference works on working conditions of academia, I would be fine with reopening (but the current answer should then be blasted). As it currently is, it's overly broad, as eykanal said.
@F'x I gave editing a go. It probably could be better. I hope I didn't change the meaning too much. I think my answer fits the edited question.
@DanielE.Shub I'm not sure that edit will help. You've broadened it even more (“what can be done” instead of “what can a department do”, e.g.). I've left a comment below the question explaining how I think it could be edited into satisfactory form
We should definitely not delete these questions. If this is truly the case, indicate as such in an answer. Remember, sometimes the only answer to a question is "there's no easy answer to this". Considering that most questions of the nature you're discussing are deep, complicated, and likely very good questions, closing them would discourage good questions, which we definitely don't want.
Closed questions should either be improved (if possible) or deleted. I don't see how this overly broad question is different. It's not a good fit for the site, it should go away.
@F'x please can you put that as an answer? I think it answers the question very well.
@EnergyNumbers done
@F'x - your comment about closed questions is irrelevant here; these questions should not have been closed in the first place. They should have been edited to be appropriate, and then answered as I suggest. Bringing up closed questions here is a red herring.
Closed questions should either be improved (if possible) or deleted. The exception is duplicates, because they can help future users better find existing questions.
When I say should, I refer to the general Stack Exchange policy. Here is a [quote from Grace Note][1], a community manager in the SE team:
With the exception of duplicates (which we keep around for searchability), closing is intended to be a temporary state for a question. There are only two states in the future of a closed question - getting deleted or getting reopened. The primary purpose of closing is to serve as a sentence to eventual deletion.
and
unless a question has some chance to be considered for reopening, it should be deleted
So, the SE policy is not to ask “which closed questions should be deleted?” but “which closed questions should be kept?” (as done, e.g., on the computer science meta).
I don't see how this overly broad question is different. It's not a good fit for the site, it should go away (or edited into a much more specific answerable question).
In my opinion closed question doesn't mean it's meaningless. Sometimes you would close a good question if it receives a lot of irrelevant answers or comments after good answers were provided. Your position goes towards a maxim that every question should have a good answer, or we should get rid of it. I do not agree.
@DanielE.Shub yeah, I forgot to add that, I've edited the post… the exception to the rule is duplicates, if they add value (in helping people better find the question)
@walkmanyi questions can be "protected" to deal with that.
@walkmanyi no, questions do not get closed because they attract to many chatty comments or answers, as long as the question itself fits the format of the site (specific, answerable, etc.). Chatty comments and answers can be dealt with independently of the question (answers moved to comments, comments moved to chat or blasted altogether, …). Moreover, if the question seems to attract too many of those, it can be protected, as Daniel said
@F'x: I see. I did not care too much for reading the official manual.
@F'x: anyway, at the moment the question has a good chance to become opened again.
@walkmanyi there are two issues here (the specific question and the question genre). The specific question is being resolved, but this is still a useful discussion.
@walkmanyi and then closed again :)
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303 | Are [online-learning] and [distance-learning] tags synonyms?
While I was creating a post about distance learning, I noticed there were two different tags. One for online learning and one for distance learning. While distance learning covers a broader range (online, correspondence, etc.) online learning seems to always be distance learning and I suspect that most distance learning today is online. So, should we have two different tags for this?
Perhaps better to have a credit-learning and non-credit learning option.
I could imagine some edge cases where online learning is not distance learning. I think there are less cases of distance learning not being online nowadays.
I think the two tags might be useful since I would think that questions about on online-distance learning could often be divided into a distance or online question.
Agree: distance learning is a subset of online, but the reverse does not hold.
Then everything with an online tag should automatically get a distance tag? It seems like searching gets a little messy this way.
@earthling I don't think so. For example, a question about participating in online QA sessions would be online-learning. A question about establishing a relationship with a professor you never see would go under distance-learning.
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3475 | Please re-open deleted answer
Please re-open deleted answer provided by self-same OP: Caregiver of disabled teenager returning to study, but can't find funding. (UK) Any thoughts?
There is material in the deleted answer that in my opinion makes a significant contribution toward answering the original question.
The question has to do with special challenges faced by UK carers (=caregiver of family member with a disability in my own, US version of English). The OP contributed, in the deleted answer, the following action steps that look promising for helping with this general problem, in the long term:
include info about carer role in thesis (apparently this ties into
the thesis topic in this case)
get the student union to take up the
issue of carers
ask that Student Records include carers in
the equality and diversity questions
recommend carers be considered
under the university's Widening Participation policy
explain to the
Vice Dean of the Faculty what a carer is
One idea I had was to modify the question slightly to enable the answer to be reinstated.
I could not find a button to press to propose that the answer be reinstated.
If I didn't couch this in the right way, may I request that some helpful soul edit my title/body/tag(s)? Thank you.
Edit 9/28/16:
A belated thank you to the moderators for reinstating the answer after I edited it for the OP.
The post you refer to was flagged as "not an answer" and then got several delete votes in the review queue.
This is because its content seemed to be intended as a response to other answers and comments. It looked as though the OP was unfamiliar with the Q&A format of this site, and simply thought that (like many forums on the Internet), they should add a new post to continue the "thread".
If the OP actually wants to self-answer the question, that's certainly encouraged. There are two ways he/she can do that:
Edit the deleted post so that its content is clearly intended to be an answer, and does not contain material that is a response to other comments or answers. Then raise a moderator flag (custom flag) indicating that this post is now intended to be an actual answer to the question.
Post a new answer whose content is clearly intended to be an answer, and does not contain material that is a response to other comments or answers. (Material that is a response to other users or further clarification of the OP's situation belongs either in the original question, if it is useful to others who will want to answer the question, or in comments on the relevant answers otherwise.)
Either way, there should be some indication from the OP that the post is actually intended to answer the question. Right now, the language of the post suggests that it was intended as a response to others and further clarification of the OP's situation, not an answer to "How to find funding."
For the benefit of those reading who can't see deleted answers, here is the post you are referring to:
These answers have been really useful, thank you to everyone, I really appreciate it. There are some great ideas here and I will post updates with any outcomes, and hopefully this will help the next Carer applying for studentships - the key message is to get this into the support letters from the start. I know I am disadvantaged by having already started, but it's not unheard of to get funding mid-doctorate.
My first years part time were funded by my part-time work in a related
industry, but due to my teaching and PhD commitments, and Carer
commitments, I haven't had time to seek more clients. So that's dried
up. I also received a discretionary fund fee waiver for the fees -
this wasn't an advertised hardship fund, this was a result of asking
and asking until finally finding something was available. You are only
supposed to apply to this once during your degree, but I have applied
once again because there just is nothing else. Awaiting outcome.
I've had success with small funding for trips abroad to conferences
and considerable success with funding for public engagement projects -
but I can't pay my living costs or wages with that.
My supervisor thinks that my identity as a carer is something that we
can't seem to escape from, so we it is something that will be
addressed in my thesis (that's ok with me, and it sits nicely with my
ambition to teach creative writing and to explore under-represented
groups in film and tv.)
I never intended to campaign on this issue, but since posting this
question, I have been successful in getting the student union to take
up the issue of Carers at our university as one of their priority
vulnerable groups, and the first thing we will ask for is for Student
Records to include Carers in the equality and diversity questions (not
a statutory requirement for this data to be collected, but why not).
Our university is behind others in offering support and recognition
for carers. Secondly, within the graduate school, the student advisor
I was talking to has recommended Carers be considered under the
university's Widening Participation policy. And just the other day, I
got to explain to the Vice Dean of the Faculty what a Carer is - It's
someone who looks after someone else who has a life limiting condition
such as a disability or illness for more than 35 number of hours per
week (that's the statuory number of hours in order to apply for
Carer's Allowance, a means tested benefit).
So, no studentship yet but I have delegated my campaigning tendencies!
I will keep this trail updated and hope others continue to contribute.
I've notified the OP with a comment linking to this meta discussion, so that he can decide what to do.
@MassimoOrtolano - Thank you, but I need to make a decision about my bounty on the original question. With the OP's carer responsibilities it is doubtful this is enough notice. I need to find a way to give the OP credit for the contributions listed in the above bullets.
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3716 | "south-africa" tag
I propose the creation of a south-africa tag. There are not many questions that target South Africa, but the few that do are sometimes tagged with africa, which is far too general. Examples of questions that will be improved with a south-africa tag are:
Which authority regulates the conferring of degrees in South Africa?
What is the status/reputation of the University of South Africa (UNISA)?
Tags for specific countries already exist, e.g. united-kingdom, germany, etc.
I created it: south-africa.
I only found three questions that seemed to fit this tag, but if you find more you can certainly add them.
| Stack Exchange | 2025-03-21T12:54:48.843410 | 2017-04-21T12:28:26 | {
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3670 | Why was my answer deleted?
I posted an answer to this question:
What can a student do to respond to faculty/administration decisions based on current political events?
MY answer was based on logic and included a link to a website supporting my information. Moreover, at the time I am writing this, my answer was the most up-voted one (with 3 up votes). So why was it deleted?
I deleted your answer, in response to a flag raised by a user. (It was flagged as "rude or abusive"; I did not agree that it was "rude or abusive" but I deleted it for another reason, see below.)
On Academia Stack Exchange, questions that ask "Help me change X's mind about Y", where X is someone in the context of academia and Y is not academia-specific, should address more than "Explain why Y is wrong". (If the question was basically "Explain why Y is wrong" it would not be specific to academia, and would therefore be closed.) The question and answers, in order to be on-topic here, must address the academic context.
In the context of this specific question, "Is it wrong for Kuwaiti institutions to reject American participants" is not on topic here, and that's the question your answer addresses. The question of what a student specifically can do to respond to faculty/administration's decisions based on political events may be on topic, but your answer does not address that.
(Given the understandable confusion, I have since edited the title of the question to focus on the aspect that is on-topic at Academia Stack Exchange - "What can a student do to respond to faculty/administration decisions based on current political events?" Hopefully future answers will not make the same mistake.)
For reference, here is the content of your answer that I deleted:
You should just tell him that Kuwait has a permanent ban on Israeli passport holders (source: https://www.timaticweb.com/cgi-bin/tim_website_client.cgi?SpecData=1&VISA=&page=visa&NA=IL&AR=00&PASSTYPES=PASS&DE=KW&user=KLMB2C&subuser=KLMB2C ) and explain to him that by his logic, all the world countries should ban the citizens of Kuwait.
But my answer did answer this question - what this student can do is explain to the professor using this logic why his decision should be overturned.
@GeneralJournal while I do agree with you, that answer would benefit from an explanation of why that approach would work, given that it is likely to result in some hostility with the department head.
@enderland (Sorry, I can't resist; I'll take the bait) Ironically, OP's answer cannot be edited to include such an explanation (surely, if the moderator hadn't acted so swiftly to delete the answer, someone could've pointed out to OP how to improve their answer in the comments). All of this begs the question: why delete the answer, rather than leave a comment to OP about how they should make their answer more suitable for the site?
@MadJack The OP can edit the deleted answer to directly address the academic context, and then flag for undeletion.
But why should OP have to do that?
Because answers worthy of deletion should be deleted. If and when it is fixed, it can be undeleted, but far too often, that doesn't happen, and it is better to have bad content hidden until fix than shown until we get tired of waiting. The content is low-quality and that is the fault of the user who created it, if they wish it to be neither low-quality nor deleted, they need to put the effort into fixing it by edits.
Interestingly, the accepted answer to this question suggested that mod should not delete bad content, but just downvote it http://meta.academia.stackexchange.com/questions/834/people-denying-the-situation-in-the-questions-instead-of-answering?rq=1
@qsp This answer seems to address a different class of cases, "incorrect and bad answers", as in "bad advice". I see how it makes sense to not delete bad answers, since the downvotes a bad answer attracts are useful information. This argument doesn't apply to off-topic answers.
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3745 | At what point should an answer be considered a non-answer?
the question came up to me when seeing following answer: https://academia.stackexchange.com/a/90807/74774
This is edited by the mod Eykanal, removing over half of the (I admit, quite funny) post. I do understand the reasoning, as the sarcasm didn't add anything and last portion of that post looks like an answer.
But I'll be honest. If this was on stackoverflow, I'd have voted to delete the answer for being not an answer. Especially because even after removing the sarcasm part it doesn't really give an answer on the question OP asked. Which was how to solve the issue (emphasis mine). On SO this should be a comment, not an answer. But different house, different rules...
This made me wonder how strict one should be when evaluating answers. Should it specifically answer the actual question asked, or is it allowed to leave a more general comment on the nature of the problem?
Thanks for posting this question. This is a constant struggle on these sites.
On the one hand, people in a community setting want to enjoy themselves. That involves conversation, jokes, sarcasm, poking fun, off-topic comments, the like. Those things are very important for a strong community; no one wants to participate where it's just a bunch of dead fish in a room.
On the other hand, the goal of the site is to be informative, helpful, and easy-to-use. This necessarily means that much the off-topic stuff should be removed, because someone visiting the site from the outside (1) may not get the jokes and (2) has to wade through inane stuff to get to the useful stuff.
Most of the time, this isn't a big issue. Conversations take place in comments, and after they're done—or after two days, whichever comes first—we move them to chat. People make jokes, we laugh, and then make sure it doesn't affect the answer itself, editing if necessary.
This is one of those unusual cases where (1) the joke was integral to the answer, (2) the joke was potentially confusing to new visitors, and (3) the question was on the Hot Network Questions list. With all that in mind I took the rather drastic step of heavy-handed editing and then sat back and waited for someone to ask about it. I appreciate your doing it politely :) I would love to hear people's thoughts as to whether I did the right thing or not.
You're welcome. Thank you for putting so much effort in the academia site. I'm happy I sumbled upon it, this is great.
@JorisMeys off topic here, but maybe in chat you could tell us if there is anything that we can do so that SE/SO users do not need to randomly stumble upon us.
I personally feel that our community has expressed little patience with sarcastic questions/answers. This means removing that part of the answer, especially on a HNQ post, in a timely manner is important. I also believe that the answer probably should be deleted as NAA. As mods, there is a big difference between editing an answer where everyone can see what we have done and anyone can roll it back and deleting an answer. As the answer has 21 up votes and only 1 down vote, I would want to see a well discussed justification before deleting the answer.
in this particular case, I agree the answer can't just be deleted. The edited answer got a lot of upvotes and I don't really advocate its removal as it stands now. My question was more on the initial action in similar cases. Which you answered in the first part, and I agree :-)
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3777 | My answer was deleted, and I cannot ask the person who did, why
User ff524 deleted my answer, that I think is relevant to the question, which is If I request a paper through my university library, must they pay a substantial amount of money? . If you can see it, since it is deleted.
I give a suggestion related to this part of the question: "I find this price ridiculous and will not pay".
Another commenter thought my answer may be "Promoting a illegal site". Of course that depends on the jurisdiction (given that the site is Ukranian, their laws may well differ from the commenter's), and my answer does not concernt itself with legality but with morality (which is quite often not the same, unfortunately).
Anyway, I'd like to ask ff524 to revert their deletion, given that I have show that the answer is relevant to the question, which was their only stated objection.
You can see the comments (including the one from moderator ff524) - you were not answering the question. You gave an answer, yes, but it was not to the asked question (but pertained to the background information in the question).
Yes, is it so bad to give some background information? Especially since another commenter already hinted at the very same thing, so it seems relevant to go into that.
Give background information, sure. But answer the question. Which is something you failed to do.
Welcome to AC.SE. You can most definitely ask for explanations about what is going on. This is exactly what meta and chat are for. In this case, since the question is specifically about AC.SE, using our meta is better than the general meta.
When you answer was deleted a comment was left that said:
This is not an answer to the question: does the library have to pay to get the article when someone requests it from them?
That is the heart of the issue. While you were providing some relevant information, you were not answering the question. Had the question been about getting the paper without paying, your answer would have made sense. The issue is the question was about if libraries had to pay the full amount for ILLs.
Please take a look at our help center. We are different from other online discussion forums in that we are unabashedly a Q/A site. We limit discussion to meta and chat and use comments sparingly, and only to improve questions and answers.
It could have been turned into a comment.
@gerrit possibly, but it was related to the question, an answer, and a comment, so it is not really clear where it should go. It was also lomg, ranty and not trying to seek information or improve the question/answer, so wouldn't have been a great comment.
Thanks, this explains my line of thinking exactly.
I suppose I was adding the "ranty" bit to avoid complaints about legality, by focusing on morality instead.
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3931 | Deciphering status in manuscript handling systems
We keep getting questions in which we are asked to decipher the status messages in some online submission management system (latest one).
I find it slightly annoying that we have to do the job of Elsevier's or Springer's customer support, and compensate for the poor UI of these systems.
It seems to me that the answer is almost always one of:
check the typical journal workflow and make your best guess;
chill out and stop checking the status every day; you'll get an e-mail when it's over and there is no real way to speed it up (with a link to the other canonical question on handling times);
we really don't know; have you tried sending them an e-mail?
Should these questions be welcome on this site? Is it time for a canonical one? Should we close them all as "strongly depends on individual factors"?
The "typical journal workflow" question is the canonical one for that kind of Q.
What would you want to handle with a canonical question that is not and cannot be addressed by the existing canonical Q&As?
@ff524What about "ask your supervisor/advisor, that is the reason you have supervisor"?
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4281 | Why was this closed ("Do I have to sit again for TOEFL")
What is the motivation behind the close votes to Do I have to sit again for TOEFL?? It seems like a perfectly reasonable question to me. Please explain.
"The answer to this question strongly depends on individual factors" --- but the underlying question 'do I have to sit again for TOEFL if I have one that expired shortly and/or I did my master in an English-speaking country" seems very broadly applicable to me. Especially since TOEFL scores last 2 years, and the typical duration of a master degree in Europe is 2 years.
"This question is not within the scope of this site as defined in the help center" --- PhD admissions are not within scope now?
I think there's a tendency to close questions when the answer is along the lines of "it depends on the institution, but there are a two or three possibilities" even though the question generalizes well and a good answer could address this. As for the newer question, it seems to be about Australian visa rules rather than academia.
The "individual factors" close reason is often used when the answers amount to "it depends on the institution" - if you notice from the answers that were given, this is true of all of them.
See in particular the section "Questions on a university’s, course’s, or similar’s rules" in the meta question/answer Why was my question put on hold for depending on individual factors?
I am not sure why close voters noted the question as out of scope, they may have simply chosen the wrong reason. In my opinion the majority "individual factors" close reason is the correct and relevant reason.
"In general no, but ask and maybe you can have it waived" looks like a general informative answer to me, that applies to most institutions.
All I can do is point you to the meta discussion I linked. The community has decided to close questions where the answers have to be that generic. My understanding is that this is largely because of how frequent these types of questions are. Also, not to accuse you of this, but those questions also often come out of people not really doing their own research ahead of time to try to answer the question for themselves, like checking the website of the institutions they hope to apply to.
Note that I am not the person who asked that question (as your "accuse you" seems to imply).
Whoops, hadn't bothered to check any names, sorry about that. Especially not meant to accuse in that case :)
Also hadn't noticed your rep and that you've spent quite some time here - if you think the policy should be changed it might be productive to open a new meta discussion on the topic suggesting a change in that close approach. Otherwise given that you've been around here a bit I'm surprised that you would be unsure of why the individual factors close reason was used here (I agree the others are more puzzling).
Personally I think that the policy is fine, but it is wrongly applied here. The bit with "it cannot be generalised to apply to others" does not apply to this question, for instance.
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3477 | Rename [tag:sexual misconduct] -> [tag:sexual conduct]
I propose to rename the tag sexual-misconduct to sexual-conduct, with a redirect. This is because "misconduct" already implies a judgment that the behavior is inappropriate, and in some questions this is a premature conclusion; for instance, the question may be *Is doing X OK?".
This proposal follows from an exchange with user @ff524 in the comments
to this question. TL;DR:
The question was initially tagged sexual-misconduct
I initially retagged the question sexual-misconduct -> sexual-sphere, out of this concern.
She reverted the change arguing that sexual-sphere is ambiguous and too broad, and we need a tag for this concept.
I agreed with her thought, but I also suggested making it explicit in the tag wiki for sexual-misconduct that no judgment is implied. We have now edited the wiki.
After pondering on it for a while, I now think that this proposal is the best course of action.
Note that you can propose a tag synonym here.
@ff524 I just wanted to make sure that the community agrees with it before.
Are you asking whether the community supports a rename or a tag synonym creation? I have no objection to the latter, but I'm not the right person to weigh in on that, because I don't have much experience with tag synonyms. However, I do not support a rename.
@aparente001 My proposal is that sexual-conduct be the master tag, and sexual-misconduct a tag synonym. This does not trigger a mass rename for past questions, but in most places where the synonym shows up in the UI it is automatically replaced by the master tag. See http://meta.stackexchange.com/a/70718/243091 for the exact behavior.
I think the moderator ff-something was on the right track. And "sexual-misconduct" should be the master tag for the reasons that user explained. Sorry I'm not providing a link, I forget where I read it.
@aparente001 in the current situation it would make very little sense to create a tag synonym with "conduct" not the master. It's only use would be to help users find the tag "misconduct." I do not think this is a major concern. // Federico: I do not see what the issue with triggering a mass rename would be. Either "conduct" is a good tag for that type of question or it isn't. If the former then I do not see a problem with it being applied retroactively.
I disagree with the tag renaming.
Sexual misconduct is often more about power or the abuse of power than it is about sex.
Rape was once seen as a subset of 'sex' but is now appropriately being seen as the vicious form of abuse and crime that it is.
The term for this concept in English is "sexual misconduct"; this is a term of art, whose meaning cannot necessarily be broken down to its constituent parts.
Those who have chosen to tag questions with this label assumedly meant to use this term, and not some other term with different connotations. Therefore it would be inappropriate to rename this tag to some other term.
Regarding the proposed alternatives:
"Sexual sphere" is not a phrase in English.
As for "sexual conduct", the OP may be relieved to learn that this is a term found largely in legal codes that criminalize certain sexual behaviors such as statutory rape or bestiality. Therefore if his goal is to avoid stigmatizing the hypothetical individuals who are tagged with this label, his proposed term would actually be far worse!
Generally, tags are there to categorize the content of the site. This categorization is not solely or even primarily to be based on an author's preferences, but is rather to be decided according to the needs and customs of the site. Moreover "[t]hose who have chosen to tag questions with this label assumedly meant to use this term" is a bit tautological and an oversimplification in that many a user is limited to the existing tags to begin with (or might feel limited even if not being technically constrained to use them).
My point was simply that a tag rename shouldn't change the meaning of the tag, even if in one case this seems appropriate, because such a change also affects all the previously-tagged questions. A tag rename from "ring" to "commutative associative unital ring" would be a bad idea, even if the latter is clearer, since all the existing posts about Hopf algebras and matrix rings are now going to be mislabeled.
By OP's intent the proposed change seems rather the opposite rename. It meant to extend the scope of the tag. The proposed name might not be good, yet another one might serve the intended purpose.
Apologies, but English is not my first language, so I might have missed a few nuances. Do you have another suggestion for a hypernym of "sexual misconduct" that does not imply a judgment?
Also, let me stress it once again: there is the option in the SE interface to replace uses of the tag "sexual misconduct" with something else (redirect) for new questions only, while leaving the tag as it is on old questions. Actually, it is the default behavior when a tag redirect is created. This should solve one of @TomChurch's concerns.
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3813 | Is there a name to define "conferences are publications" fields?
When asking for clarifications in this question, it occurred to me that, fundamentally, many customs pertaining conference abstracts depend actually on a single yes-no bit: there are some fields where conference abstracts are considered publications (engineering, computer science...), and some fields where they are not (mathematics, and, if I understand correctly, chemistry, biology, most fields within the humanities).
Is this classification correct?
Does this subdivision make sense?
Is there a word or an expression to distinguish these two areas of academia? For instance, something that we can turn into a tag?
At least questions 1 (in the sense of: “is this actually binary”?) and the first part of question 3 are something that you can ask on the main site. Question 2 depends on what you want to achieve with this question. If it is a tag and the answer to question 1 is yes, then yes.
@Wrzlprmft Thanks, I have replaced "liberal arts". I have considered asking #1 on main, but I don't think it is a good fit: as it happens every time we try to divide something in two categories, the subdivision makes sense only with a specific purpose in mind: in this case my purpose is identifying a large set of questions whose answers apply indistinctly to all "conferences-are-publications" fields or to all "conferences-are-not-publications" fields, but not to the other, and state this appropriately to avoid repetition and confusion. With this stated purpose, it's a question for meta.
every time we try to divide something in two categories, the subdivision makes sense only with a specific purpose in mind – Sure, but we don’t have to ask a yes or no question. Rather, the interesting question is whether there are any grey zones or there is a third way, because that’s something we might need to take into account when creating such tags. Also, even though motivated through a self-servicing purpose, it would be fit for the main site as it is a request for information that is valid and relevant beyond this site. Anyway, if you don’t want to ask the question, I would do it.
@Wrzlprmft Please go ahead. I wouldn't know how to formulate this question properly, myself.
When you say publication, do you really mean peer-reviewed abstracts?
Abstracts or proceedings?
@FedericoPoloni: Relevant existing question: Is the status of conference publications in Computer Science really absolutely unique?
And I finally asked: Conferences as publication venues – black and white or is there a grey or third way?.
Going by the current outcome of my question-turned-survey on what different treatments of conferences exist, I suggest not to categorise questions by fields or even conferences but by the treatment of the submissions in question.
I therefore suggest to introduce a tag conference-publications (or similar) for questions concerning submissions to conferences which are treated as (serious) publications. Thus:
Questions about general peer-reviewing, paper writing, or authorship that apply to both journals and conferences shall be tagged as before.
Questions about giving presentations, posters, chairing, and answering questions that apply to both kinds of conferences shall be tagged as before.
Questions that are specific to journals shall be tagged with journals (as before).
Questions that are specific to conference submissions treated as publications shall be tagged conference-publications.
Questions about submissions to conferences that are not treated as publications should just be tagged with conferences (as before). While we could have a specific tag for those, I doubt that it will be of any use (hardly anybody will use it for searching; askers won’t even know that this could be a reason to tag a question; …).
Should this suggestion be accepted, we should organise how we apply this tag to old questions, as there will be many.
"Proceedings" is another good option for the name of your suggested tag, probably.
@FedericoPoloni: I disagree. In many fields proceedings are treated quite differently and submission to the proceedings is independent from submissions to the conference. See also the last paragraph of my question as well as this deleted non-answer.
I see, I agree with you.
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4924 | Should we focus on having more objective answers?
This critical answer on Academia.SE from Meta.mathoverflow deserves some attention, in my view:
The problem with academia.SE is that it is very different in style from MO and other SE sites. The paradigm of SE is that the questions are well-defined enough to have a correct answer, and the answers, well, attempt to provide it. Academia.SE is more of a discussion forum. Opinion-based questions, as well as non-questions flourish. Popular questions tend to have many answers repeating various talking points in different ways; it is telling that the answers almost never have any references/citations. The answers get upvoted not because they offer any useful insight, but because the upvoters agree with the opinions expressed there. Often, the highest upvoted answer is quite short and simply states an opinion.
My opinion is that this strikes an open wound and identifies an area where we need to improve.
I don't mean to strike down on subjective answers overall. Subjective answers can still have a positive role, when they identify good practices or suggestions, or are in areas that are not so well documented. And we are clearly not the only SE site with this concern; for instance, I would guess that most of Interpersonal.SE is subjective questions and answers where it is difficult or impossible to give a reference.
SE has some advice on good subjective and bad subjective questions, and suggests that these answers become a lot better if they share experiences over opinions, and are backed up with facts and references rather than just "because I'm an expert".
It seems to me that we often disregard these good practices on subjective topics, and do not worry about making our answers as data- and experience-backed as it would be possible, in many cases. Looking back at my post history I am myself guilty multiple times of this sin, so I do not claim to be better than the rest of the community. But I think that we should reflect on this feedback from an external user and try to improve in this area.
(Important: please do not go and downvote that Meta.MO answer --- it is difficult to get constructive criticism and suggestions for improvement if we mass-downvote those who provide them.)
do not go and downvote that Meta.MO answer --- it is difficult to get constructive criticism and suggestions for improvement if we mass-downvote those who provide them. – That answer basically says: “I don’t think Academia SE should exist, so we should not migrate there.” It’s not addressing the asker’s concern at all. Sorry, but that’s not constructive criticism.
That answer on MathOverflow superficially misjudges the situation here. Following MO, I actually downvoted it when it appeared.
@MassimoOrtolano Why do you think this judgment is mistaken? Personally I think it looks on point and we need to do some critical self-evaluation before dismissing it. For instance, on the last thread in which we both participated recently, that advice made me add some references to my answer, and I think the effort improved it. And surely there are many other answers that can be improved similarly if one tries actively to back up one's point and not sound like "because I say so".
@FedericoPoloni As soon as I have time to write an answer, I'll explain a bit better. In general, in my answers, I add references whenever I think that are needed (examples: 1, 2, 3, 4; for yesterday's answer I didn't have the time to add the references, but the sentence "there are guidelines [...]" means that I have those guides in my bookshelf and I checked them in the past exactly for cases like that one).
I have been wondering for some time if we should make wider use of the "needs citation" post notice (which would require a clearer policy on when citations are required). For example, the intersection between academia and law is fraught with complications (and few of us are qualified to answer), but such questions tend to attract low-effort, common-sense answers.
For many questions here, folks are sharing experience, often in terms of a hard-won opinion. (And, for fun, I still recall an early answer of mine that gave a personal example and then a final summary paragraph - one user downvoted and said the personal story was irrelevant and should be deleted.) As far as I can tell, many folks who answer here have been-there-done-that and are trying to give useful pointers to often complex human problems.
@FedericoPoloni Have you spent much time on IPS? I'd say they have policies more in line with what you're suggesting here. Personally, I respect what they are doing but find the rules a bit onerous and strongly prefer the environment here. I'd be in favor of a more narrowly targeted citation requirement though, such as for questions bordering law like cag51 mentions.
@BryanKrause No, I haven't spent much time on IPS, so my opinion is formed on a limited amount of data; if you have a pointer to this policy or some recent examples to share I'd appreciate it.
@FedericoPoloni https://interpersonal.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/2993/can-we-start-enforcing-the-back-it-up-policy and https://interpersonal.meta.stackexchange.com/search?q=back+it+up are places to start. I think it's hard to get a picture of how it actually works on the site in practice without just participating, though (or at least following new questions/answers and see how the moderation/voting plays out).
Do you have any suggestions for writing a good experience-backed answer? I could imagine answers depending on several unrelated experiences, and citing all of them might make things quite messy.
I actually removed my account from ipse, although I was among the earlier users, once they began to single-mindedly enforce the "back it up" rule and started to demand useless anecdotes for common sense answers. If you work or have worked in academia, you have experience with it's rules and culture; there's no need to make that very explicit in most cases.
I don’t think we can be much more objective in answers than we currently are.
Many of our questions are about problems that are far beyond the reach of studies or are far too individual for somebody to have relevant personal experience. Hence, we are only left with basing our answers on good arguments, which is what we often do. Often “as data- and experience-backed as it would be possible” is “not at all”.
Why arguments are not listed as possible ways to back up an answer in Good Subjective, Bad Subjective always eluded me and I don’t think we can ask the author now.
Maybe he simply didn’t think of questions that can be answered by argument as subjective at all.
What I consider the key to avoiding being overly subjective is to close or edit questions that can only attract too opinionated answers and guide askers to ask better questions in the first place.
Some specific replies to the cited post:
The paradigm of SE is that the questions are well-defined enough to have a correct answer, and the answers, well, attempt to provide it.
This does not even apply to the original Stack Overflow or Math Overflow. There are many questions which have multiple solutions. And Math Overflow appears to welcome questions such as this. Stack Exchange has a successful history of exploring what topics can work in its format under reasonable constraints. And our site is one of the results.
it is telling that the answers almost never have any references/citations.
See above: There is nothing reasonable to cite in most cases.
Often, the highest upvoted answer is quite short and simply states an opinion.
While concur that the opinion should be backed up by some argument, opinions are all we have. The importance is to distinguish between well-founded opinions and others.
Have you read the linked page on "good subjective and bad subjective", in particular the paragraph on "Great subjective questions invite sharing experiences over opinions"? I think it explains how we can improve even on questions that look hopelessly subjective.
@FedericoPoloni: I know that page very well, but you asked about improving answers, not questions. (It also for some reason doesn’t list (reasonable) arguments as one of the ways to back up answers.) We do a lot to avoid hopelessly opinion-based questions or edit them and I think that’s the most important route to avoid becoming an opinion cesspit.
If a question can only be answered with opinions, you can vote to close it. I often do. Example: "What is the best basket weaving department?"
If an answer is unambiguously an opinion (Example: "University A is better than University B."), you can downvote and leave a comment asking for the answer to be made more objective (Example: "If you are looking for a university that employs many professors of basket weaving, University A will suit your needs better than University B."). If you do this, keep in mind that answerers are not obligated to do your literature search or homework for you. If you want referenced answers, use Skeptics. Answerers are also not obligated to try and earn your upvote.
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4565 | What happens if there are too few candidates for moderator?
At the moment there are fewer candidates for moderator than there are slots. What happens if this remains so?
There are, potentially, a few members here that others, including myself, would not like to see as moderators as they seem, in posts and comments, to have too negative an attitude.
If there turn out to be "too few" candidates, it might be useful to let the election proceed but in a different form. "Should X be a moderator? yes/no".
If the no votes outweigh the yes, perhaps the person should not be given diamond status.
It might be useful to do something like this in any case if the number is more than the number of positions but below some other value. The number of open slots is two. Maybe with fewer than five candidates (or some similar value) the form of the election would change.
Disclaimer. This is not directed at any current candidate as I write this.
And maybe it is too late to make any change at present, but it should be considered for future elections, IMO.
Relevant Q&A on the main Meta.
See also this discussion and maybe consider participating with your concerns and suggestions.
Sorry if this is a stupid question, but where does it say how many slots there are? This site seems to have a good number of moderators already, so I would have thought there was only one slot currently available.
@aparente001 Top right box in https://academia.stackexchange.com/election : moderator positions available: 2.
@FedericoPoloni - Thanks very much. Why do we need two more moderators? Maybe I should ask a Meta Question.
@aparente001 The current moderators asked to create two more positions to get more help: see this comment. I missed that comment, too, initially, but then @ Strongbad pointed it out to me in another answer.
This thread on various moderators being fired or resigning on other SE sites was just brought to my attention. Maybe this series of issues between Stack Exchange (the company) and the community is part of the reason why we have so few candidates?
Voting on "Should X be a moderator" makes no sense unless X wants to be a moderator, and also has the time available to do the job. (Those two considerations may be independent of each other, of course.)
@alephzero, yes, agreed. I meant X only as for the declared candidates, not everyone. And the only reason for that, actually, is the possibility of self nomination in case a bad actor self nominated and there were no other choices.
If the nomination phase is coming to an end and there aren't enough candidates, we (the Community Team) generally extend the nomination period for one more week. We also make a new post in Meta, to draw attention to the lack of candidates.
Hopefully, that's enough to draw in more people willing to step up and moderate, but if it isn't then the election is cancelled. After that, the Community Team will need to convene with the moderation team, and assess next steps — though waiting for a bit before retrying the election is standard practice (if it failed, we wanna make sure we're not retrying just a month after, lest if fail again). We can also make a "interest check" Meta post before retrying the election, so we can assess how many people will be willing to moderate before starting another election that can potentially fail again.
out of curiosity: while this is not a very friendly thing to do and should probably not be considered when there are plenty of candidates, are there options to vote against a candidate when the number of candidates is less or equal to the number of positions?
Who are the "we" that take these decisions? The Stack Exchange staff? Or the users of each community?
You can vote against candidates if there are enough candidates to trigger a primary phase: see the description on the sidebar here, @ZeroTheHero.
The Stack Exchange staff, @FedericoPoloni
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5406 | Specific tags for subfields: desirable?
A new tag appeared today human-computer-interaction. HCI is actually a subfield of computer science, and maybe psychology as well. Here is the new question
I did a brief scan of all of our tags (ugh) and found that few fields here have specific tags for sub-fields. But it seems that CS is the main exception with several, including artificial-intelligence and data-science. Those sub-field tags have relatively few questions.
A further search for "human computer interaction" reveals 88 questions. But many (most?) of them aren't so tagged, nor even tagged with computer-science. And those can be found with a search without any tags (obviously), as the terminology is standard and in no way obscure.
As a "new-tag skeptic" I wonder if there is any consensus on the desirability of such sub-field tags. I replaced the new tag on today's question briefly, but rolled it back in favor of a discussion here first. It may be an edge case, actually. But the question itself is more general than the study of HCI and could be applied to at least CS and probably broader.
My personal view is that too many tags is a detriment here and that some users, especially new ones, feel that all keywords should be tags.
I'll note that many fields have recognized subfields, especially math and physics, but there don't seem to be sub-field tags for those.
So, the more general question, if answerable, is about how general or specific our tags should be. Likewise, should tags be a substitute for search.
It might also be the case that the CS sub-field tags are just an artifact that some of those fields are "hot" at the moment, making some people think they are especially important relative to others.
I'm not sure how to interpret votes on this question, especially down votes. Any enlightenment would be appreciated. This seems to be the case for several questions on meta here.
My 2 cents....
My personal view is that too many tags is a detriment here
I agree
So, the more general question, if answerable, is about how general or specific our tags should be.
My view is that tags should differentiate substantively different categories of questions.
If the question hinges on the differences between, say, measure theory and topology, then the question is not a good fit here. So, I would recommend against introducing tags for these subfields.
On the other hand, some subfields of biology do experiments with live mice or even humans. These introduce very different considerations, and so I wouldn't object to introducing tags for animal-research or human-subjects-research.
A new tag appeared today human-computer-interaction.
At this point, we already have 466 tags with at least one question each, and a few hundred more that are synonyms. I think we have passed the point where users should simply create new tags: rather, new tags should be proposed and approved here on meta, just as we do for canonical questions. This human-computer-interaction is a good example: offhand, I am inclined to say that this field does not need its own tag, but if someone creates a proposal and makes a strong case that this field has its own peculiarities due to the way it takes data on humans using computers, I could be convinced.
Perhaps those proposing a new tag should also suggest at least the short form for the tag wiki. The wiki is seldom created for new tags.
Why is more tags bad? There's a tag limit, but I don't think we hit it frequently.
@AzorAhai-him-, If tags have too few questions they aren't useful as categories. And if there are too many tags they are too hard to find and people will, then, just add more, making it worse. We have search for specific things and tags for categories of questions.
@Buffy If tags have too few questions they aren't useful as categories I don't agree, why do you say that? if there are too many tags they are too hard to find Are people scrolling through the tag list? I don't think so, I think most people type things into the tag box, so more tags, including synonyms enhances discoverability.
@AzorAhai-him-, but a question can only have five tags at most. Imagine a situation where there was a tag for every keyword. I've found five limiting for a few questions, actually. I have no problem with synonyms, actually, but it takes an action to create them.
@Buffy Sure, but I was asking about your comment about too few questions - what's the minimum viable # of Qs, in your opinion? How does any topic start with "enough" Qs?
@AzorAhai-him-, I don't have a minimum. The current average is 93 questions per tag. New tags have just one question of course. But if, after a year or so, a tag only has two or three questions, it isn't that useful on a general site like this one. Especially with the five tag limit.
There's a reasonable argument that tags are obsolete now that search is a solved problem, and we shouldn't bother with tags at all. As we've seen, it's very labor intensive and most people just search rather than scrolling through tags. But setting that aside, all the advantages of tags (being able to subscribe to or block certain tags; using tags to find interesting or relevant questions) break down if we have thousands of tags with four questions each. It's not just a matter of precision (giving each question good tags), but also of recall (giving tags all of the corresponding questions).
A few more fields beyond biology that do research on live humans: psychology, sociology, economics, and likely more. The value of a possible tag [tag:human-subjects-research] is not that it is a subfield of something (like biology) but that it identifies issues that pertain to multiple fields.
Concermimg the last part of this answer, the creation of new tags: I don't think most creators of new tags do so intentionally, they simply type in a keyword they think should be a tag and this action makes the new tag spring into existence. Most of these new or newer users don't even know about meta. To prevent the creation of new tags from happening there would need to be a pop-up message when entering a "new" keyword in the tag bar.
There is a way to enable a tag warning: https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/62591/warning-or-confirmation-on-new-tag-creation/233897#233897. Maybe we should request this, perhaps even requesting custom wording that new tags should probably be discussed on meta first.
The tag warning is probably a good idea.
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