@Did: It was originally public, but it seems that something happened (see above comments by @amWhy) and some moderator made it private. I am now puzzled. This is the first time I've seen this kind of thing.

I do not think any of us can you give more information on this - we are displayed the same message: "The room you are attempting to access is private. If you believe that you should have access to this room, you can request access to it."

The best thing is probably to wait whether they change it back to public (or at least publicly readable) or whether they make some kind of announcement on meta about this.

@MartinSleziak If they don't make it public again, we'll have to change the description of that room in the Meta post listing chat-rooms. Haha..

@MartinSleziak @user21820 Thanks for the information. Life on mse is truly full of suspense these days... :-)

Ya. Just after university, too.

@user21820 I think that probably leave to the mods how both the entry in the list of chatrooms and the announcement about opening the office is going to be changed.

@MartinSleziak Oh I forgot about that one, which I had previously upvoted.

That room is mentioned in several posts on meta and also in some comments on meta (perhaps also on main).

We will see what to do with this - maybe in places where this information is really crucial, they should be edited or removed.

But I would definitely wait at least a week before asking the mods what the further plans are. (And it would not be surprising to me if they let us know after they decide what to do.)

Not too long ago, life here on this site was relatively calm and we could basically take out popcorn and watch the unfolding of the drama of meta.MathOverflow. It seems that recently it's the other way round.

← 13 messages moved from CRUDE

@MartinSleziak Am I supposed not to be here? Just checking.

@amWhy I am not sure whether it's up to me to say. AFAICT this is completely public room where everybody can come and discuss stuff relevant to the topic of the room. (So mainly things related to meta.)

Let's hope that the tension between various users on meta will calm down a bit in the next few days.

On the other hand, perhaps this might make me to spend a bit less time on meta, which will probably only do me some good. Meta can be quite addictive and time consuming.

Yeah, I hope so too, @MartinSleziak. I hope they can chill.

There is even a meme originating on meta.SE: meta means murder :-)

The picture seems to be too big and distracting - so I'll only leave the above link.

The recent exchange on meta hints and disagreement on whether and which answers should be deleted. Was something like that discussed in the past.

@amWhy Yea we just thought CRUDE wasn't supposed to be about meta stuff. This room on the other hand is a catch-all room. I made you an owner of this room too, so you can't be not supposed to be here. =)

I know that there were several discussions about deletions by mods - but now I mean deletions by regular users (i.e., via vote to delete).

@MartinSleziak Lol!

I found Deleting Wrong Answers in “Low Quality” Queue and Deletion of on-topic answers only because they contain mathematical errors.

The latter contains an answer by quid, which seems quite reasonable. And also a few related posts are linked there.

*hints on (not "hints and")

@SimplyBeautifulArt o/

@Did @user21820 @MartinSleziak @amWhy @AJHenderson I have one more piece of information: Before the privatization of that chat, there was a message posted by arjafi as well as what I believe was a banning of @amWhy from the room. I assume the mods will work out the details, so I won't bother mentioning what I recall was said.

@MartinSleziak err ... and reveals as well disagreements of a moderator's unilateral decision to undelete the answer in question, after which the answer was locked.

A comment and pin from arjafi in mod chat stating in bold "amWhy is not welcome in this chat room" (despite the fact that it had been days since I commented in the chat room.

Shortly after the boldface comment in the mod's chat, I was told, by arjafi: "As the room owner of the Math Mods' Office, I am able to kick people out that I do not wish to be there. Nothing moderator-specifc, just the fact that I was the owner of that room." So I suspect the room will

Any way, back to Math Meta.

@amWhy If this is true, it's sad. But I think we may have to wait for the mods to sort it out and respond. Thanks for giving your brief account of what happened, for the benefit(?) of those who are left wondering in the dark.

@user21820 I have little doubt that a mod chat will be accessible to all (but me)... despite my not having had any recent discussion with arjafi in the mod chat. So It's my loss; I'm quite sure the room become accessible to all users who are in arjafi's favor. Unless, that is, another mod/ all mods co-owns it. But yes, we'll wait and see, but for most frequenters of the chat room, I just want to reassure you, that if a mod room is going to exist, it will be open and accessible to you.

@amWhy I still have hope that it will turn out better than it would seem to. =)

@user21820 I'm hoping so, as well.

@MartinSleziak these are both situations where a mod would likely be expected to come in and counter it. SE explicitly does not determine "correctness"

only usefulness

so therefore being incorrect is NEVER a correct reason for deletion

it's a reason for downvoting and commenting

this is where the "super downvote" issue comes from

but that's fundamentally different from something that does not answer the question or provides so little support that it does not meet the documentation criteria for an acceptible answer

deleting for reasons of being incorrect would be a situation where a moderator is expected to intervene and go against the general site concensus

@AJHenderson This is an interesting opinion. As a logician I firmly disagree with it. A post about mathematics is useful only if it has mathematically correct content. I don't count accidental errors as diminishing a post's value, unless the author deliberately refuses to correct mathematical errors. However I do count mathematical nonsense as useless. Hence I will downvote in the way I please to ensure usefulness of Math SE.

@user21820 right, but that's why you down vote

I also vote to delete for the same reason.

if something has a score of -20, nobody is going to take it seriously

but it's a community decision if something isn't useful, where as deleting prevents that decision from being made

I consider voting to delete as a crucial means of ensuring mathematical usefulness, because the majority of the Math SE community utterly fail at determining the mathematical correctness of some posts that I know for sure are nonsense.

It's something that I do not expect people to understand or agree with me, especially if they are not logicians. But in my opinion it's a serious case of the Dunning Kruger effect.

@user21820 then additionally comment

This happens especially with HNQ.

your point proves what I'm saying

I always comment when I think the author has good intention.

sure it's great if you get to it first to delete, but what if 3 other members of the community get to it and delete something that is correct

because they thought it wasn't

As a user with sufficient reputation I can see deleted posts and can vote to undelete.

The problem here (I readily admit) is that experts in a topic may not have the necessary reputation.

But that is a fault of the SE system.

I am just working the best way I know how to within it.

I have indeed voted to undelete some posts which are correct.

that's the relevant SE meta post

there are also some others that go in to more detail

but the short version is that it is officially an incorrect usage of Delete to remove incorrect answers that are otherwise reasonable attempts at answering

it might be a policy that SE is willing to budge on on particular sites though. It certainly seems more relevant to something like Math, but at the same time, SE really isn't set up for academic standards

since reputation lacks much in the way of review

@user21820 yes, this. It's generally agreed the "don't delete wrong" isn't ideal, but it's also a limitation of what the system can handle well given how rep works

but it is a strong enough reason that there is actually a built in flag response for moderators to say that flags shouldn't be used to indicate incorrect answers (which is another thing that frequently occurs)

@AJHenderson Yes I am aware that it is officially incorrect. However, I believe all experts on Math SE will not disagree with nearly all my choices of deletion. And I'm always open to feedback and discussion and reasoning and will change my mind if appropriate.

You wouldn't be surprised that I have been told a few times about my incorrect use of flags.

@user21820 fair enough, I just wanted to make sure you weren't ignorant of it. How you choose to work from there is your call

I would suggest there isn't much a delete accomplishes that a down vote and comment doesn't accomplish though

it is also possible you have some extenuating circumstances if you have a crowd of users that like to upvote with no clue

in which case that's likely a good case for varying from official policy, but I'd probably work on a meta discussion for it at that point

to try to make sure it's the best solution (and consistently enforced solution) for the problem

What I gathered seems to be that deletion is considered 'community consensus' enough to be a permitted way of getting rid of nonsense. I agree that "nonsense" is subjective. Yes I have seen so many HNQ posts that are mathematically nonsense and need downvoting and deletion.

@AJHenderson This was a recent example, that surprisingly the author decided to follow Did's advice to self-delete.

@user21820 yeah, HNQ always causes issues pretty much everywhere

they should probably just send moderators a notice when a question hits HNQ so we know to watch it closely

Ya. I wish I could stop HNQ to Math SE.

at a minimum it almost always gathers a ton of "me too" answers

it's good for community growth and worth the pain they cause

but they are almost always a pain

@user21820 If I notice question in HNQ which I consider not a good representative for the site and if I consider it an improvement of the title, I simply include some math formula (MathJax) into the tile.

@MartinSleziak I did that in the past, and it worked. Now I'm afraid it may not work anymore.

And most of the time I come across them too late, since I'm not watching the HNQ every now and then.

Why it may not work? Because there are too many of them?

@MartinSleziak Last I tried it, it stayed on the HNQ... Perhaps I am misremembering, but I didn't try again after I thought it failed.

I believe that documentation is pretty clear on this: Are the questions with TeX markup in titles excluded from Hot Network Questions?

It might simply be caching - probably it stays there for a few more minutes.

@MartinSleziak Okay thanks for that; I'll have to try it again next time I see a silly HNQ.

And of course we both know that this is not an intended use of MathJax. =D

If there were some changes, I guess they would appear among the post linked to that one. I do not see any announcements of change there. (I might have missed something.)

@user21820 Making titles better (more informative) is a right thing to do. If this also removes a not very good question from HNQ, that's just a side effect. (A positive one, in this case.)

Personally, I do not have problems with good questions in HNQ. (Of course, various people have differing opinions on which questions are good.)

you know what might be nice is if they added another tag rep related feature

@MartinSleziak I use the 'feature' also when just LaTeX-ing a title with some math already in it, if I want to remove it from the HNQ. I too like to have good questions in the HNQ. But recently it seems not many are there.

where if a user had high rep in a tag on the question, they'd be able to vote to mark an answer as "incorrect"

@AJHenderson Hahaha. I wish!

Something to separate out the opinion of "trusted" users in a tag from those who are just casually reading

That would be an alternative (and perhaps superior) solution to the problem.

@user21820 yeah, probably true, but I'm just throwing the idea out there

but it is atleast something SE as a whole has considered with giving tag experts additional power

Somehow, it never occurred to me. But surely they wouldn't agree to implement such a thing?

so the idea of trusting them more isn't necessarily out of the question

Hmm.

they recently (last 6 months or so) made it so high rep tag users can directly close I think it was

I believe for reasons of duplicate

Yea I heard about that. But that's like so limited.

but having something similar for some type of annotation to an answer would make sense as well if a strong enough argument can be made that incorrect upvoting is a significant enough issue

I don't think they trust high-rep users enough. After all, the reputation system was already flawed to begin with.

sure, but having a "This answer may be incorrect" annotation is also quite limited

but also very effective at getting people to pay more attention

Yea and that's the whole goal.

Much greater benefit to readers than "closing as duplicate".

having a seperation of "helpful users think something is wrong" vs "random users think this is great" would be valuable

for that matter it could even just be automatic

if the high rep user in the tag vote count is negative, highlight it somehow

It's like an advertized downvote-by-expert.

it doesn't even have to be a special feature

just something that looks at vote count

Would you suggest it to Meta?

I need to think it through a bit more, but I'll probably end up making a meta.se post on it

it seems easy to implement and quite valuable

Thanks a lot! Please share the link here if you post it. =)