Editing titles and editing old posts

Yemon Choi

May 22, 2016 4:53 PM

A grumpy plea: can we please not introduce pseudo-LaTeX/MathJax in titles of questions, unless it seems absolutely necessary to interpret certain symbols such as subscripts

Also, I remain unconvinced that $SU(n)$ is better than SU(n) if this is used infrequently in the question, not least because it should arguably be ${\rm SU}(n)$ anyway

Not to mention ${\bf Z}$ versus ${\mathbb Z}$, and so on...

Martin Sleziak

@YemonChoi This is related to some of the recent edit suggestions, I guess. I see that you voted to reject one of them.

It seems that the relevant meta thread is the one linked by quid above:

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Q: Editing titles to include $\mathfrak{LaTeX \; Math}$

Should question titles, which sometimes intentionally avoid LaTeX math for those who choose faster rendering, be edited to insist upon LaTeX math? A recent instance that prompted my question is "two tetrahedra in R^4." The original title used R^4 to mean $\mathbb{R}^4$, and it was edited, bringin...

It seems that MO users have different opinions on this.

-1 for 1st para and +1 for 2nd para :-) — Yemon Choi Aug 8 '13 at 0:16

+1 for first paragraph, and -1 for second. :-) — Joel David Hamkins Aug 8 '13 at 11:32

One side effect of not using MathJax in the title is that such question can appear in the network-wide hot question lists. (And again, my guess is that the opinion whether this is a good thing or a bad thing will be devided.)

But I agree that there is certainly not much difference between $SU(n)$ and SU(n) or $\mathsf{ZFC}$ and ZFC.

Martin Sleziak

May 22, 2016 5:49 PM

@YemonChoi IIRC it is possible to ping any editor. So perhaps the best way to make that particular user aware of this would be to ping him on that particular post and add a link to the particular post on meta or to your message ni chat (or both).

Martin Sleziak

May 25, 2016 5:51 AM

@YemonChoi I have pinged this particular editor on the main. (So that your "grumpy plea" gets at least to him.) I am not sure whether you think it is necessary to contact also the reviewers who approved the edit.

@AmirSagiv Maybe it is worth mentioning that some users do not agree to adding MathJax/LaTeX to the titles which are perfectly readable without it. (As far as I can say, there is no clear consensus about this.) See this discussion on meta or this message in chat. (Regardless of this issue, I appreciate efforts to improve posts by editing them, be it for typos, grammar, LaTeX or anything else.) — Martin Sleziak 1 min ago

If you think that there is a reason to make more people aware of the issue, bumping that old discussion on meta could cause some people to notice it. (And remind some users who have forgotten about that discussion.)

For example, adding the editing tag seems like a reasonable thing to do. Perhaps there are some typos in the question or the answers. (Since I am below 2k, I cannot edit posts on meta. So basically it's up to you - the question is whether it is important enough to revive the discussion by bumping that post.)

Of course, it is possible that a few users will notice this simply because it was mentioned here in chat.

Martin Sleziak

May 25, 2016 12:19 PM

I'll read and comment in Meta. Thanks for the heads up. In the post themselves it is a consensus, right? — Amir Sagiv 31 mins ago

StackExchange

May 25, 2016 2:08 PM

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Q: New tags: Functional Data Analysis, Time Series, Functional Time Series

In my opinion there should be at least the following two tags, I couldn't find: "Time Series", "Functional Data Analysis". Since functional data are used more and more and time series as a discipline are very popular, it could be considered to have the following tag as well: "Functional ...

discussion tags

Yemon Choi

May 25, 2016 5:00 PM

@MartinSleziak I know this is your POV, but I think you said that you are not such an active user of MO? I am, and I use the front page (rather than the "new questions" tab) because I want to be aware of older questions that attract new, good answers; sometimes I didn't notice them on first go. Having old questions and answers bumped for purely cosmetic reasons, or because someone is over-enthusiastic about what they think is correct grammar, just creates noise for users like me.

@MartinSleziak Obviously, fixing broken markup (to fix alignment or MathJax issues) is fine. Changing Z to {\mathbb Z} or Z to {\bf Z} -- the latter is what everyone should do, arguably, but that battle seems to have been lost -- is not, in my view, sufficient reason to resurrect things

Martin Sleziak

May 25, 2016 5:29 PM

@YemonChoi Considering that Asaf's answer has score 19 at the moment, I am not the only one who thinks that editing posts is useful.

I do not edit much and I try to edit mostly recent posts.

BTW since I am below 2k, I cannot do much harm - all my edits have to be approved by more experienced users.

And the comment you're objecting to was my effort to let the editor know about your objections. You can easily ping the editor in the same thread and if I misinterpreted what you wanted to say, you can add better explanation.

Yemon Choi

May 25, 2016 5:58 PM

@MartinSleziak I note that Asaf also expresses a preference for not resurrecting old questions, which is my particular bugbear. I am not saying "improving posts is a bad thing". I am saying "people making trivial improvements, some of which are based on a false sense of knowledge, creates noise"

Martin Sleziak

Point taken.

Maybe the difference is what people understand under trivial improvement.

Yemon Choi

Indeed. This one, for me, is trivial (and look at the date) mathoverflow.net/review/suggested-edits/65175

Although in fairness, that edit came after the question had already been bumped by someone adding a tag

mathoverflow.net/posts/87835/revisions

Martin Sleziak

I think that if question was bumped, it changes the game.

Still, if you think that this particular edit was wrong, I think that letting the particular editor know about it seems to me a reasonable course of action.

Yemon Choi

@MartinSleziak Agreed. (Wow, online agreement.)

Martin Sleziak

As for myself, I can promise you that I will try to refrain from editing older post. (Although there are some cases where it is difficult to resist.)

BTW I see that you are among the most active editors at MO. Would you mind if I add you as a room owner? (So that there is an owner who belongs to MO community.)

One thing you can do as a room owner is to pin messages. (For example, if you want to pin the "grumpy plea" to the starboard.)

The way I understand it, quid did not want left the room without an owner when they were leaving. And I was around. (I think that after some time the room will die anyway, since both Ricardo Andrade and quid are not active on MO anymore. As far as I can say, they used to be the most active users in this chat room.)

Still, in case it might be useful, perhaps it is worth giving this room a chance.

Other things the rooms owner can do is to change the feeds in the room. That's about all what I can think of from the top of my head.

Martin Sleziak

May 25, 2016 6:32 PM

Speaking of bumping old questions, quite an important difference between MO and math.SE is the number of questions asked. If there are 500 question per day, bumping a few old questions will go unnoticed. Situation is quite different with 40 questions per day. stackexchange.com/sites?view=list#science-questions

Martin Sleziak

May 26, 2016 4:00 AM

Just to clarify, here are some examples of edits which I would consider useful, but not important enough to bump an old post: correcting typos, adding completely missing MathJax, adding DOI link (or other link) to references, TeX improvements (changing $<a,b>$ to $\langle a,b \rangle$, $sin x$ to $\sin x$, $max f(x)$ to $\max f(x)$, $||a||$ to $\|a\|$, etc.)

I should have also mentioned adding reasonable tags or removing wrong ones. (Especially in the case where there is a suitable top-level tag, but the question is not tagged with such.)

Examples where I would consider bumping post: correcting link which is not working, replacing missing picture, fixing picture link to stable (imgur) url, ...

If a post is marked CW, it often means that edits by other users are welcome, so maybe I would be more relaxed in such cases.

And, as you agreed, the situation is different if the question has been bumped anyway for other reason.

I understand that bumping old question is more distracting on a site with less than 50 qpd than on a site with hundreds of questions per day.

When on MO, I'll try to respect the opinions of MO community as expressed in the relevant threads:

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Q: Editing titles to include $\mathfrak{LaTeX \; Math}$

Should question titles, which sometimes intentionally avoid LaTeX math for those who choose faster rendering, be edited to insist upon LaTeX math? A recent instance that prompted my question is "two tetrahedra in R^4." The original title used R^4 to mean $\mathbb{R}^4$, and it was edited, bringin...

discussion titles

17

Q: What's our consensus on people resurrecting old questions just to edit formatting?

I think the title says it all. Personally, as someone who uses the "newest questions" as the front page, I'm not keen on people tweaking questions or answers that seem to have outlived active interest. Added 2013-07-08: I see we are now getting nit-picking corrections of English. Well, more defe...

discussion

Perhaps also this one from tea is relevant: Must we raise the dead for umlaut's sake

Martin Sleziak

May 26, 2016 6:42 AM

Since you brought up $\mathbf Z$ and $\mathbb Z$ issue both here and on meta, I will also comment on this: My personal view is that edits should respect the OP intentions. (It is helpful to make an edit for an user who does not know how to do something in MathJax. It is different thing to change completely the notation introduced by the OP.)

But I guess changing $\mathbb Z$ to $\mathbf Z$ (or the other way round) is not that radical change as completely changing the OP's wording or notation.

I suppose things like this were discussed on some metas, too. But I did not find quickly something here at meta.MO. I found a related discussion at meta.MSE:

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Q: Arbitrarily editing an asker's notation to fit your own preferences

I've seen several cases of other users editing a question to change all instances of an asker's $\mathbb{Z}_n$ to $\mathbb{Z}/n\mathbb{Z}$, saying that the former is an incorrect notation. I don't want to call specific people out if they are genuinely trying to improve the site, but it is really...

discussion editing

There was even a discussion specifically about (blackboard) bold:

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Q: Blackboard bold

Why do people use blackboard bold here and elsewhere in print? I thought the whole point of the font was as a substitute for bold when one was writing out something by hand. Shouldn't we be using just bold R, Z, N, etc.?

discussion soft-question

MO editors' lounge

Participants