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8:18 AM

I got a bit zealous with editing old arXiv front links. For a little while, the overall flow of questions (presumably because of the northern hemisphere summer) was enough to space out my edits a bit more, but as Gerry Myerson pointed out, there are now too many of them on the front page.

Martin Sleziak

@David, the front page is now flooded with old questions that you have bumped up by making edits. That bumps newer questions off the front page. Please do three or four of these a day, not seventeen in a few hours. — Gerry Myerson 2 hours ago

@GerryMyerson sorry about that. I would have hoped that the variety of questions compensated for the bumping (and there is also the sort facility...), but I can definitely slow right down. — David Roberts 14 mins ago

MathOverflow Meta: Do we have an unofficial quota on how many old questions one should bump for minor edits in a single day?

@theHigherGeometer One thing which slows down me when editing (especially if there are several answers) if when I try to look also at other answers to see whether there is something that should be edited.

In that way, it is possible that somebody makes 17 edits and bumps three or four questions.

Here is a query which counts removals per day: data.stackexchange.com/mathoverflow/query/1490489/… data.stackexchange.com/mathoverflow/query/1490489/…

Of course, even here it is possible that some of those posts were answers to the same question - so number of bumped questions is smaller than that.

It would probably be possible to count number of questions rather than post - the query would have to be a bit more complex. We would need at least one more join - to be able to get the ParentId.

In case somebody is curious, I have already posted various stats about removals of such links: chat.stackexchange.com/…

Regardless of the bumps (MO seems to be more sensitive to this than other sites) - thank you for your work on improving MathOverflow posts!

2 hours later…

Martin Sleziak

10:58 AM

Here is an example of a post that was bumped because of editing links - and after that, somebody noticed the question and posted a new answer.

Q: Is there a periodic table for knots?

When I see knot tables, I have two feeling: ah, it's beautiful, and... painful. I don't see how knots are ordered in the knot table, the way to go from one knot of a certain crossing number to another seems to be completely random. But I would guess there are some order? For example, why are the...

knot-theory

A: Is there a periodic table for knots?

I'm surprised no one mentioned the story by William Thompson, also known as lord Kelvin, which originally thought of atoms or elements as knots! That would literally put them in a periodic table :). I learned this from this from this fascinating talk by Haynes Miller, which I quote the relevant p...