@Zacky Well, as you can see, the post was locked so it can no longer be deleted by votes of regular users.
Possibly you can ask quid about this directly. But it is a judgement call, when locking a post, mods have to decide whether it should be deleted or not.
Some advantages to keeping those post: 1. For the OP that they keep the reputation. (If we consider the self-answer a sufficient context, this could be seen as a reward for asking good question/including context.) 2. It is possible that this might be useful when searching (as it might direct users to the other question).
I will admit that neither of these two reasons is two strong. But neither there are strong arguments why to delete.
Maybe quid will mention their reasons for keeping the question. (If you feel strongly that it's necessary to discuss this, you can ping them.)
If needed, I can copy them here - but they can be seen in the above links.
As I've mentioned in one of the moved messages: It seems to me that the explanation given in the comments was more about "creating interesting integrals" in general rather than about this specific post.
Well, that is maybe because I tried to obtain a general answer (with this question included into that too). "Would it also be possible to mention what is the reason on posting a question then provide yourself an answer?"
That is because more than half of OP questions are of this type.
Oh, now that I re-read that, it doesn't sound so general. (I tried to do both anyway).
For the record, if somebody asked me whether or not to delete the original question - before we noticed that it's likely a duplicate, I would not vote to delete it. (I would consider self-answer a sufficient context. Although I know that many users have harsher criteria on self-answered questions.)
Certainly, I would prefer if the OP found the duplicate and post an answer there rather than posting a new question - but I know that searching for math expressions can be quite tricky.
Yes, that's true. Also, often not everyone sees the self answers, what you commented there might save this "it might be useful to mention directly in the question that you have also posted your own answer".
@Zacky a merge moves the comments (at least most of them). Thus, they comments would have landed on the other question, where they would be confusing. I now included part of the explanation in the main post. It is interesting to know about this, but as Martin said it is rather a general explanation, as opposed to a motivation for this one particular integral.
I mean a mathematical motivation, say something like: I post this integral since it is a nice illustration for the use of polar coordinates.
I do not see a strong reason for deleting the migration stub. The post is not bad. It looks nice, and it now even has some base context.
Would it have been made clear from the start that there is a self-answer chances are it would never have been deleted to begin with. I agree that a self-answer often can serve as context, but it is still good to explain what one is doing and why one posts this question. If the content is then reasonably solid, math and presentation wise, there is not much reason why we would not want to keep it.
This is of course, leaving the dupe-considerations aside.
@Zacky yes, this is why we try to avoid duplicates and merge posts. Somebody that comes to the site in three months with the same question ideally should be able to find one post with several good answers. As opposed to finding one post with a not so great answer, then searching for another post finding one with no answer and then leaving in frustration before they found the third one that actually had a good answer.
Since moderators have the ability to merge posts it's not always needed to really copy the answer as we can move it.
I'll check the specific situation.
By now even the questioner has posted their solution on the original version, in that sense I'd say yes it's better to also move your answer there via a merge. Again we can keep the stub.
Since there are needed many votes, it might be hard to undelete in this room the following question: My sister absolutely refuses to learn math. However it might be worth a try.
Well, if you look at my last post where I posted U3 --- U10, you will see that they barely got 1 undelete vote. Thus getting 10 undelete votes seems quite hard.
@Zacky it's way too broad which also makes it primarily opinion based. The question is phrased in a very conversational way. That's just not a question that fits the format well.
Most happened in the first couple of days while the question was "hot" or otherwise highly visible. Yes, there is a constant trickle of votes as there is for many highly voted questions I assume, but really it does not strike me as very relevant.
I would also not over stress this "helpful" thing.
I really don't think that most of those voters had had the same problem and were helped by the advice received.
I certainly don't say that this type of questions cannot have any merit at all. I mean, after all I am also active on Mathematics Educators. But they need to be reasonably scoped.
+121/-5; +40/-2; +43/-2; +8/-0; +11/-0, are the votes of the first five days. The rest trickled in. So about two thirds were cast in the first five days, and basically even in the first tree days.
@Zacky there are posts that get 100 thousand upvotes. You can check how "useful" you find those. Certainly they are useful is a way. A good joke is not useless.
Of course that's not the same thing. But I really would not overstress the usefulness angle.
Yes, no doubt many found the post interesting, amusing, something else postive, but not in the sense of solving some actual problem.
But granted there is likely some good advice in there. The point is that actually it is not presented very well, but munched together in an unfocused post.
But, yeah, it just as well could be historically locked too.
I don't know details about historically locking posts, but it certainly shows that such posts aren't encouraged here anymore and in the same time it keeps the post somewhat here.
