Can you guys do something about this? How do I flag three posts of the identical question — allegedly by different people, but I don't believe it? What's worse, the offender first emailed me and then posted a question and never had the politeness to acknowledge my comment/correction (even in the subsequent post). This behavior should be censured.
@MattSamuel Sorry about getting agitated last night. One of the chief difficulties in formulating a policy here is that how undesirable certain kinds of actions are depends on the scale. A single answer to a PSQ is fine. An accident. If done by a newbie it is par for the course, ok even. The practice becomes progressively more offensive when it is turned into an industry.
It would, indeed, be petty to worry about a single pigeon leaving its droppings on your window sill. But when it's the same group of pigeons, doing it a dozen times a day, soon you will grow tired of just cleaning it up every time (which is what you seem to insist should happen). And, at some point, the thought may cross your mind, that may be a shotgun as a deterrent would work. Local laws permitting.
Also, offering another compromise is difficult when the opposing faction won't show up at the negotiation table. They could also make a counteroffer to the current PSQ policy. But they only complain.
Re: scale. Here we have a frequent offender posting four distinct solutions to a single PSQ. The question is not trivial. But this answerer has already explained the same techniques hundreds of times.
@JyrkiLahtonen I guess in the case of inequalities and contest question, it might be also a difference of the culture. Probably some people come here from AoPS.
I am not really that familiar with AoPS, but AFAICT various contest problems are simply posted there, without requiring any context. (I am not sure to which extent they have some rules requiring attempts in the subfora which are not directly about context but closer to homework help.)
I vaguely recall that you've mentioned in some post on meta that contest-math is somewhat different from other questions and that you would be glad to see some form of community curating the content to grow around that tag. (I am just paraphrasing.)
I meant this - I somehow misremembered that it was about contests:
> I am somewhat in favor of various subcommunities, say, those forming around selected tags, within Math.SE developing their own norms. Enforcing such norms will mostly be up to the subcommunities themselves. It is good to have some common standards (enforced for example via our common review queues), but IMO the keen followers of a tag are best placed to judge many cases.
> A good example of such a subcommunity is the one built around those tough definite integrals discussed recently.
@MartinSleziak Bringing up that old post gives me a warm feeling. You see, at that time I was still thinking that all users could find common ground. I guess I still do. Anyway, there are tags where the process never started.
At the time I also still entertained hopes that contest-math could be handled differently. At the time there was no such "industry" around a specific type of contest math problems. Michael Rozenberg, while producing objectively good math, is, in my opinion, transforming the contest math tag from a haven of creativity to a scene of crank turning by building a pool of techniques out of which the answerers are then to pick one that works for a particular instance.
I cannot quite put my finger on it, but this is step into an undesirable direction. Differences of opinion. Shrug. Not ruling out the possibility that I wear tinted glasses when thinking about the contest scene the way I saw it when I was participating myself.
Anyway, in the years after those posts I have given up the ghost that contest math should have separate rules. Impractical to enforce. If we ever had a chance to talk face-to-face I could probably easily find common ground with Rozenberg. We both love contest math. The gripe is more about the volume of similar questions turning it from a form of art into a craft. Not unlike calculus.
You see, in the early days of the site the contrast between contest math and calculus seemed clear to me. Each contest question needing ideas from diverse (even though elementary) areas of math whereas calculus was more about turning the crank. Again, I am wearing tinted glasses :-/
And also, when posting those meta posts I was more moderatorial. I thought of such self ruling subcommunities as one possible compromise (with a view of Matt Samuels complaint from last night that I am not offering any compromises). But, those compromises should not vary vastly from one subcommunity to another. Because we only have one review queue. May be I failed to communicate the need for some level of cohesion between the subcommunities that is required for the entire site to work well.
But @MartinSleziak. I truly think that you did a great job in reminding me about that old post. At the moment I am not in a position to lead the formulation of such a scenario - United Subcommunities of Math.SE, together with some common rules but also varying local rules. It actually may be one way forward.
Too bad I have burned so much goodwill to be able to credibly lead a formation of such a future :-( Not that I would make a good leader under the best of circumstances.
A disturbing possibility is that some subcommunities would be a bunch of nomads. Is anyone policing freshman calculus? I'm not involved well enough there to say one way or the other, but the view in the review queues (likely distorted by some selection bias) is that it is an anything goes -zone.
@JyrkiLahtonen I'm surprised you believe you have burned so much goodwill. You can absolutely credibly lead a formation of such a future, and you have been a good leader even in trying times.
@JyrkiLahtonen You've always been honest, and that says far more than I can attribute to the majority of math.se users. You've always been an asset, and you say what you mean and mean what you say. That's a strength in my book. And you are rarely rarely disrespectful when doing so.
@JyrkiLahtonen also @MartinSleziak For the record: the "Close" review queue is currently sitting at around 600 items. This requires something on the order of 1800-2400 individual user actions to clear. As an ordinary user is only allowed to take 20 actions per day, clearing this queue would require the active participation of somewhere around 100 users.
As of right now, I see fewer than 20 active participants.
There simply are not enough actively participating users to deal with the flood of low-quality material that is posted to Math SE.
However, if the folk who are so often so very fast to write answers would instead take a couple of minutes to look for duplicate targets (or just voting to close low-quality questions), instead, they could help clear this backlog, and help maintain the overall quality of the site.
It is, in part, this lack of interest in civic participation which I find offensive.
@Xander what this reveals is that some of us embrace civic participation to benefit the community, while some among us think only about daily rep scores.
^^^^ some among us think only about maximizing their own daily rep scores. (Just to clarify my last comment.)
@XanderHenderson I'd be happy to participate in reviewing, but my opinion is not welcome apparently. I was review-banned twice for my attempts to contribute.
@MattSamuel That should be an indication to you that you are an outlier, not cognizant of site norms, or insistent on carrying out some agenda that most users won't endorse.
Everyone fails an audit here and there, beause there a rational arguments to be made about a post or two selected algorithmic-ally may be poor, but no one is banned for occasional failures, only when such failures indicate a biased reviewer.
@amWhy I never, ever fail review audits. These are moderator-imposed bans, both times they provided links to questions I approved that they disapproved of.
@MattSamuel That's not the way it works, though I sympathize with your need to blame others, rather than taking responsibility for your repeated opposition to norms.
@MattSamuel Once again, blame others for your opposition to any and all standards on this site.
@MattSamuel For what it's worth I frequently "skip" a post in a review queue when I don't feel strongly enough about it to waste a vote on it. Anyway, it sounds like you want to ignore norms developed before your time. Not forgetting that the reviewers should take software suggested close reasons seriously. After all, they were designed by the creators of the site. Why would you then be surprised that acting contrary to the site goals is met with disproval?
@XanderHenderson I need to get some shut-eye, and fire up my drawing tablet in 9 hours. I have about 15 unused close votes for the day. Feel free to include them in the tally (when deciding whether you want to cast the deciding vote).
@MattSamuel it's a relief to know people actually read those
the way we view review queue is that it is crowdsourced enforcement of site rules, rather than a voting system on what the site rules should be
4
when confronted with a bare, no context question, and one of the close reasons is "this question lacks context", the review should not be to leave open
it's ok to have the opinion that doesn't line up with the established site norms, the review queue just isn't the appropriate venue to argue that opinion
if a policeman that thinks a law should be changed, they should take this to the town hall meetings, instead of just ceasing to enforce it while they're on duty
@AlexanderGruber I never use the no-context close reason. After the first review ban, I skipped those questions and voted to leave open questions that I thought had some degree of context. I thought that the ones cited in the second review ban did, apparently you disagreed. I don't always vote to leave open. I vote to close questions for needing focus and being unclear, and being duplicates.
@MattSamuel yeah, it can be a judgement call at times
i try not to hand out review bans when i think there is ambiguity, but if I've gone too fast and overlooked something, feel free to point it out to me. I don't want to keep you away from the queue if you're doing it properly.
@AlexanderGruber I was actually initially under the impression that it was partially retaliation for running for moderator. I used "Contact Us" to ask whether it disqualified me, and they said it had no effect on eligibility. It happened around the election period.
@TedShifrin just realized nobody answered you. Usually people flag one of the questions and include the link to the other questions in the flag's custom text.
@AlexanderGruber Namely, you voted to undelete (against the asker's wishes), and reopen (despite community moderation to deleted as a dupe) this question
@AlexanderGruber No you weren't wrong. There certainly exist far better duplicates, so I fully understand your actions. Thanks for responding. (Admittedly, I did not read the previously chosen duplicate target until now.)
