@amWhy Going back to handle 20 more from close queue.

@ParamanandSingh Go to it! :-)

Now it says "come back in 23 hours to review again". Let me check other queues

@XanderHenderson : that question on definition of $a^x $ (needing multi level equation numbers) came in review queue and I voted as needing focus.

@ParamanandSingh Great job! I think the number of posts in the close review queue is lower than it's ever been since Covid-19.

@ParamanandSingh @amWhy Seems reasonable. Closed.

@amWhy: I wasn't aware that I could make a noticeable difference (there may be other users involved too).

Right now saying 89 in close queue

@ParamanandSingh I really have difficulty believing that... I wonder if the new system f'd up the queues...

@ParamanandSingh It varies, based on how many votes you've cast, on how many of the questions you handled have been handled to the point of actual closure. Once you cast them, they aren't listed for you. You only see the number of posts in the close queue that haven't been closed AND the ones you have not yet voted on. I see a tad over 100.

@Xander It's always been like that. One only sees in any review queue, posts that are available for review which you personally have not yet reviewed.

@amWhy No, that's not my issue. That the queue is under 250 for anyone shocks me.

I just am having difficulty believing that the queue could be that low.

@XanderHenderson Well below, for me too, @107. I know, that's why I commented above. It was at 166 when I started today. I'm hoping that additional gold stars after reaching and multiple of 1000 has brought us more reviewers. We should ask @MartinSleziak if there is any query we can run to determine the number of close vote reviewers now, vs. three months ago.

@amWhy No, I don't doubt you. It shows well under 200 for me, too. I just have trouble believing that this could be correct.

I can't even remember the last time it was this low, @Xander!

Arg... I closed a question three minutes after it was asked, and it managed to get an answer five minutes later! math.stackexchange.com/questions/4037596/…

What is the point of closing questions?!

@ParamanandSingh A week from now I can do the review queues at 5:00 IST. I've been lax with review queues this week because it takes effort to go through it and it is a family-heavy week for me, so once I get back next week I can focus better. Actually, I find that the questions at 5am IST are also worth answering more. It is just funny, I suppose!

@XanderHenderson You know Swati Mohan?

@XanderHenderson If this isn't reported somewhere on general meta, it might be worth a post.

@ParamanandSingh Thank you for the input on the bountied problem. I was only hoping that context was sufficient, but what made me think it was a contest problem was all those constraints that OP had put out. I think it is common to have such restrictions in a programming competition, given that I went to one about eleven years ago.

@XanderHenderson: how is it possible. I don't see any answer link to post a new answer to that question (or for that matter in any closed question). But the timeline shows that the answer came after you closed it. Bug or what??

@TeresaLisbon: I wasn't suggesting that you need to wake up early and manage 40 posts from close queue. My usual time for waking up is 6:30 or 7 am. Today I just woke up early as my kid started crying somewhere at 4:30

But yes if you are available during that time it is worth doing reviews.

@ParamanandSingh Oh, I see, unfortunate that. I usually get up very early at hostel, say 3:45 IST, and sleep at 8:15 or 8:20 IST, I find it helpful at morning to stay awake. At home things are different, where I am right now. I will see how it goes next week, when I return to hostel.

*20:15 or 20:20 IST, I meant.

Wrong answer on a HNQ has the most upvotes and is accepted.......

@user21820 The answer was edited.

@JoséCarlosSantos How's the edit relevant? It still fails to answer the question, as Greg pointed out.

While the question itself is admittedly slightly ambiguous, the natural reading is indeed the one Henry took, as did many others like myself.

@amWhy I am not sure whether this is really possible. You (or somebody else) can check the related posts on Meta Stack Exchange: How to query the Data Explorer for reviewer stats, Is it possible to estimate the active reviewer population using the SEDE data?

@user21820 You are right. I have downvoted it.

Since SEDE stats on reviews have been brought up, here is a query created by rene which should (roughly) correspond to the size of the close votes review queue: data.stackexchange.com/math/query/368472/…

It is taken from this post: Why doesn't the reviewtasks table contain records for close reviews before July 10th, 2012

Some time ago I have tried to create this, but this only shows questions entering on the given date (not the entries which are active on the give day): Number of questions in a review queue per day

here, the answer is good , but the author did neither clarify what is meant with the orbit nor whether start value 1 is allowed. Apparently, the answerer hit the intention of the author. Should we just close , oe delete the question ?

@Peter Since that thread is of zero lasting value, and the question is a bad one, I would close and delete.

I have no idea why the asker didn't seem to even think a bit before asking though.

D1, D2, D3.

D7, D8, D9.

D10, D11, D12.

D11 : some user claimed that Euclid was not able to prove uniqueness of prime factorization :)

@TeresaLisbon Yes. She is married to a friend from high school---I went to their wedding (which was one of the best weddings I ever went too; big, fat Indian wedding, with three days of eating and celebration).

@ParamanandSingh I believe that this is a well-known problem with the way that the mobile site works. If you start writing an answer before the question is closed, you can still submit that answer after the question is closed.

C/D

@XanderHenderson: I wasn't aware of this.

Embarrassing ! Or was that intended ? This would even be worse.

D

@ParamanandSingh See

Apparently you can “force-submit” an answer even on the desktop site, within four hours after the question was closed.

Here is another question which seems to demonstrate the problems with [tag:solution-verification. What is an answer to this question even supposed to say?

Is this a question about mathematics? It is definitely a question about mathematical writing, but I don't think that it is really about math.

Maybe it should be closed as "opinion based"?

Thanks for the link in meta. Bookmarked it

definitely off-topic

@XanderHenderson: that solution verification question is best answered in comments. It does not need a separate answer. I think the idea of solution verification is useful if people post solutions about which they are not sure and maybe they need to highlight the parts which they think might be wrong or dubious. Let's not use mathse as an examiner

@ParamanandSingh If it can only be answered in the comments, then it is off-topic. :\

@XanderHenderson: maybe you need to convince mods and users to formulate this as a policy

@ParamanandSingh I think that this has been discussed before, and that there is no real community consensus about how these kinds of questions should be handled. The problem is that the solution-verification tag's very existence seems to be justification enough for a large number of users.

Honestly, I get really tired of the argument "the tag exists, therefore I can ask the question".

Similar problems occur with the various tags related to programming languages: because the tag exists, people seem to think that it is okay to ask us to debug code.

:\

the same with history-questions, see my above example here again. This question is about a past so far away that we can anyway only speculate, we won't have reliable sources.

@Peter Yeah, but that question isn't even well-formulated. What is a "mathematician"?

I don't think that "mathematician" existed as a profession or descriptor until very recently.

I mean, Newton and Leibniz were "natural philosophers".

This question was deleted by its author after I posted an answer. That is not nice. On the other hand, the question is of (at most) medium quality (does “I think I need to use Schwarz's reflection principle” count as sufficient context?), therefore I can also live with it remaining deleted.

@MartinR I am usually inclined to undelete such questions because (1) the deletion is rude to the answerer, and (2) I suspect that a lot of these deletions are meant to cover up cheating. That being said, I am also more than happy to subsequently let the community close and redelete such questions.

@amWhy Hi, I posted again some posts that need close-/delete-votes and I once again (but the last time to avoid to be considered as annoying) want to mention that there are still 50 posts with a score of -8 or less. No matter how old most of them are, this should be reduced , and we should not wait until some of them vanish automatically.

Ugh... math.stackexchange.com/q/4038134/468350 . This has to be a dupe, right?

@XanderHenderson Yes, it is.

@Peter Yes, I agree!

@MartinR After ten minutes of google and approach0, I can't find a good target. :\

I'm extra annoyed that two of the answers (hastily written as they are) can't even be bothered to correctly typeset the double vertical bars for a norm. :\

@XanderHenderson It was a bit tricky: approach0.xyz/search/…

@MartinR Clever!

Merged and deleted.

I fixed the norms from four years ago, and the newbie norms, but I am not going to fix the mistakes of a user with 70k+XP. Such a user should know better. :\

@XanderHenderson my preference would be: if someone posts a question under solution-verification, then they should post their proposed solution as an answer rather than as part of the question itself

if it's already right, we can say so and then they accept it. if it's wrong, we help them improve it or supply other approaches.

(but that would require posters to do their due diligence, and, well, i'm not exactly optimistic about that)

@XanderHenderson Please help to do the same for a stub that I have flagged for mod attention earlier today. Thanks!

a side note: it's petty, but i get a bit of satisfaction with taking a PSQ and ">"ing the problem statement part, simply because it makes it apparent how little of the question text is actually their own contribution

@user21820 All D's have been eliminated.

@MartinR I will just add that A0 distinguishes between || and \| (I think) - so it might be useful to try both when searching for norms: approach0.xyz/search/…

@Semiclassical But if you do that, the question is not longer about verifying a solution. The question is "How do you solve this?" and the answer is "This is the solution. (Is it right?)"

The question itself ("How do I solve this?") is almost certain to be a duplicate.

So, long story short, I guess that most solution-verifcation questions should probably be closed as duplicates. :\

DA, DB, DC, DD, DE, DF, DG, DH

@RRL I added a d-vote to each; two I think are gone, the rest need one more delete vote.

DI, DJ, DK, DL

@amWhy: As always -- thanks.

@XanderHenderson hmm

the tag isn't just for categorizing questions, though. it's the Q&A as a whole

and while the Q itself may cease to be "verify my solution", the Q&A as a whole is

that said, i do think that solution-verification Q&As tend to be so narrowly focused ("is my particular problem solved right") that they tend to be of limited utility to the community

@Semiclassical Users vote on questions, and if a user is uncertain and wants us to check it, then the question is: Is my work (in this question field) correct? could you provide feedback? Problem statement, OPs solution. We are not to evaluate a question that appears in an answer.

@Semiclassical Yes, the tag is added only to questions. Tell me where you see the ability to add the solution-verification tag to an answer? I agree whole-heartedly with @Xander, because if people interpret the tag like you do, the tag is best burninated.

When you click on a question, you don't just get the question. You click and get to the whole Q&A. So I find it strange to mentally divorce the two. Tags are for finding useful answers as much as they are for finding relevant questions.

(the fact SE encourages people to supply answers to their own questions when submitting them seems to reinforce that notion for me)

@Semiclassical Tags indicate what topic is discussed in the question body. If it's a PSQ posted in a question tagged solution verification, the tag is inappropriate and the question should be closed as lacking context, with or without an answer from the OP.

If someone is confident to answer a question they were posed, that the question ceases to be a question. If they are fully in doubt, then they can ask others to assess their work posted in the question.

This tag is in fact quite fruitless. If it is correctly used, the answer is either basically "yes" or "well done" , or it has to be corrected , in which case it can be considered as an attempt. In either case, the tag does not make much sense.

@amWhy It ceases to be a question -for them-. It does not cease to be a question for other users in the future.

Remember, @Semiclassical, answers should not be posted when they are guesses, hunches, or when "I think this might work, but I'm not sure". "Is this what you're looking for?"

that assumes there's a simple, bright line between "I know for sure this works" and "I dunno"

but if we're talking PSQs....point taken

@Semiclassical You're setting up an open field for narcissistic egomaniacs to "grace us with their knowledge to hand down to posterity.

if i'm doing that, then it's SE which is already setting the stage for that. when you write a question, it explicitly points out that you can create an answer along with it, and links to the SE blog: stackoverflow.blog/2011/07/01/…

it's SE that's sending that message, every time a user creates a question

@Semiclassical Look at the date! Almost ten years ago. I know this site, for one, has evolved beyond prehistoric SE.

It's old because it's a concept that goes back to the very origin of the Stack Exchange network.

@Semiclassical Yes, and a person should post an answer to their own question if they are sure of the answer.

There is a difference between being foundational and obsolete.

But the point is that Math SE seeks to be a repository---questions and answers should be of use to more than just the asker.

So, again, if a question is asked, and the answer answers it, then the question should stand on its own as a good question, and the answer should actually answer the question.

We cannot (and should not) proofread the work of askers.

This is not the right format for peer review.

@XanderHenderson But they shouldn't have asked it on site, if they were sure of the answer. If during the time between asking, the OP arrives at a solution, by all means, they should post it.

So, again, most solution-verification questions are duplicates of questions which have already been asked before. So they should be closed as duplicates of those. The remaining solution-verification questions are unlikely to be of much use to anyone other than the asker, and can be closed for being too narrow.

@amWhy I disagree. There are times that someone might have a piece of useful knowledge they want to share, and the Q&A format is not a bad one for it. Of course, the question should have merit in the first place.

The big caveat with all of this is that the likelihood of it being a useful Q&A goes down the more of a PSQ it is

To the extent that we're talking about questions as a whole on the site, I very much believe in the Q&A concept. in the context of PSQs, though...bit like trying to squeeze water from a stone

@XanderHenderson I disagree; this is too black and white. E.g., a user might ask for solution verifcation of a question they think can be answered by methods used to answer two other potential dupes of the question, but they want to make sure they didn't assume too much... In those cases, closing as a dupe is inappropriate, if no question can be found is answered that way. You can nitpick, and so can I.

@amWhy I'm sorry, I think I misunderstood your comment. In the solution-verification tag, there is no reason that a user should show up to ask a question and answer it immediately.

It rather undermines the meaning of that tag.

My comment was more global.

@XanderHenderson No problem! I'm pretty much on board with what you're saying.

@XanderHenderson Precisely.

And, just for the record, I really dislike the solution-verification tag. If I were dictator of Math SE, I would burninate it.

I sort of remember when its uptake as a tag picked up; around the time a meta post queried: "If I ask to have "my solution verified", it shouldn't be a duplicate of the question I'm trying to answer myself; I don't care what others did, I want feedback on MY work." And afterwards it seemed there was pick up among many users in comments, when someone suggested a dupe, they'd say, "but this user is asking about "his/her" solution, so it isn't a dupe." Here enters the danger of being too local.

@XanderHenderson By the way, I do agree with you. Just hypothesizing about how the usage of the tag picked up, in part, to help spare users from closure as dupes.

@amWhy I think that this hints at a bifurcation in the site: there are some users who are very focused on the one-on-one interaction, and on helping individuals; while there are other users who are more focused on the global goal of creating a repository. I would argue that the latter are "more correct", but the former have enough clout and influence to get their way much of the time.

:\

i'll certainly agree with the thesis that, given how the solution-verification tag is interpreted, it simply encourages "comment answers" and dead/pointless questions

@XanderHenderson Maybe we should strengthen our subject chatrooms, which already are typically well managed, to help with a division of labor: personal, one-on-one interactions, (e.g., tutoring) happen best in a chat environment. But the conundrum is foundational with SE: users seeking rep want to be able to answer everything: the personal, local, duplicate, general, etc etc, and are not rewarded for their efforts, e.g. in chat. I'd say "tough."

@amWhy Perhaps a canned comment? "This kind of question is really too local for the Q&A format, but we have chat!"

The problem is that one needs some XP to use chat.

:\

@XanderHenderson Yes, and yes :\

@XanderHenderson chat has a higher barrier of entrance than questions do :P

i guess there's no need for :P when it's a statement of the obvious

it's an uphill battle, because SE is structured as "you interact with the sites is by asking questions, not having conversations"

@Semiclassical Which, frankly, I find perverse. :(

How about a canned comment? "This kind of question is really too local for the Q&A format, but we have chat!" and the first time a user has a question closed for that reason, they are granted the privilege to use chat.

is that possible, tho

^^^^^I know, SE wouldn't want to implement it.

it's SE's world, we just play in it

@Semiclassical Yes, and everything begins and ends with Stack Overflow and their needs. Math just isn't synonymous with programming, etc.

I can certainly put a bounty on Allow inviting people with rep < 20 to private chat? or Invite low rep users to participate in chat - just to bump the post. so that the issue is reminded. (I don't think that it increases likelihood that it gets implemented by much, but bounty is one of legitimate ways to bump posts.)

The above discussion reminded me a bit of this: Would a chatroom for new users be feasible? Although when I posted that, I had in mind a different kind of tutoring. (Helping with posting on Mathematics, rather than math tutoring.)

Sorry if I digressed too much from the topic of this room.

No, that's great, @MartinSleziak! Thanks. And I think a chat room helping users post on math.se would be great too!

I am a bit skeptical whether it would help that much. (The tutoring in chat and helping new users in chat.) One thing is that there aren't that many users willing to help in chat. And the other thing is that new users would also need some time to lear chat.

I guess both this issues were already mentioned here in some way.