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[ { "answer_id": 4302, "author": "Anonymous Physicist", "author_id": 13240, "author_profile": "https://academia.meta.stackexchange.com/users/13240", "pm_score": 3, "selected": false, "text": "<p>Welcome, Ixer. This is a feature, not a bug. The Stack Exchange system is designed to make it easy to remove low quality questions. If you do not like this, try a different website. </p>\n\n<p>If you want an example of how to ask a higher quality question, you might like this: </p>\n\n<p><a href=\"https://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/86686/why-are-journals-used-in-modern-scientific-academic-research\">Why are journals used in modern scientific academic research?</a></p>\n" }, { "answer_id": 4303, "author": "Wrzlprmft", "author_id": 7734, "author_profile": "https://academia.meta.stackexchange.com/users/7734", "pm_score": 4, "selected": false, "text": "<p><strong>TL;DR: If users say that your question is unclear, please consider the possibility that this is because it is actually unclear – and not because of censorship.</strong></p>\n\n<p>There were several problems with your question as it was closed:</p>\n\n<ul>\n<li><p>It was not understandable due to using an acronym <em>(HIP)</em> that is not in active use. In the ten thousands of questions and answers on this site, nobody ever used this acronym. The first results by Internet search engines are from some exotic company. (This issue is now fixed.)</p></li>\n<li><p>It asks several questions at once, which is something not suited for our question-and-answer format. Please take the <a href=\"https://academia.stackexchange.com/tour\">tour</a> to learn more about how this site works. A specific problem that already arose from this is that the existing answers addressed different aspects of the question and thus are not comparable.</p></li>\n<li><p>You tell us very little about want you already know, why you want to know what you are asking for, or why you are skeptical about certain things. This is not a forum where you just throw a topic into the ring and everybody writes an essay about it.</p></li>\n<li><p>Some of the questions you were asking were already addressed before or are very broad themselves and we have several questions around that topic.</p></li>\n</ul>\n\n<p>Note that the primary purpose of putting a question on hold is to prevent further answers while giving you the opportunity to fix the issues with the question. It does not result in deletion and unless users vote to delete your question, it will not be automatically deleted. If you edit your question, it will automatically be sent to a review queue, where users can decide whether the issues are fixed and it can now be reopened.</p>\n\n<p>Finally note that the right to put questions on hold is a <a href=\"https://academia.stackexchange.com/help/privileges/close-questions\">privilege</a> in this community and it takes five users to agree on this, so it’s not that easy to abuse this function for censorship. Also note that the privilege of closing requires much more reputation than the privilege of downvoting, and so far nobody downvoted any of the answers that you presume they disliked.</p>\n" }, { "answer_id": 4304, "author": "xLeitix", "author_id": 10094, "author_profile": "https://academia.meta.stackexchange.com/users/10094", "pm_score": 5, "selected": true, "text": "<p>I did not find the question particularly unclear, but there were certainly some problems that led to it getting closed. A wish of our members to censor this discussion was certainly not one of them, as we have many questions in similar spirit that were highly upvoted:</p>\n\n<ul>\n<li>It's a duplicate. Notably <a href=\"https://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/73536/what-is-the-point-in-publishing-a-paper-in-a-journal-rather-than-arxiv\">this question</a> contains more or less the same discussion.</li>\n<li>It sounds like a discussion prompt rather than question with a clear answer. Stack Exchange is not a discussion forum, and questions in the style of <em>\"I identified this problem with academia, what can we do?\"</em> are not in scope of this website.</li>\n<li>Somewhat relatedly, it probably triggered the \"rant alarm\" of many of our community members. In this Stack Exchange, many members are wary of questions that are asked in bad faith, or meant to provoke or trigger discussions. Again, Stack Exchange is not a discussion forum. It's simply not the right place to brainstorm alternative ideas to academic publishing. It certainly <em>is</em> the right place to ask why the publishing model is the way it is, as the question linked in the first bullet item shows, but your question did not sound like that.</li>\n<li>You are asking a number of questions at the same time. The question of why to choose a journal over arxiv has already been answered, but you also ask about publishing a blog post instead. You also ask why it's not better to not care so much about scientific rigor and try to get it out of the door quickly, and there is also something related to IPR and patenting in there. The Stack Exchange model really only works well if you ask one, fairly narrow and specific, question at a time. </li>\n</ul>\n\n<p>It's an unfortunate reality that one really should not read too much into the specific closing reason here. Oftentimes, what exact reason the community members choose to close a question on is a bit random. Going over the comments in the question (or asking a meta question, as you have done) is more instructive in learning how the question can be salvaged.</p>\n\n<p>Further, note that putting a question on hold does not mean that people want to kill it with fire. It purely means that we think the question needs some editing before it becomes a good fit to the site. Oftentimes, fairly small editing to the question is sufficient to bring it in scope, at which point it will be re-opened.</p>\n" } ]

[ "https://academia.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/4301", "https://academia.meta.stackexchange.com", "https://academia.meta.stackexchange.com/users/82383/" ]

[ { "answer_id": 4318, "author": "eykanal", "author_id": 73, "author_profile": "https://academia.meta.stackexchange.com/users/73", "pm_score": 2, "selected": false, "text": "<p>I'm sorry you feel that way, and thank you for taking the time to post your experience. Looking over your posts, I'm not sure I understand why you feel that way... your <a href=\"https://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/116888/should-i-withdraw-my-paper-from-a-journal-which-even-didnt-give-me-the-manuscri\">last question</a> (>10k users) was pretty well received and good discussion helped improve the question even more.</p>\n\n<p>There is a well-recognized phenomenon of older users rushing to close questions, but try to view it from their side... many new users post without checking history, and in many cases the answer has already been discussed. This site has been around for over six years at this point, we have quite a body of knowledge built up. Sometimes mistakes happen, but overall it tends to work fairly well.</p>\n\n<p>That said, as you point out, it's not perfect. I'm sorry you're not feeling welcome, and I really would urge you to reconsider your decision. You've only been a member for a few weeks now, but in that short time you've contributed a few pretty interesting questions. Don't let one bad experience ruin that for you.</p>\n" }, { "answer_id": 4319, "author": "Scientist", "author_id": 66782, "author_profile": "https://academia.meta.stackexchange.com/users/66782", "pm_score": 2, "selected": false, "text": "<p>I suspect by the time I post this answer here, you will be gone already. Still, my answer might serve someone else feeling likewise.</p>\n\n<p>I am a regular SE user. I think the main objective of the database is to provide a Q&amp;A search interface for specialists in different fields. Meaning that if one has a problem, there might be a dedicated SE discussion for it, freely available and still open for additional discussion. I follow and participate different topics in SE, and I can say this website has helped me <strong>beyond measure</strong>. </p>\n\n<p>Now, there is the matter of the <em>main goal of <strong>users</strong> in SE Academia</em>. I believe your question was meant to <em>highlight a distance</em> between what I wrote in the paragraph above and what users are actually seeking here. You seem believe most users are just selfishly hunting for reputation, and one of their strategies is nitpicking at selected questions what won't bring them any more views or points. My answer here is based on this personal interpretation, and I am afraid you won't be here to reply or edit the question anymore.</p>\n\n<p>I do not seek reputation in SE Academia. My profile is anonymous, and many of my answers oscillate between controversial and unpopular. Perhaps I often state facts and opinions many academics engaged here don't want to see or be seen in public? I don't know, and I don't care. Because my main personal objective here is (in answering) to contribute to colleagues here who seem to need help in situations I may know about, and also (in questioning) learning what colleagues elsewhere think/advise about a certain topic or situation. </p>\n\n<p>I should state <em>I have voted to close one of your questions</em>, linked in another answer here. It seemed and still looks like a duplicate of <a href=\"https://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/55665/what-does-the-typical-workflow-of-a-journal-look-like?noredirect=1&amp;lq=1\">another</a>, Frequently Asked Question (FAQ). I did not seek to censor you, not understand why anyone would do that on such a trivial question. Being directed to FAQ is a very helpful outcome, as you may find a suitable answer among many other discussed aspects, or else reformulate your question more specifically on a details you still quite don't understand. </p>\n\n<p>I do believe <strong>some</strong> users may occasionally misuse this platform on occasion, mostly by passive-aggressively attacking others in comments (or even edits) and by downvoting and voting to delete material they personally disagree with without clear technical or objective reasons. This may be interpreted as a form of censorship, and is unfortunately very common everyone in the real world as well. However I do not think this is widespread in SE Academia (and I would say if I did) and I do not think you seem to have been a victim of such situation.</p>\n" }, { "answer_id": 4320, "author": "Bryan Krause", "author_id": 63475, "author_profile": "https://academia.meta.stackexchange.com/users/63475", "pm_score": 4, "selected": false, "text": "<p>The goal of Academia.SE (similar to the other stack exchange sites) is to develop a useful Q&amp;A that <em>applies to a broader audience than the individuals asking questions</em>. This is why we close questions that are too specific to a single individual, or mark as duplicates questions that have already been answered.</p>\n\n<p>These approaches filter out the messy individual circumstances and <em>give the best chances for <strong>other people</strong> to find answers here</em> without having to ask their own question.</p>\n\n<p>Closing a question as duplicate is never an attempt to censor a particular question or questioner, it seeks to point you toward information already here. Additionally, we can't really answer \"what should I do?\" questions: you have to make your own decisions based on what you value. Your advisor is likely to be a better place to get information when you need to make a particular decision, because they know you and your circumstances better (though even then you may disagree).</p>\n" }, { "answer_id": 4365, "author": "Community", "author_id": -1, "author_profile": "https://academia.meta.stackexchange.com/users/-1", "pm_score": 0, "selected": false, "text": "<p>I agree with you again!!! Nothing is more frustrating then literally having a question and being in need of help and the first responses on your account are people editing your original content, and making it something else entirely by changing your tone and diction, and/or people saying your post is irrelevant. It is rare that you will actually get help. </p>\n\n<p>Try to go reddit. I'm thinking of going there when I need help now. </p>\n" } ]

[ "https://academia.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/4317", "https://academia.meta.stackexchange.com", "https://academia.meta.stackexchange.com/users/-1/" ]

[ { "answer_id": 4326, "author": "Wrzlprmft", "author_id": 7734, "author_profile": "https://academia.meta.stackexchange.com/users/7734", "pm_score": 3, "selected": false, "text": "<p>First of all and just to clarify, the goal of this site is not to collect personal opinions, but facts and best approaches to certain problems.\nGiven the nature of our subject (academia), this is only an ideal and often the best we can offer are educated opinions.\nHowever, you will not find questions like “Should pay-to-view journals be outlawed?” or similar on this site (if you do, please flag to close as primarily opinion-based).</p>\n\n<blockquote>\n <p>do the answers here necessarily reflect the accepted answers to questions or problems of whole academic community?</p>\n</blockquote>\n\n<p>Of course there is a certain bias to the answers and votes given by this community due to its tendency towards computer-heavy fields and people who become active on such websites in the first place.\n<a href=\"https://academia.stackexchange.com/q/19604/7734\">Here</a> is an example, where a custom or rule completely differs between fields and this wasn’t reflected in the answers for about four years (still, all the previous answers did make appropriate disclaimers, so nobody can complain that we spread false information).</p>\n\n<p>However, quantifying this bias would be largely infeasible:\nYou would have to make a large-scale survey soliciting the stance of a representative selection of persons from the academic community on a representative selection of questions on Stack Exchange – and ensure that you do not get a bias due to who will participate in such a survey.</p>\n\n<p>That being said, we do not exist in a vacuum.\nIf there is a huge amount of people with differing opinions, some of them are bound to eventually stumble upon our site, and some of them in turn are bound to tell us <a href=\"https://xkcd.com/386/\" rel=\"nofollow noreferrer\">that we are wrong on the Internet</a>.\n(And just in case we are censoring any dissent, somebody is bound to start a website informing the Internet about this – which hasn’t happened yet as far as I know.)\nNow, for most of our questions, the general directions of answers align and votes merely indicate which answer presents the best reasoning or <a href=\"https://meta.stackexchange.com/q/9731/255554\">simply was first</a>.\nCases with strongly dissenting answers are rare, and it rarely happens that somebody joins our site just to tell us how wrong we are.\nI would consider this a good indicator that the aforementioned bias is not a huge issue when it comes to the correctness of answers.</p>\n" }, { "answer_id": 4341, "author": "Fomite", "author_id": 118, "author_profile": "https://academia.meta.stackexchange.com/users/118", "pm_score": 4, "selected": true, "text": "<blockquote>\n <p>In other words, do the answers here necessarily reflect the accepted\n answers to questions or problems of whole academic community?</p>\n</blockquote>\n\n<p>No. There's no reason or evidence to believe that this community is a representative sample of academia as a whole. And, as you note, a number of reasons to believe that this <em>isn't</em> the case - namely, that many of the natural \"feeder\" sites to introduce someone to Academia.SE are computational in nature.</p>\n\n<p>To be frank, there's not even a guarantee that the answers to the questions reflect the whole community <em>of this site</em>. For example, if you ask a question about a field without particularly high coverage (my own, for example) and I'm not on the site for whatever reason, it's possible that that absence will skew the answers. We're not, when it comes down to it, a very large site.</p>\n\n<p>That being said, there is a reason so many of the answers on this site boil down to: \"It depends.\" and \"Have you asked your supervisor?\" Academia as a field is hugely diverse, and even among fairly homogeneous groups the answers to questions will vary considerably.</p>\n" }, { "answer_id": 4350, "author": "Wetlab Walter", "author_id": 28355, "author_profile": "https://academia.meta.stackexchange.com/users/28355", "pm_score": 2, "selected": false, "text": "<p>All sub-samples contain bias unless inclusion is random - and inclusion to academia.stackexchange is anything but random. Certainly there is observer bias.</p>\n\n<p>academia.stackexchange also contains feedback mechanisms like up/down voting, which like many online communities reinforces founder-behaviour: ideas, viewpoints, theories, etc that are majority-held views are promoted, while minority opinions are generally not. This is kind of the point of up/down voting, to rank answers by popularity as a proxy for validity.</p>\n\n<p>Having said all that, the mods at academia.stackexchange try really hard to allow opinions from all sides of the discussion. Even if no one likes an argument, it will be allowed to remain up on the website. In other words, you will at least be exposed to a wide variety of opinions on SE, even if the results of voting are somewhat biased. It's not quite as wide as <em>i personally</em> would like, but I also think it's pretty ahead of the curve in general.</p>\n" } ]

[ "https://academia.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/4325", "https://academia.meta.stackexchange.com", "https://academia.meta.stackexchange.com/users/98164/" ]

[ { "answer_id": 4329, "author": "Bryan Krause", "author_id": 63475, "author_profile": "https://academia.meta.stackexchange.com/users/63475", "pm_score": 4, "selected": true, "text": "<p>Questions with outlier level of attention are almost always a result of the \"hot network questions\" or HNQ.</p>\n\n<p>This has been a topic of a lot of discussion on the <a href=\"https://meta.stackexchange.com/search?q=HNQ\">main meta</a> as well as the meta for individual stacks. HNQ are great for attracting attention to stacks, but sometimes that attention is a bit unwanted, including votes and answers on questions that are more controversial that end up not reflecting the home stack but rather the SE community at large (without any attention to the quality, note that 2/3 of your answers come from people who are not regulars here; this is typical of questions on HNQ but you will find that most other answers here are by regulars).</p>\n\n<p>Your particular question probably got a lot of attention from people who are interested in automatic plagiarism detection, probably because everyone in the StackExchange community has been a student of some sort at some time, and many are young enough to have experienced automatic plagiarism detection. It probably received less attention (proportionally) from people who are <em>users</em> of automatic plagiarism detection as educators or people affiliated with journals, which is the audience you might get more informed answers from and would be more likely to find in the makeup of the regular Academia.SE community - that's simply the nature of HNQ.</p>\n\n<p>In summary, if a question generates a little bit of attention quickly, it can end up on the \"Hot network questions\" that people see on the side bar and on the main StackExchange site. These questions tend to then attract a lot <em>more</em> attention from people who are just SE users or casual users of a particular stack, rather than the regulars in a stack. This has an especially large effect on stacks that are fairly small (which Academia is, though it's not the smallest). <strong>Most likely, most of that attention is <em>not</em> from the everyday Academia.SE community.</strong></p>\n" }, { "answer_id": 4335, "author": "Cape Code", "author_id": 10643, "author_profile": "https://academia.meta.stackexchange.com/users/10643", "pm_score": 2, "selected": false, "text": "<p><a href=\"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schadenfreude\" rel=\"nofollow noreferrer\">Schadenfreude</a> and the tabloid effect.</p>\n\n<p>Issues pertaining to plagiarism, fraud, retraction, inappropriate behavior of supervisor, sexual misconduct, \"stolen\" ideas, feeling of despair, etc. attract bored site users more than the serious ones.</p>\n" } ]

[ "https://academia.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/4328", "https://academia.meta.stackexchange.com", "https://academia.meta.stackexchange.com/users/98164/" ]

[ { "answer_id": 4333, "author": "Buffy", "author_id": 75368, "author_profile": "https://academia.meta.stackexchange.com/users/75368", "pm_score": 3, "selected": false, "text": "<p>The following is a proposal for a community wiki question at Academia. Feel free to edit it. It focuses on student actions. A companion question might be formulated for advisors to get advice. </p>\n\n<p>I don't actually know how to make it CW on the site. </p>\n\n<hr>\n\n<p>Title suggestion: Building a healthy relationship with your supervisor</p>\n\n<p>Some graduate students and post-docs have reported serious problems with their advisors and supervisors. Some of the problems are severe enough to be career ending. Not all problems can be avoided but it is possible that some can be if the student or post-doc takes some actions in their first days of the new position. The goal is to build a solid and positive relationship with the advisor from the beginning so that small problems later don't escalate. </p>\n\n<p><em>What can a student or post-doc do, starting in their first days and weeks, to help assure a strong and positive relationship with a supervisor?</em> </p>\n\n<p>There is no assumption here that it is all up to the student, but what can a person do in a new environment to maximize their chances of having a good and lasting relationship? </p>\n\n<p>likely tags: advisors, graduate-study</p>\n" }, { "answer_id": 4334, "author": "Community", "author_id": -1, "author_profile": "https://academia.meta.stackexchange.com/users/-1", "pm_score": 1, "selected": false, "text": "<p>Based on my experience, and was thinking of it while returning from the conference! Why I arrived to this point, I was always respecting people, but probably there are advisor who dont like to see their students grow and shine, we are human being, even myself, sometimes I feel jealous but what retracts me from hurting people is conscience!</p>\n\n<p>Honestly, me and many students will tell you that at the first couple months, you will see an angel PI and you will not recognize their behavior unless you go with the time! This PI was trying to looks like a cool and funny person, but I didn't know about their dreadful actions towards the senior student who was not allowed to defend his PhD although publishing in top-tier conferences which is a big question mark! My fault is not asking the students before joining, however, some students afraid to tell the truth because they could endanger them, another thing, there aren't alumni listed in the website which I see after my experience is a red flag. The good PI will be proud to put links about their PI and where they have arrived.</p>\n\n<p>I do think even if you made a good relationship with your PI as probably I had the beginning, but when he realized that I want to publish and attend conferences, he felt jealous. With a reference to that I began to realize that he don't want any one to be successful, the toxic PI feels happy when people are desperate and they get their power from the weakness of others.</p>\n\n<p>He was trying to suppress me from presenting my work although he doubted and forced me to leave and now he wants to put his name on my proposed methodology which is insane!</p>\n\n<p>There are two roads to continue under psycho PI or leave it , and from my position after spending one year, I can say I am totally damaged mentally and physically as well, and it is not easy at all!</p>\n\n<p>All the students want to learn and do research that they are passionate about . In the other side, the abusive PI is going to fabricate problems and make obstacles for the students to stumble their progress. </p>\n\n<p>I dont know what could be the solution as I read stories from more than one decade and still the problem exists. That is made me wondering, whether academia is fake and fabricating non-existing problems to finds solutions, I dont know that makes me contemplating about academia.</p>\n" } ]

[ "https://academia.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/4332", "https://academia.meta.stackexchange.com", "https://academia.meta.stackexchange.com/users/75368/" ]

[ { "answer_id": 4339, "author": "StrongBad", "author_id": 929, "author_profile": "https://academia.meta.stackexchange.com/users/929", "pm_score": 2, "selected": false, "text": "<p>In my opinion, the issue is that it is not clear to me what you are asking about. There appears to be a lot of jargon (framework, domain, class diagram) whose meaning is not clear to others. I think this mm is making it difficult for people to figure out what you are asking.</p>\n\n<p>The SE system is different than other online communities. Please take a look at our <a href=\"https://academia.stackexchange.com/help\">help center</a>. What the comments were trying to do is guide you to provide information that people think might help clarify your question. They may not be the right questions to ask, but there is something unclear about your question.</p>\n\n<p>Instead of being highly abstract in the question, you might want to try and provide more specifics. Instead of assuming the terminology is known, provide links or references to the key concepts, or better yet descriptions/definitions.</p>\n" }, { "answer_id": 4340, "author": "Bryan Krause", "author_id": 63475, "author_profile": "https://academia.meta.stackexchange.com/users/63475", "pm_score": 2, "selected": false, "text": "<p>Your question is off-topic because it is about the <em>content of your research</em> which is explicitly off-topic for Academia.SE (see <a href=\"https://academia.stackexchange.com/help/on-topic\">https://academia.stackexchange.com/help/on-topic</a>). Since you are new to StackExchange, note that every stack has a definition for what is on- and off-topic, and it is decided by those communities. If you want a community to change what they define as on-topic the correct way to address that is to start a meta conversation about it.</p>\n\n<p>In addition, calling out people who are trying to help (including politely letting you know your question is off-topic) and accusing them of being here for reputation alone are both ways to come off as rude, and \"be nice\" is a core principle behind the StackExchange framework.</p>\n" } ]

[ "https://academia.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/4338", "https://academia.meta.stackexchange.com", "https://academia.meta.stackexchange.com/users/94409/" ]

[ { "answer_id": 4356, "author": "Buffy", "author_id": 75368, "author_profile": "https://academia.meta.stackexchange.com/users/75368", "pm_score": -1, "selected": false, "text": "<p>I think the terms are used interchangeably here. Usage differs by field and by place, but both terms seem to be used by writers for the same thing. In some countries doctoral study is actually a job, so \"supervisor\" seems more natural. In others it is purely an academic relationship. I doubt that it is worth the effort to try to make a strong distinction as the writers will write what they write in any case. </p>\n" }, { "answer_id": 4360, "author": "Bryan Krause", "author_id": 63475, "author_profile": "https://academia.meta.stackexchange.com/users/63475", "pm_score": 2, "selected": false, "text": "<p>Although I have not looked at the posts using each tag to see how the community has actually used them, I think it's important to note that one tag is <a href=\"https://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/supervision\" class=\"post-tag\" title=\"show questions tagged &#39;supervision&#39;\" rel=\"tag\">supervision</a> and not <strong>supervisor</strong>.</p>\n\n<p>The tag descriptions make it sound like they are overlapping, but I would argue that <a href=\"https://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/advisor\" class=\"post-tag\" title=\"show questions tagged &#39;advisor&#39;\" rel=\"tag\">advisor</a> makes more sense in the context of a student asking how to interact with their advisor in some way (communicate something, choose an advisor, etc.) whereas <a href=\"https://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/supervision\" class=\"post-tag\" title=\"show questions tagged &#39;supervision&#39;\" rel=\"tag\">supervision</a> seems more appropriate for an advisor asking about how to supervise their students.</p>\n\n<p>Of course someone could also make an argument for the inverse.</p>\n" } ]

[ "https://academia.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/4355", "https://academia.meta.stackexchange.com", "https://academia.meta.stackexchange.com/users/56861/" ]

[ { "answer_id": 4358, "author": "ff524", "author_id": 11365, "author_profile": "https://academia.meta.stackexchange.com/users/11365", "pm_score": 2, "selected": false, "text": "<p>It's true that the best answers help more than just the OP.</p>\n\n<p>However, this is first and foremost a Q&amp;A site, not a discussion site, so answers should answer the question. It's OK (even good) to include stuff that generalizes beyond the OP's situation, but not to write a post that doesn't address the OP's question at all, or that primarily addresses a different situation.</p>\n\n<p>If an existing question inspires you to think about a related question and answer, you can always post the related question and also self-answer it. Just make sure the related question is a real, practical question, and not a \"discussion prompt\". For example, the answer <a href=\"https://academia.stackexchange.com/a/119966/11365\">you wrote</a> would be appropriate (with some modifications) as <em>part</em> of an answer to the question \"As an instructor, should I ask students to save all questions until the end of the lecture?\"</p>\n\n<p>Or you may find that (with modifications) it is appropriate as an answer to an existing question, like maybe <a href=\"https://academia.stackexchange.com/q/36428/11365\">this one</a> in the case of the answer you were wondering about.</p>\n\n<p>(I'm writing this with my user hat on, not moderator hat. This isn't some decree from on high, just my personal opinion.)</p>\n" }, { "answer_id": 4359, "author": "Bryan Krause", "author_id": 63475, "author_profile": "https://academia.meta.stackexchange.com/users/63475", "pm_score": 2, "selected": false, "text": "<p>In general, I think generalizing answers is good, especially if they make explicit their generalization. I have argued elsewhere on Meta that the purpose of the SE model is specifically to produce a Q&amp;A that is helpful to more than the individual question-askers.</p>\n\n<p>An example might be to pose an alternative circumstance that would change the content/direction of your answer.</p>\n\n<p>I am also supportive of \"frame challenge\" approaches to questions that help the OP recognize that they may be asking the wrong question or taking the wrong approach from the outset.</p>\n\n<p>However, I think the particular example you pointed out is a bad example of generalizing or frame challenging, and to be blunt it is probably my least-favorite answer of yours. It really seems like you are just taking an opportunity there to tell an autobiography that does not directly relate to the question asked: it addresses beneficial aspects of question-asking in class and the problem of large class sizes. The OP's question was how to approach a possibly delicate situation where another student's accommodations are unfortunately impacting the rest of the class negatively.</p>\n\n<p>Therefore, I'd like to frame challenge your meta question here: I think you are perceiving a displeasure from some in the community about generalized versus narrow questions, whereas I think the criticism of your example post is instead about an answer that neither answers the narrow nor the generalized question that was posed, and does not represent a relevant frame challenge.</p>\n" } ]

[ "https://academia.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/4357", "https://academia.meta.stackexchange.com", "https://academia.meta.stackexchange.com/users/75368/" ]

[ { "answer_id": 4367, "author": "aeismail", "author_id": 53, "author_profile": "https://academia.meta.stackexchange.com/users/53", "pm_score": 2, "selected": false, "text": "<p>I think the more important usage for SE purposes is what the general community has adopted as a meaning for \"reproducible research.\" The general consensus is that it's closer to your first usage, but also much more widespread. It's starting to become a major concern in <em>computational</em> research across all of science and engineering. </p>\n\n<p>The latter concern is also serious, but it's also harder to address. It's also part of reproducible research, but I believe that restricting the use of the tag to that specific issue does a disservice to the site.</p>\n" }, { "answer_id": 4368, "author": "Wrzlprmft", "author_id": 7734, "author_profile": "https://academia.meta.stackexchange.com/users/7734", "pm_score": 2, "selected": false, "text": "<p>I am not exactly sure what you want to achieve here. Tags mainly exist to make questions easier to find or to allow potential experts to subscribe to them. If you want to shape the usage of scientific terminology, tag names on this site are the wrong place to do this.</p>\n\n<p>As it is currently used, the <a href=\"https://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/reproducible-research\" class=\"post-tag\" title=\"show questions tagged &#39;reproducible-research&#39;\" rel=\"tag\">reproducible-research</a> seems to cover all that you describe and is still sufficiently narrow to only contain fifty questions.\nI see no problems arising from this such as users not being able to find certain questions. It may be a tad more difficult in some cases, but this does not even remotely justify the effort of separating these tags and expecting our users to adhere to the distinction. The only thing we may change is to make the tag wiki a bit broader.</p>\n" } ]

[ "https://academia.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/4366", "https://academia.meta.stackexchange.com", "https://academia.meta.stackexchange.com/users/75368/" ]

[ { "answer_id": 4370, "author": "StrongBad", "author_id": 929, "author_profile": "https://academia.meta.stackexchange.com/users/929", "pm_score": 3, "selected": false, "text": "<p>Yes. When I answered the question it had a score of -1. When I read the question I thought it was pretty reasonable: I think this is inappropriate, but want to crowd source to make sure I am not crazy. My answer was basically a throw away answer of <em>yeah, don't do that</em>. Then it hit the HNQ and I now have a new highest upvoted answer.</p>\n\n<p>Hopefully it will fall off the HNQ soon and it will disappear into obscurity and we will have another piece of evidence that the HNQ does not really promote good stuff.</p>\n\n<p>The only real downside is a few users (including me) picked up 400 points of easy rep.</p>\n\n<p>Overall I don't think the question, or my answer, or any of the other answers is a farce. I think it is simply the voting that got out of hand because of the HNQ.</p>\n\n<p>Also a better answer would have addressed the legal issues and GDPR and the use of first name, last initial and providing the class year, and then probably concluded that it is not acceptable to shoot people.</p>\n" }, { "answer_id": 4371, "author": "Massimo Ortolano", "author_id": 20058, "author_profile": "https://academia.meta.stackexchange.com/users/20058", "pm_score": 4, "selected": false, "text": "<p>In a comment now moved to chat, I wrote this:</p>\n\n<blockquote>\n <p>It should be said, however, that in some countries this kind of public shaming happens sometimes during public oral exams. For instance my country is filled with horror stories of students publicly humiliated for a wrong answer, especially in certain fields like the humanities and medicine. And when I was a student I certainly witnessed a few episodes myself. </p>\n</blockquote>\n\n<p>Maybe my short comment doesn't give enough idea of the level of shaming that happened, and probably still happens in some cases, but my main point is: <em>There are professors who think that this is perfectly acceptable behaviour, and so the question is not a farce.</em> </p>\n\n<p><strong>And, well, an excellent answer would be one capable of convincing that professor that such a behaviour is not ok.</strong></p>\n" }, { "answer_id": 4373, "author": "Flyto", "author_id": 8394, "author_profile": "https://academia.meta.stackexchange.com/users/8394", "pm_score": 3, "selected": false, "text": "<p>The answer to the question is demonstrably not an obvious or trivial one, given the site that was referred to and the frequency with which one sees academics mocking the silly answers of their students.</p>\n\n<p>Moreover, I'm not aware of any reason for which a question being a simple one justifies closing it.</p>\n\n<p>Sure, it's not the best moment in the history of the site, but I don't see any reason to get worked up about getting rid of it.</p>\n" }, { "answer_id": 4374, "author": "Dan Romik", "author_id": 40589, "author_profile": "https://academia.meta.stackexchange.com/users/40589", "pm_score": 4, "selected": false, "text": "<blockquote>\n <p>Is it just me or is that question and its answers kind of farcical?</p>\n</blockquote>\n\n<p>It’s just you. </p>\n\n<p>To wit, one of the posted answers, posted by a well-known professor from the US, actually tries to downplay the severity of the online shaming described in the question, saying it is in “bad taste” but very pointedly refusing to denounce it as anything to get excited or particularly upset about. That answer currently has 16 upvotes. So, it’s not just in countries in Europe where there’s a history of professors behaving in a condescending and bullying manner towards students, as Massimo explained in his answer, that there are people for whom the answer to the question “is it acceptable?” is very much not obvious.</p>\n\n<p>The question is not just a valid question but in fact a good question, and StrongBad’s answer with its upwards of 300 votes, far from being farcical, does a good service to the community by making it clear (to those relatively few people who apparently need it to be made clear to them) where the vast majority of people stand on this.</p>\n" } ]

[ "https://academia.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/4369", "https://academia.meta.stackexchange.com", "https://academia.meta.stackexchange.com/users/7319/" ]

[ { "answer_id": 4382, "author": "Wrzlprmft", "author_id": 7734, "author_profile": "https://academia.meta.stackexchange.com/users/7734", "pm_score": 4, "selected": false, "text": "<p>They should be on-topic.\nAt the end of the day we exclude questions about the content of research because academics in general (i.e., the community of this site) are not interested in such questions or able to evaluate answers to them – this is better done by subject experts who most often have their own sites. Also these sites taken together receive far more questions per day than we do; the questions this community is about would drown in others.</p>\n\n<p>However, in the case about research about academia, we also are the subject-specific community (maybe together with others like History of Science and Mathematics, Psychology and Neuroscience, a hypothetical Sociology SE, etc.). Therefore the above issues do not arise. Therefore, <strong>such questions should be an exception of the rule that the content of research is off-topic</strong>.</p>\n" }, { "answer_id": 4383, "author": "Bryan Krause", "author_id": 63475, "author_profile": "https://academia.meta.stackexchange.com/users/63475", "pm_score": 2, "selected": false, "text": "<p>I agree with <a href=\"https://academia.meta.stackexchange.com/a/4382/63475\">@Wrzlprmft</a>, but I would distinguish between \"content of research\" meaning <em>results</em> and \"content of research\" meaning methodology/approach/the process of research. I think the opposition to the question linked in the OP wrongly conflates the prohibition on the \"content of research\" meaning methodology with asking for a referenced answer (i.e., \"results\").</p>\n\n<p>I think questions about <em>methodology etc related to academic research should still be off-topic</em> and think this is consistent with @StrongBad's comment:</p>\n\n<blockquote>\n <p><em>I think at some point questions about the nuances of the field of Education (the academic field that produces a lot of the research about academia) eventually become off-topic once they are no longer directly relevant to academics in general.</em></p>\n</blockquote>\n\n<p>Asking for <em>results</em> of academic research should be on-topic and has a tag <a href=\"https://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/reference-request\" class=\"post-tag\" title=\"show questions tagged &#39;reference-request&#39;\" rel=\"tag\">reference-request</a>. Asking about <em>how you should do research into academia</em>, looking for topics to research within academia, etc, should remain off-topic as it relates to the process of doing research.</p>\n" }, { "answer_id": 4384, "author": "Buffy", "author_id": 75368, "author_profile": "https://academia.meta.stackexchange.com/users/75368", "pm_score": -1, "selected": false, "text": "<p>Unfortunately the tag wiki for reference-request isn't very helpful. How \"specific\" is the query here? The question reads as if the OP is looking for a few lines in a literature search on a topic. Whether the topic has to do with academia or not is, to me, irrelevant. The question seems to be trying to avoid closure for being \"opinion based\" the earlier one was. However, the question isn't based on a <em>problem</em> that someone in academia has. Answers will solve no problem. </p>\n\n<p>A good question (or answer) on this site is, IMO, one that a reader can return to in three years and say \"Yes, I can use that.\". That isn't the case at all here unless you are researching a specific topic and need that lit search. </p>\n\n<p>The question at hand, and sadly others on the current active list, are without such consequence or future usability. On learning that the \"average\" academic spends, say, three hours per week doing reviewing, my response would be (a) \"That's interesting.\" and (b) \"So what?\". The standard deviation of such a result would be so large as to make any \"average\" meaningless. For myself, I either don't do any reviewing at all for months on end, or do it extensively for many hours over the course of a month depending on conference scheduling. But that is about the specifics of <em>this</em> question, not the general situation. </p>\n\n<p>The help center says: \"You should only ask practical, answerable questions based on actual problems that you face.\" I don't see any <em>problem</em> here other than a specific research question. </p>\n\n<p>I still think it should be closed. </p>\n\n<hr>\n\n<p>About the tag itself. </p>\n\n<p>If I write a question of the form \"I once saw some research on the significance about Mumbly-Peg among pre teen boys, but lost the reference. Can you help?\", it would be a valid reference-request. If I ask for \"I'm interested in the significance of Mumbly-Peg among pre teen boys. Is there research on that?\" it would be, in my view something else. Specifically, it would read like asking others to do my research for me. </p>\n" } ]

[ "https://academia.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/4381", "https://academia.meta.stackexchange.com", "https://academia.meta.stackexchange.com/users/7734/" ]

[ { "answer_id": 4386, "author": "Massimo Ortolano", "author_id": 20058, "author_profile": "https://academia.meta.stackexchange.com/users/20058", "pm_score": 3, "selected": false, "text": "<p>However unpleasant they are, I think we should deal with such kind of questions. For two reasons.</p>\n\n<ol>\n<li>It can be challenging to write one, but a balanced or straight answer to a thorny question can be extremely helpful to the asker and to future visitors. And I think that our community has certainly a number of people capable of giving good advice even in such controversial cases.</li>\n<li>Once a non-anonymous question of this sort has been posted, all the mechanisms that are available to standard users and moderators to get rid of it or to make it anonymous are too slow or too weak to be effective, and the damage is already done. Better deal with it face up, then.</li>\n</ol>\n" }, { "answer_id": 4387, "author": "Sascha", "author_id": 53466, "author_profile": "https://academia.meta.stackexchange.com/users/53466", "pm_score": 2, "selected": false, "text": "<p>I wondered about the same thing regarding this question. I would leave it open: </p>\n\n<ul>\n<li><p>It could be that the person asking is really severely deluded. While I thing that the answers may or may not be helping him to understand that, there is a chance that they do</p></li>\n<li><p>The question in itself is not a bad one - I had an (much more specific) idea in a research proposal which showed up later in a paper of the group I applied to.</p></li>\n<li><p>Sometimes I also saw people failing in communicating due to their cultural background and research projects being transferred due to nepotism and/or racism</p></li>\n<li><p>Only after looking for some time it seems that this is not just an unplanned rant, but part of some attempt to defraud people - here the answers could also serve to people who have such a case in their team.</p></li>\n</ul>\n\n<p>So the answers may be do not help the person asking, but others who are at a point in their scientific career where they would go down such a path could profit.</p>\n" }, { "answer_id": 4388, "author": "Wrzlprmft", "author_id": 7734, "author_profile": "https://academia.meta.stackexchange.com/users/7734", "pm_score": 4, "selected": false, "text": "<p><strong>In general</strong>, I agree with the <a href=\"https://academia.meta.stackexchange.com/a/4386/7734\">Massimo’s</a> and <a href=\"https://academia.meta.stackexchange.com/a/4387/7734\">Sascha’s answers</a> that such questions should stay as long as they can be sufficiently anonymised.\nThey can help others in similar situations and as long as the personal links are borrowed in some edit history (and stay civil), we do not leave the impression of being a place for public accusations – which I consider very important.</p>\n\n<p>Now, while <strong>the specific question</strong> can be sufficiently anonymised (I just did that before reading through the answers), all the upvoted answers depend on information the asker posted in comments or external links.\nEven without removing any of this, this becomes very confusing and <a href=\"https://academia.meta.stackexchange.com/q/3406/7734\">highly individual</a> advice which heavily depends on the one-sided details we are provided (even though even those seem to point against the asker).</p>\n\n<p>This is of little use to future visitors and I do not think it can be made useful without a major editing job to the question and all answers, which would probably be too radical for an edit in some cases, removing major portions of some answers.\nI would therefore opt to <strong>delete this question</strong> and (if desired) start from scratch, i.e., post a new question, that is sufficiently generalised and anonymised.</p>\n" }, { "answer_id": 4389, "author": "sean", "author_id": 15501, "author_profile": "https://academia.meta.stackexchange.com/users/15501", "pm_score": 3, "selected": false, "text": "<p>I vote to delete this question. I agree with Sascha</p>\n\n<blockquote>\n <p>In the meantime, it becomes IMHO more and more clear that the guy is a\n fraud, and not just deluded.</p>\n</blockquote>\n\n<p>My answer isn't meant to help this guy, but to show his false accusations. I guess he just wants to be famous by public shaming other people.</p>\n" }, { "answer_id": 4391, "author": "Jeffrey J Weimer", "author_id": 96595, "author_profile": "https://academia.meta.stackexchange.com/users/96595", "pm_score": 2, "selected": false, "text": "<p>The OP is at this point clearly showing that he has a highly distorted and false world view of the effort involved in research leading to a successful publication. He is attacking with a religious zeal to convince others that he is under all manner of professional and personal persecution. No answer will be marked as one that correctly addresses his starting question.</p>\n\n<p>I vote to NOT delete the question. Over time, I believe the content can serve as a worthwhile reference for others who may be starting out as ignorant of the research method and/or as religious in their zeal to prove some measure of personal persecution in the face of a distorted world view.</p>\n\n<p>As desired and/or demanded by the guidelines, and as the effort permits, I agree that sanitizing references to specific details may be needed. I do not believe the general message will be significantly diluted by such an effort.</p>\n\n<p>==> In the meantime, I vote to CLOSE the question IMMEDIATELY to further answers and comments.</p>\n" } ]

[ "https://academia.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/4385", "https://academia.meta.stackexchange.com", "https://academia.meta.stackexchange.com/users/63475/" ]

[ { "answer_id": 4396, "author": "ff524", "author_id": 11365, "author_profile": "https://academia.meta.stackexchange.com/users/11365", "pm_score": 2, "selected": false, "text": "<p>In past years (2016 and earlier), site moderators received emails from SE announcing the upcoming Winter Bash <em>before</em> it started, and asking us to let them know before a specified date if our site wants to opt out.</p>\n\n<p>There wasn't an email announcement this year (or in 2017).</p>\n" }, { "answer_id": 4397, "author": "aeismail", "author_id": 53, "author_profile": "https://academia.meta.stackexchange.com/users/53", "pm_score": 0, "selected": false, "text": "<p>In addition to ff524’s and StrongBad’s comments, I’d also mention the rate of support in most of the polls was well over supermajority levels.</p>\n\n<p>However, the fact is that nobody got advance notice of the Winter Bash. I had forgotten about it until I saw I had been awarded a hat!</p>\n" }, { "answer_id": 4398, "author": "StrongBad", "author_id": 929, "author_profile": "https://academia.meta.stackexchange.com/users/929", "pm_score": 4, "selected": true, "text": "<p>I guess I will formally chime in. The <a href=\"https://winterbash2018.stackexchange.com/faq\" rel=\"nofollow noreferrer\">2018 Winterbash FAQ</a> says:</p>\n<blockquote>\n<p>Why are you doing this to us?</p>\n<p>For sites that have hats on by default, your moderator teams or your communities indicated that hats would be a fun, lighthearted thing to do. Why did we offer it in the first place? Because we thought it was a nice way to finish out another really amazing year. You can always decide you hate hats and turn them off.</p>\n</blockquote>\n<p>In 2013, we had to tell SE if we wanted to be included (default was no hats). In 2014, they changed the default to hats, but asked us to respond either way. In 2015 and 2016, they did not even bother asking for responses to opt in and instead only asked for a response to opt out. In 2017 and 2018 they simply did not ask for anything. the idea was that support for hats was so decisive (most sites really love hats and a few really hate hats) that SE stopped asking mods if we wanted them or not.</p>\n<p>There may have been some discussion regarding them stopping the discussion, but I really do not remember. In 2017, I asked moderators I noticed we did not get the standard email asking if we wanted hats or not. I asked other moderators from all the SE sites what they were doing and there was strong support that we probably did not need to poll users anymore. If someone else starts a poll and it becomes clear we don't want hats, I will let SE know that we don't want them anymore. In this way democracy is not really dead.</p>\n" } ]

[ "https://academia.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/4395", "https://academia.meta.stackexchange.com", "https://academia.meta.stackexchange.com/users/19607/" ]

[ { "answer_id": 4401, "author": "StrongBad", "author_id": 929, "author_profile": "https://academia.meta.stackexchange.com/users/929", "pm_score": 0, "selected": false, "text": "<p>I am not sure what you mean by <em>best universities</em>, but for the UK you could ask if there is a correlation between REF ranking (research) and student satisfaction rankings, and if so why they are correlated.</p>\n" }, { "answer_id": 4402, "author": "xxxxxxxxx", "author_id": 37771, "author_profile": "https://academia.meta.stackexchange.com/users/37771", "pm_score": 4, "selected": true, "text": "<p>I think the problem with the original question, as well as all suggested modifications, is that there is not really a meaningful question. You seem to be asking why there is a correlation between a university doing research that is perceived as \"good\", and a metric that is based on how good the research at a university is perceived to be. It's really quite circular.</p>\n" } ]

[ "https://academia.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/4400", "https://academia.meta.stackexchange.com", "https://academia.meta.stackexchange.com/users/84834/" ]

[ { "answer_id": 4408, "author": "JNat", "author_id": 32458, "author_profile": "https://academia.meta.stackexchange.com/users/32458", "pm_score": -1, "selected": false, "text": "<p><a href=\"https://twitter.com/StackAcademia\" rel=\"nofollow noreferrer\"><img src=\"https://i.stack.imgur.com/wLQrl.png\" alt=\"Help this community grow -- follow us on twitter!\"></a></p>\n" }, { "answer_id": 4411, "author": "Sir Cumference", "author_id": 72753, "author_profile": "https://academia.meta.stackexchange.com/users/72753", "pm_score": 3, "selected": false, "text": "<p><a href=\"https://astronomy.stackexchange.com\"><img src=\"https://i.stack.imgur.com/1tczj.png\" alt=\"Astronomy Stack Exchange\"></a></p>\n" }, { "answer_id": 4415, "author": "Tyberius", "author_id": 69679, "author_profile": "https://academia.meta.stackexchange.com/users/69679", "pm_score": 3, "selected": false, "text": "<p><a href=\"http://chemistry.stackexchange.com\"><img src=\"https://i.stack.imgur.com/noaFv.png\" alt=\"Haikus are awesome/ Chemistry is more so/ Ask straight away!\"></a></p>\n" }, { "answer_id": 4448, "author": "Dilaton", "author_id": 5904, "author_profile": "https://academia.meta.stackexchange.com/users/5904", "pm_score": -1, "selected": false, "text": "<p><a href=\"https://physicsoverflow.org/\" rel=\"nofollow noreferrer\"><img src=\"https://i.stack.imgur.com/TUFMz.png\" alt=\"PhysicsOverflow\"></a></p>\n" }, { "answer_id": 4512, "author": "E.P.", "author_id": 820, "author_profile": "https://academia.meta.stackexchange.com/users/820", "pm_score": -1, "selected": false, "text": "<p><a href=\"http://dissem.in\" rel=\"nofollow noreferrer\"><img src=\"https://i.stack.imgur.com/HAnRi.png\" alt=\"Are your papers available in an open access repository? Check with Dissemin\"></a></p>\n" } ]

[ "https://academia.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/4407", "https://academia.meta.stackexchange.com", "https://academia.meta.stackexchange.com/users/32458/" ]

[ { "answer_id": 4419, "author": "Flyto", "author_id": 8394, "author_profile": "https://academia.meta.stackexchange.com/users/8394", "pm_score": 5, "selected": true, "text": "<p>It's not something we can solve as academia.SE. </p>\n\n<p>As you noted, it's been a known thing for many years over at meta.stackexchange.com (<a href=\"https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/9731/fastest-gun-in-the-west-problem\">Fastest Gun in the West Problem</a>). They even have a likely solution noted there, which is what <a href=\"https://redditblog.com/2009/10/15/reddits-new-comment-sorting-system/\" rel=\"nofollow noreferrer\">Reddit adopted</a> some years back. I imagine there must be counterarguments as to why that isn't a great idea. But regardless, so far as I know it isn't something that Stackexchange is planning to deal with :-(</p>\n" }, { "answer_id": 4750, "author": "user1271772", "author_id": 93303, "author_profile": "https://academia.meta.stackexchange.com/users/93303", "pm_score": 2, "selected": false, "text": "<p>Some of this seems not to be &quot;first answer bias&quot;.</p>\n<p>You say that when your question became &quot;accepted&quot;, then your answer started quickly accumulating more upvotes at a faster rate than buffy's, even though it was the other way around before. This seems to be like a &quot;top answer bias&quot;.</p>\n<p>I disagree with the other answer, which says that &quot;it's not something we can solve as academia.SE&quot;. I believe this has been already fixed on Meta.SE where instead of sorting the questions by the number of votes (which I think is the default here):</p>\n<p><a href=\"https://i.stack.imgur.com/ezpIm.png\" rel=\"nofollow noreferrer\"><img src=\"https://i.stack.imgur.com/ezpIm.png\" alt=\"enter image description here\" /></a></p>\n<p>the questions can be sorted by most recently active:</p>\n<p><a href=\"https://i.stack.imgur.com/qzzWk.png\" rel=\"nofollow noreferrer\"><img src=\"https://i.stack.imgur.com/qzzWk.png\" alt=\"enter image description here\" /></a></p>\n<p>It's possible that MSE also has &quot;votes&quot; set as default and I just changed it some time long ago to &quot;active&quot; without noticing, but either way <strong>we could easily make &quot;active&quot; the default instead of &quot;# of votes&quot; so that the first answer (or most voted answer) doesn't get an unfairly disproportional number of upvotes. We could even make a new one called &quot;random&quot;.</strong></p>\n<p>I do think these things would improve the site, because I find the &quot;chain-reaction voting&quot; to be a much bigger issue here than on any other site I'm active on (I have 1000+ rep on 7 sites and 150+ rep on 26 sites, and I created one site currently in Beta from scratch in Area51: so I've been on SE almost 24/7 for a while, as anyone who lead the launch of a site would be able to appreciate). I recently wrote a Meta post here about &quot;chain-reaction voting&quot; (on Academia.SE) too: <a href=\"https://academia.meta.stackexchange.com/q/4747/93303\">How do people here feel about chain-reaction downvoting of posts?</a>.</p>\n<p><em>Let me conclude with my opinion about why &quot;top answer bias&quot; (not necessarily &quot;first answer bias&quot;) happens:</em></p>\n<p>I can at least speak from my own experience on Academia.SE: Recently I read an <a href=\"https://academia.stackexchange.com/a/148951/93303\">answer by BryanKrause</a> for which I commented &quot;this might be one of the best answers I've ever seen on SE, and I've saved it somewhere for me to re-read over and over again later&quot;, and I upvoted. However it was a long answer with a lot of substance, which I read slowly and nodded my head to the entire time. By the end of reading the post and reflecting so much over it, I remember being too exhausted to read all the other answers with the same amount of attention. I just double checked and it's true that I didn't upvote the 2nd or 3rd listed questions either!</p>\n<p><strong>Often people read the first answer they see, and they might put a decent amount of energy into processing it or commenting on it, then they move back to whatever they were working on or whatever SE site they were on before being the HNQ list drew them here.</strong> If the answers were set by default to &quot;random&quot; or &quot;active&quot; instead of &quot;votes&quot; or &quot;oldest&quot;, then the &quot;first answer bias&quot; or &quot;top answer bias&quot; could be eliminated, without too much disadvantage.</p>\n" } ]

[ "https://academia.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/4414", "https://academia.meta.stackexchange.com", "https://academia.meta.stackexchange.com/users/79875/" ]

[ { "answer_id": 4417, "author": "eykanal", "author_id": 73, "author_profile": "https://academia.meta.stackexchange.com/users/73", "pm_score": 1, "selected": false, "text": "<p>That question is <a href=\"https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/52764/what-is-a-protected-question\">protected</a>, which means you need to have certain rep to answer it. The association bonus doesn't count for that calculation.</p>\n" }, { "answer_id": 4418, "author": "StrongBad", "author_id": 929, "author_profile": "https://academia.meta.stackexchange.com/users/929", "pm_score": 3, "selected": false, "text": "<p>The question is protected. As you seem to know what that means, you are probably thinking to yourself <em>it doesn't look protected, there is usually a notice</em>. You would be correct, but somebody broke something ...</p>\n\n<p><a href=\"https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/322971/protection-banner-missing-when-i-dont-have-enough-rep-to-answer-closed-and-loc\">Protection banner missing when I don&#39;t have enough rep to answer; closed and locked banners appear in wrong spot</a></p>\n" }, { "answer_id": 4421, "author": "Shog9", "author_id": 78, "author_profile": "https://academia.meta.stackexchange.com/users/78", "pm_score": 4, "selected": true, "text": "<p>Sorry for the inconvenience; Protected questions should now show up as such: <a href=\"https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/322971/protection-banner-missing-when-i-dont-have-enough-rep-to-answer-closed-and-loc/323286#323286\">Protection banner missing when I don&#39;t have enough rep to answer; closed and locked banners appear in wrong spot</a></p>\n" } ]

[ "https://academia.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/4416", "https://academia.meta.stackexchange.com", "https://academia.meta.stackexchange.com/users/80335/" ]

[ { "answer_id": 4428, "author": "Kimball", "author_id": 19607, "author_profile": "https://academia.meta.stackexchange.com/users/19607", "pm_score": 2, "selected": false, "text": "<p>I typically read most answers before voting.</p>\n" }, { "answer_id": 4429, "author": "Kimball", "author_id": 19607, "author_profile": "https://academia.meta.stackexchange.com/users/19607", "pm_score": 4, "selected": false, "text": "<p>I typically vote on answers I like right after reading them but usually read several of the answers.</p>\n" }, { "answer_id": 4430, "author": "Kimball", "author_id": 19607, "author_profile": "https://academia.meta.stackexchange.com/users/19607", "pm_score": -1, "selected": false, "text": "<p>I typically vote on answers I like right after reading them and often don't read further answers.</p>\n" }, { "answer_id": 4431, "author": "Kimball", "author_id": 19607, "author_profile": "https://academia.meta.stackexchange.com/users/19607", "pm_score": 1, "selected": false, "text": "<p><strong>Other</strong> (vote before reading, never vote, ...)</p>\n\n<p>Please explain in comments.</p>\n" } ]

[ "https://academia.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/4427", "https://academia.meta.stackexchange.com", "https://academia.meta.stackexchange.com/users/19607/" ]

[ { "answer_id": 4437, "author": "ff524", "author_id": 11365, "author_profile": "https://academia.meta.stackexchange.com/users/11365", "pm_score": 6, "selected": true, "text": "<p>Every single semester, I explicitly teach my students a slightly more elaborate version of</p>\n\n<blockquote>\n <p>Plagiarism is passing someone else's work as your own</p>\n</blockquote>\n\n<p>And every semester, there is at least one instance of plagiarism by a student who has an existing (wrong or incomplete) understanding of what plagiarism is, and doesn't recognize the difference between what I told them and what they had previously understood.</p>\n\n<p>For example, I think in <a href=\"https://academia.stackexchange.com/q/125223/4249\">that specific question</a>, the OP had previously heard something like \"If your project is the same as one of your classmates' projects, it's going to be flagged as plagiarism\". When someone who has heard this reads</p>\n\n<blockquote>\n <p>Plagiarism is passing someone else's work as your own</p>\n</blockquote>\n\n<p>they may think, \"Well, I've heard it's plagiarism if I submit a classmate's work as my own, so that definition is basically the same as what I've heard\". Then, given that (mis)understanding, they may still think it may not be plagiarism if they're not plagiarizing from a literal \"classmate\".</p>\n\n<p>I don't think this misunderstanding is unique to the OP of that question - I've come across this before. I do think there is some value to explicitly addressing common misunderstandings of plagiarism in the Q&amp;A format.</p>\n" }, { "answer_id": 4438, "author": "Buffy", "author_id": 75368, "author_profile": "https://academia.meta.stackexchange.com/users/75368", "pm_score": 3, "selected": false, "text": "<p>Let me say a few things about a more general issue. Most of the questions like this and other similar repeated questions come from newcomers with rep 1 or 101 and little experience elsewhere. Many don't know how the site operates nor what they can learn from tags until they get a bit more experience. </p>\n\n<p>Likewise many newcomers don't know to distinguish this site from a \"chatty\" email list and so write some things that are superfluous. Comments in particular often become chatty. </p>\n\n<p>I think we need to be a bit tolerant of all such novice \"errors\" and pass them to the help page or otherwise help them. </p>\n\n<p>OTOH, self plagiarism is a special issue since, IMO, it isn't universally understood. Ten or so years ago few worried much about it, especially novice researchers, of whom we see a lot here. So, repeating the definitions, and the reasons behind them, seem to me to be a good thing. </p>\n\n<p>But it would also be good to have a way to mark <em>canonical</em> questions and answers so that those who want to help can quickly find a way to redirect the OP to the answers they need before there is too much redundancy in the site. </p>\n" } ]

[ "https://academia.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/4436", "https://academia.meta.stackexchange.com", "https://academia.meta.stackexchange.com/users/4249/" ]

[ { "answer_id": 4445, "author": "StrongBad", "author_id": 929, "author_profile": "https://academia.meta.stackexchange.com/users/929", "pm_score": 2, "selected": false, "text": "<p>Only mods know if two accounts belong to the same user and we obviously cannot say anything. So without commenting on this particular user, a single user having multiple accounts is sometimes fine, but sometimes a flagrant violation. You cannot have two accounts to up vote your own content or artificially increase your reputation. If you are suspended you cannot create a new account to circumvent the punishment.</p>\n\n<p>Some people create new accounts to ask (or answer) something anonymously. That is a valid use, as long as your accounts never interact. Some really high rep users want to be able to do things as a lower rep user and that is okay, more or less.</p>\n\n<p>The most common case of multiple accounts is people either losing their login info or not understanding the system. If your see this, you can leave them a comment about how to merge accounts (contact us link at the bottom of every page) or flag it. (In this particular case, we are aware of the multiple accounts so please do not raise a ton of flags.)</p>\n" }, { "answer_id": 4446, "author": "Wrzlprmft", "author_id": 7734, "author_profile": "https://academia.meta.stackexchange.com/users/7734", "pm_score": 4, "selected": false, "text": "<p><em>All the information I give here is generally available and does not come from my moderator privileges.</em></p>\n\n<p>First of all some general information on this:</p>\n\n<ul>\n<li><p>Having multiple accounts is okay, as long as they do not do something that cannot be done with a single account, which includes almost all interactions of the accounts: <a href=\"https://meta.stackexchange.com/q/57682/255554\">How should sockpuppets be handled on Stack Exchange?</a></p></li>\n<li><p>Unregistered accounts are based on cookies. They cannot do certain things such as voting. See: <a href=\"https://meta.stackoverflow.com/q/262909/2127008\">How do unregistered accounts work?</a> and <a href=\"https://academia.stackexchange.com/help/why-register\">Why should I create an account?</a></p></li>\n<li><p>The default avatar of any account is an identicon based on a hash of your IP or, if provided, your e-mail address. It is extremely unlikely that two identicons coincide by chance. See: <a href=\"https://meta.stackexchange.com/q/17443/255554\">How is the default user avatar generated?</a></p></li>\n<li><p>Moderators have further tools to tell if two accounts belong to the same person.</p></li>\n</ul>\n\n<p>Now, some observations and conclusions on the accounts in question:</p>\n\n<ul>\n<li><p>They have the same avatar, so they very likely come from the same IP or provided the same e-mail address.\nThe alternative is that they use the identicon image as a manual avatar (like I use a picture of a glass head), but then again, they intend to be identified with each other.</p></li>\n<li><p>They are unregistered, which makes the most common forms of sockpuppet abuse (in particular voting) unavailable to them.\nIf such accounts commit sockpuppet abuse, it is usually by circumventing rate limits, question or answer bans, or suspensions.\nIf you see any indication for this (or some other kind of sockpuppet abuse), please flag for moderator attention.</p></li>\n</ul>\n" } ]

[ "https://academia.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/4444", "https://academia.meta.stackexchange.com", "https://academia.meta.stackexchange.com/users/77539/" ]

[ { "answer_id": 4452, "author": "Wrzlprmft", "author_id": 7734, "author_profile": "https://academia.meta.stackexchange.com/users/7734", "pm_score": 4, "selected": false, "text": "<p>The single direct effect of closing questions is that it prevents answers, for reasons such as:</p>\n\n<ul>\n<li><p>To give the asker the opportunity to clarify their question before existing answers get invalidated.</p></li>\n<li><p>To prevent the inevitable endless discussions answers to some questions provoke.</p></li>\n<li><p>To avoid the broken-window effect, i.e., new users getting the impression that they can get answers to certain questions here.</p></li>\n<li><p>To avoid redundant content, voting, etc.</p></li>\n<li><p>To avoid that askers commit pointless real-life mistakes by blindly heeding the inevitable wrong answer certain questions will attract (applies to many questions closed due to depending on individual factors).</p></li>\n<li><p>…</p></li>\n</ul>\n\n<p>In short, we close questions because we think that answers to them would be bad.\nCircumventing this defies the entire point of closure.\nThese questions should not be answered on this site, in the comments, and at times nowhere on the Internet.\nClosure needs the five votes of high-reputation users (or one vote of a diamond moderator).\nIf it happens, there usually is a good reason for it.</p>\n\n<p>So, the best way to avoid your problem is: <strong>Do not answer questions that should be closed!</strong> Roughly 16 % of your answers were on questions that were later closed. This is a rather high number, among the highest for high-reputation users on our site. (For comparison, it’s 6 % for me. <a href=\"https://data.stackexchange.com/academia/query/1002402/answers-to-subsequently-closed-questions\" rel=\"nofollow noreferrer\">Here</a> is a Stack Exchange Data Explorer query for this.)</p>\n\n<p>That being said:</p>\n\n<ul>\n<li>If you think that a question was wrongly closed, you can argue against it (on Meta Academia if it takes longer) and vote to reopen.</li>\n<li>If you think that there is a valid question buried under a question, edit it and vote to reopen.</li>\n<li>If you think there is a valid, relevant question to which what you just wrote is the answer, write that question and <a href=\"https://academia.stackexchange.com/help/self-answer\">self-answer</a> it.</li>\n<li>If the asker needs to clarify something, comment to let them know what and wait for them to do it.</li>\n</ul>\n\n<p>While this happens, just save your answer in a regular file.</p>\n" }, { "answer_id": 4456, "author": "cag51", "author_id": 79875, "author_profile": "https://academia.meta.stackexchange.com/users/79875", "pm_score": 3, "selected": false, "text": "<p>I agree with Wrzlprmft's analysis, particularly for very \"off-topic\" questions (too broad, about content of research, etc.). But as another user with ~16% of answers on closed questions, let me offer another viewpoint.</p>\n\n<p>Consider a question like \"I'm worried I ruined my life and could really use help, let me post my super long, specific-to-me question\" (<a href=\"https://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/126282/have-i-dug-myself-a-hole-that-i-can-not-get-out-of\">example</a>). Such questions should obviously be closed as they violate our community norms; on the other hand, it is very unwelcoming to just downvote and close after someone took the time to ask for help. <em>There is really an opportunity to help someone here</em>, even if we know the question will likely be closed and we won't get much reputation in exchange for a good answer. </p>\n\n<p>I know it's a bit heterodox, but in such cases, I have no problem with answering a question knowing it likely will (and should) be closed. As such, I would not be inclined to interrupt users who are in the middle of answering such questions.</p>\n" }, { "answer_id": 4460, "author": "Ooker", "author_id": 14341, "author_profile": "https://academia.meta.stackexchange.com/users/14341", "pm_score": 0, "selected": false, "text": "<p><a href=\"https://meta.stackexchange.com/q/91922/260800\">This post on the main meta</a> explains why during the next 4 hours of being closed new answers can still be submit, and how to do this. This can be a good balance point for the disciplinary - flexibility issue, because we want two conflict things at the same times.</p>\n\n<p>Not intentionally want to advertise, but I happen to discuss about the way to find the balance point in my article <a href=\"http://lyminhnhat.com/2018/12/21/a-theory-of-perspective/?utm_source=Stack%20Exchange&amp;utm_medium=Academia%20Meta&amp;utm_campaign=Perspective&amp;utm_medium=answer#balance_point\" rel=\"nofollow noreferrer\">A theory of perspective</a>:</p>\n\n<blockquote>\n <p>The secret to be flexible without having to compromise stability (e.g. violate rules) is to notice the struggle of others, because mitigating others' struggles is the reason why stability is born at the first place. Instead of worrying whether a behavior is moral or legal or not, we should check its ability to reduces the cognitive dissonances of everyone in long term. In the case of having conflicts, no one will feel that they have to compromise, but sees how their worry is maximally satisfied before it is actually satisfied.</p>\n</blockquote>\n" } ]

[ "https://academia.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/4451", "https://academia.meta.stackexchange.com", "https://academia.meta.stackexchange.com/users/75368/" ]

[ { "answer_id": 4455, "author": "Massimo Ortolano", "author_id": 20058, "author_profile": "https://academia.meta.stackexchange.com/users/20058", "pm_score": -1, "selected": false, "text": "<h2>Please, don't remove questions from the HNQ list at all</h2>\n\n<p>I think that the HNQ is a non-issue and we should not exclude anything, just leave the algorithms do their work (whether good or not). So, I add this as an answer because I think that we should give the community also the possibility to choose this option.</p>\n" }, { "answer_id": 4457, "author": "StrongBad", "author_id": 929, "author_profile": "https://academia.meta.stackexchange.com/users/929", "pm_score": 4, "selected": false, "text": "<p>I think we should prevent <a href=\"https://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/gender\" class=\"post-tag\" title=\"show questions tagged &#39;gender&#39;\" rel=\"tag\">gender</a> and <a href=\"https://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/sexual-misconduct\" class=\"post-tag\" title=\"show questions tagged &#39;sexual-misconduct&#39;\" rel=\"tag\">sexual-misconduct</a> from being featured. While these questions are important for our community, I do not think they make for good advertisements. The answers often get the job done, but we don't have a user base that is expert in the nuances of these difficult questions. Further, they often attract poor answers from the HNQ that garner lots of up votes which makes them move from not good advertisement to poor advertising. Finally, they seem to attract a lot of discussion which eventually degrades into rude/offensive ranting, which becomes really bad for everyone involved.</p>\n" }, { "answer_id": 4458, "author": "Wrzlprmft", "author_id": 7734, "author_profile": "https://academia.meta.stackexchange.com/users/7734", "pm_score": 5, "selected": false, "text": "<p>I propose to remove all questions where <strong>the asker is a victim of sexual discrimination or misconduct</strong> from the HNQs.\nNote that this a more narrow category than <a href=\"https://academia.meta.stackexchange.com/a/4457/7734\">what Strong Bad proposed</a>.\nFor example, I would leave questions on how to battle sexual discrimination, avoiding conflicts of interest, and dealing with such issues as a third party.</p>\n\n<p>Rationale:\nWhile the topic of sexual discrimination and misconduct tends to attract trolling and other problems in general, I think this is a price we should pay for the positive effect of raising awareness on these issues.\nSilencing the entire topic is exactly what some of the aggressors want.\nHowever for questions by victim, the benefit of awareness is outweighted by the chance of hurtful comments that doubt the asker’s assessment, directly attack the asker, or even blatant trolling.\nThis is usually the last thing the asker needs in such a situation.</p>\n" }, { "answer_id": 4459, "author": "Wrzlprmft", "author_id": 7734, "author_profile": "https://academia.meta.stackexchange.com/users/7734", "pm_score": 5, "selected": false, "text": "<p>I propose to remove all questions around the topic of <strong>suicide or severe psychic health problems</strong> from the HNQs.</p>\n<p>Rationale:</p>\n<ul>\n<li><p>For many HNQ visitors this is a dire topic they do not want to be confronted with, to the extent that it could trigger problems itself.\nNon-HNQ visitors of our site implicitly accept a certain risk of running into this topic by visiting a site on social topics.\nI strongly suspect that titles mentioning <em>suicide</em> and similar are filtered out anyway, so this is for the questions where these filters fail.</p>\n</li>\n<li><p>If the asker is suffering from such problems themselves, they almost certainly do not enjoy the extra attention HNQs give them.\nAlso there is an increased chance that some idiot leaves a hurtful comment.</p>\n</li>\n</ul>\n" }, { "answer_id": 4461, "author": "Federico Poloni", "author_id": 958, "author_profile": "https://academia.meta.stackexchange.com/users/958", "pm_score": 3, "selected": false, "text": "<h2>Why not \"all of them\"?</h2>\n\n<p>I'm not sure myself that this is the perfect solution, but take this answer as a way to think about the benefits of HNQ.</p>\n\n<p>What good comes to our community from a question being in the HNQ, usually? Most of the time, all that happens when a question enters it is that we get a bunch of votes and answers from people that are not very knowledgeable about academia. They tend to skew the votes, so that they do not reflect the opinion of university people anymore.</p>\n\n<p>Also, the HNQ tends to promote click-bait questions and controversial issues, which (in my opinion) are not an effective way to advertise our site to new potential users. I'd see more value in a curated list of the best questions and answers, than in a contest on who can get the most clicks by attracting the attention of random users.</p>\n\n<p>The HNQ benefits Stack Exchange more than it benefits us as a community, I believe.</p>\n" }, { "answer_id": 4469, "author": "Mark Amery", "author_id": 86725, "author_profile": "https://academia.meta.stackexchange.com/users/86725", "pm_score": -1, "selected": false, "text": "<p>Anything that's a soft interpersonal or sociopolitical issue that doesn't require any academic expertise to answer.</p>\n\n<p>As a Stack Overflow user who is neither an academic nor a user of Academia Stack Exchange, I find Academia's presence in HNQ consistently frustrating. Pretty much all from here that currently reaches HNQ is soft questions about interpersonal interactions that require no particular expertise to opine on. Yet when we users of other sites click through to them, we usually find ourselves pre-emptively silenced by the question being \"Protected\".</p>\n\n<p>It's bad for us, because we suffer the frustration of not being permitted to answer with differing perspectives; on these broad questions about how to decently interact with other human beings, only the (disproportionately left-leaning and otherwise atypical) views of actual users of this site are permitted to be voiced in the answer section. That leaves us with only comments as a permitted way to engage with the issues, but those comments get nuked seemingly capriciously by the mods.</p>\n\n<p>And it's bad for <em>you</em>, because it channels users into precisely the interactions you don't want. You end up with a horde of users who are just as qualified as you to answer the questions they're reading, but who you only permit to use comments to do so, turning every such squishy interpersonal question into a brawl in the comments section that your mods need to clean up.</p>\n\n<p>Assuming that you're unwilling to simply stop using question protection on these questions, the <em>other</em> way you can stop this dysfunction by simply not letting these questions be in HNQ. If there's no particular expertise that someone who works in academia can bring to a question compared to a random member of the public, nuke it from the sidebar. Then you guys get to have the controlled discussion of social issues amongst yourselves that you seem to repeatedly want to have, free from disruption by the rest of us, and we get to go about our lives in blissful ignorance and with slightly lower blood pressures.</p>\n" } ]

[ "https://academia.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/4454", "https://academia.meta.stackexchange.com", "https://academia.meta.stackexchange.com/users/7734/" ]

[ { "answer_id": 4463, "author": "StrongBad", "author_id": 929, "author_profile": "https://academia.meta.stackexchange.com/users/929", "pm_score": 3, "selected": false, "text": "<p>From what I can piece together, you want to know if your draft email is good. That is not a good fit for AC.SE. If instead you want to know if an initial contact email to a professor can include links (and possibly links to your work, and possibly tracking links at that), that is a great question for AC.SE. That said, it does not require the draft email.</p>\n" }, { "answer_id": 4466, "author": "Ooker", "author_id": 14341, "author_profile": "https://academia.meta.stackexchange.com/users/14341", "pm_score": 1, "selected": true, "text": "<p>I agree with StrongBad that the question should about the problems of links, not whether the draft is good or not. But I'm not sure if including a draft is bad too. From <a href=\"https://academia.stackexchange.com/a/126560/14341\">Buffy's answer</a>, it's evident that having it is useful for both the askers and answerers. Even StrongBad answers this question mainly based on the information on the draft. So I think there is no problem with having it at all.</p>\n" } ]

[ "https://academia.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/4462", "https://academia.meta.stackexchange.com", "https://academia.meta.stackexchange.com/users/14341/" ]

[ { "answer_id": 4543, "author": "Anonymous Physicist", "author_id": 13240, "author_profile": "https://academia.meta.stackexchange.com/users/13240", "pm_score": 2, "selected": false, "text": "<p>No, the differences between South East Asia and South Asia are clear. </p>\n\n<p>If a changes were to be made, perhaps removing the \"Asia\" tag as too broad would be an option. </p>\n" }, { "answer_id": 4563, "author": "Flyto", "author_id": 8394, "author_profile": "https://academia.meta.stackexchange.com/users/8394", "pm_score": 0, "selected": false, "text": "<p>There are some international differences in what these phrases mean. For example, AIUI in the USA, \"South Asia\" means \"India, Sri Lanka, Pakistan and Bangladesh\" (maybe Nepal too). In other places that might be called \"The Indian Subcontinent\", and \"south asia\" might be taken more geographically.</p>\n\n<p>I'm not sure whether \"South-east asia\" has similar non-geographic meanings. In my mind it refers to the peninsula that Cambodia, Vietnam, Thailand, etc., sit on, but that might not be true for everybody.</p>\n\n<p>So, these meanings are different for different people.</p>\n\n<p>I'm not sure what this means for the appropriateness of the tags, except perhaps that if they exist, the tag wikis need to be really clear.</p>\n" } ]

[ "https://academia.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/4467", "https://academia.meta.stackexchange.com", "https://academia.meta.stackexchange.com/users/15723/" ]

[ { "answer_id": 4472, "author": "Wrzlprmft", "author_id": 7734, "author_profile": "https://academia.meta.stackexchange.com/users/7734", "pm_score": 4, "selected": false, "text": "<h3>Publications</h3>\n<ul>\n<li><p>In some fields like computer science, conferences act as publication venues: you submit papers, they get peer-reviewed and disseminated. In most fields this is not the case and publishing your work in written form and presenting it at a conference are two different things.</p>\n</li>\n<li><p>The duration of the peer-review process varies greatly across fields, journals and publishers, ranging from a few weeks to more than a year (<a href=\"https://academia.stackexchange.com/q/32768/7734\">further reading</a>). Other stages in the peer-review process such as editorial assessment scale accordingly.</p>\n</li>\n<li><p>Double-blind peer review (i.e., the reviewers do not know who the authors are) is the norm in some fields, while impossible or unheard of in others. Sometimes, only single blind reviewing is practiced (the reviewers know the identity of the authors, but not the other way around).</p>\n</li>\n<li><p>The prevalence of publishing preprints (on the ArXiv or similar) strongly varies across fields and even subfields and so does the acceptance of this practice by publishers.</p>\n</li>\n<li><p>Mentioning somebody in the acknowledgements requires their consent in some fields or for some journals (<a href=\"https://academia.stackexchange.com/a/110019/7734\">further reading</a>).</p>\n</li>\n<li><p>Some fields have a tendency towards many small publications (with the extreme being <a href=\"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Least_publishable_unit\" rel=\"nofollow noreferrer\">salami publishing</a>), while in other fields, authors try to accumulate as much content into one paper as possible. In yet other fields, much or most new work is published as complete books. Relatedly, the average publication frequency of researchers differs strongly across fields.</p>\n</li>\n<li><p>The average numbers of citations made and received by papers vary strongly across fields and even subfields. Relatedly, what is a high impact factor varies strongly across fields: Some mega journals that are regarded as a junk pile by some disciplines (due to their low impact factor) are sometimes erroneously held in a high regard by others (due to their high impact factor). Note that this is also affected by the impact factor only considering citations within the first two years, thus disadvantaging fields with long “response” times.</p>\n</li>\n<li><p>Journal article formats are different in different fields and in different journals. Sometimes there is a strict format. Sometimes the author can organise their paper as they wish.</p>\n</li>\n<li><p>In some fields, <a href=\"https://www.elsevier.com/authors/policies-and-guidelines/submission-fees\" rel=\"nofollow noreferrer\">submission fees are common</a>, while in most ones <a href=\"https://www.letpub.com/Journal_Submission_and_Publication_Fees_A_Review\" rel=\"nofollow noreferrer\">article processing charges</a> or color printing charges are due only after a paper is accepted.</p>\n</li>\n</ul>\n" }, { "answer_id": 4473, "author": "Wrzlprmft", "author_id": 7734, "author_profile": "https://academia.meta.stackexchange.com/users/7734", "pm_score": 3, "selected": false, "text": "<h3>Authorship</h3>\n\n<ul>\n<li><p>In many fields, the order of authors in a paper indicates how much or how they contributed: The first author usually did most of the work, while the last one is sometimes the supervisor. Other fields order authors alphabetically.</p></li>\n<li><p>Depending on the field and even the journal, <em>corresponding author</em> can refer to the author who communicated the paper to the journal or the author to whom post-publication communication about the paper by third parties should be addressed (<a href=\"https://academia.stackexchange.com/q/84476/7734\">further reading</a>). Among others this results in corresponding authorship being valued in evaluation or for funding (<a href=\"https://academia.stackexchange.com/q/84476/7734\">further reading</a>) in some contexts, while this seems bizarre to those used to the other meaning of <em>corresponding author.</em></p></li>\n<li><p>In some parts of the world, the PhD supervisor may be the first author even if the PhD student did most of the work.</p></li>\n<li><p>In some fields, papers with more than a handful of authors are rare. In other fields, one might regularly find papers with dozens or, in extreme cases, even hundreds or thousands of co-authors.</p></li>\n<li><p>In some fields, the authors’ affiliations on a paper indicate where the work was done; in others, affiliations indicate where the authors can be currently found.</p></li>\n</ul>\n" }, { "answer_id": 4474, "author": "Wrzlprmft", "author_id": 7734, "author_profile": "https://academia.meta.stackexchange.com/users/7734", "pm_score": 3, "selected": false, "text": "<h3>Writing and Writing Style</h3>\n\n<ul>\n<li><p>In pure math, a paper’s introduction may just be “We consider the problem of X.” and not have a conclusion or summary. In other fields, you are expected to argue why a problem is relevant, summarise previous research, and place your own research in that context.</p></li>\n<li><p>The question whether single-author papers should be written using “I” or “we” depends on the field (<a href=\"https://academia.stackexchange.com/q/2945/7734\">further reading</a>).</p></li>\n</ul>\n" }, { "answer_id": 4475, "author": "Wrzlprmft", "author_id": 7734, "author_profile": "https://academia.meta.stackexchange.com/users/7734", "pm_score": 3, "selected": false, "text": "<h3>Employment and Funding</h3>\n<ul>\n<li><p>In some countries, PhD students are university employees, which means they get unemployment benefits, healthcare, and pension contributions like any other employees.</p>\n</li>\n<li><p>In some countries, PhD students are getting paid, but it's legally a stipend, so the benefits are not the same, but every PhD student gets the money.</p>\n</li>\n<li><p>In some countries, PhD students are getting paid if they apply for funding and get it. If they don't get the funding, they can still study just without money. In this case, some positions might be tied to specific stipends, so if you are hired/admitted, you don't have to apply for more funding, but this is not the case for everybody in the country or even in the department.</p>\n</li>\n<li><p>In some countries, PhD students won't get paid for being PhD students, but they will have to do some paid teaching.</p>\n</li>\n<li><p>In some countries, PhD students have to pay tuition (which might or might not be countered by stipends or teaching)</p>\n</li>\n<li><p>In some countries, faculty contracts include twelve or more months of salary; in others only nine months.</p>\n</li>\n<li><p>In some countries, the funding is based on impact-factor publications; in others, they do not care about this sort of thing.</p>\n</li>\n<li><p>In some countries, prospective PhD students apply directly to potential supervisors; in others, they apply to a department.</p>\n</li>\n</ul>\n<p>All these may also vary between fields or institutions within a given country.</p>\n" }, { "answer_id": 4476, "author": "Wrzlprmft", "author_id": 7734, "author_profile": "https://academia.meta.stackexchange.com/users/7734", "pm_score": 3, "selected": false, "text": "<h3 id=\"academic-life-a1pr\">Academic Life</h3>\n<ul>\n<li><p>In some countries, universities don’t arrange academic or mental-health counselling services for students.</p>\n</li>\n<li><p>In some countries or institutions, mass graduation ceremonies are a big thing. In others, most graduates just fetch their diploma from the respective office when they completed all the requirements (or receive it via mail), and mass graduation ceremonies are seen as something for people coming from the former countries and people who (or whose parents) like dressing up – if they happen at all.</p>\n</li>\n<li><p>In some countries or universities, it is common to strongly identify with and be loyal to one’s university or to an institution within the university; in others, this is regarded as outlandish.</p>\n</li>\n<li><p>In some countries, the academic year is interrupted by a large break during which campuses are mostly empty of students; in others, there are periods with classes that are interrupted by shorter breaks, while at least some students are almost always around for one university-related reason or another.</p>\n</li>\n<li><p>What kind of dress is the norm or appropriate strongly depends on field and to a lesser extent on country. The same attire can be overdressing for a formal occasion in one field and underdressing for everyday work in another.</p>\n</li>\n<li><p>Clothing requirements may also vary for practical reasons (e.g., no open-toed sandals in a lab; no strongly patterned clothing in a Deaf Studies course).</p>\n</li>\n<li><p>In some countries, institutions, and programs, instructors are required to keep daily attendance records for all students registered in a course. In other programs, such a requirement would be considered offensive and a violation of academic freedom.</p>\n</li>\n</ul>\n" }, { "answer_id": 4477, "author": "Wrzlprmft", "author_id": 7734, "author_profile": "https://academia.meta.stackexchange.com/users/7734", "pm_score": 4, "selected": false, "text": "<h3>Studying and PhD Programmes</h3>\n<ul>\n<li><p>In some countries, you have to decide on a discipline when you start studying, in others you start broadly and decide for a major (or similar) later.</p>\n</li>\n<li><p>Some countries and programmes, you need to pass major hurdles before you can start studying such as good grades in previous education, entrance exams, or paying a considerable amount of fees. In others, you need only minimal qualifications to study, but passing the exams is a major filter. Depending on this, half of the students failing an entry-level course is a disaster or the norm. This is somewhat linked to whether students are regarded as customers.</p>\n</li>\n<li><p>In some countries, there are no extensive university- or department-wide policies (on behaviour, cheating, writing reports, etc.).</p>\n</li>\n<li><p>In some countries, there is a big difference between undergraduate and graduate studies. In others, this distinction does not exist or is merely marked by bachelor’s degree. For example, it isn’t even possible to accurately translate the words <em>undergraduate</em> and <em>graduate student</em> into the German language.</p>\n</li>\n<li><p>In some countries, PhD programmes are purely research-based but require a master’s degree (which usually takes two years) for admission; in some they are purely research-based and require only a bachelor’s; and in some they require only a bachelor’s degree for admission but require coursework to be completed as part of the PhD. In the third case, the concept of “mastering out” exists. In the first (and second?) case, graduate schools do not exist or are mostly virtual structures (the author of these lines was a member of a graduate school that did not even inform its own students of its existence). Of course, there are variations of both schemes.</p>\n</li>\n<li><p>In some countries, prospective PhD students apply directly to potential supervisors; in others, they apply to a department.</p>\n</li>\n<li><p>In some countries, the PhD student chooses, or is assigned to, a supervisor only after some time (e.g. two years), while in some countries the student is to find a potential supervisor, willing to supervise them from the very beginning, before the actual application.</p>\n</li>\n<li><p>In some countries and universities, it is the norm to attempt to keep past exams secret (and obliging examinees to do this), so they can be re-used in future exams. Elsewhere, this approach is considered naïve and bound to fail and exams are designed under the assumption that all previous exams are available.</p>\n</li>\n</ul>\n" }, { "answer_id": 4478, "author": "Wrzlprmft", "author_id": 7734, "author_profile": "https://academia.meta.stackexchange.com/users/7734", "pm_score": 3, "selected": false, "text": "<h3>Theses and Defences</h3>\n\n<ul>\n<li><p>In some countries and universities, you hand in your thesis to the examination office, which then distributes it to the examiners for grading. In others, you hand in your thesis to the examiners for grading directly. Yet another way is that you have to hand in a thesis that is already signed by your supervisor.</p></li>\n<li><p>In some programmes, you must defend your thesis before submitting it; in others, you can only defend a fully examined thesis; in yet others, thesis submission and defence are mostly independent.</p></li>\n<li><p>In some countries, bachelor’s degrees must be completed with a thesis; in others, this is optional or impossible.</p></li>\n<li><p>Some programmes prescribe a fixed time that you shall spend on a thesis (which in turn can even vary between comparable programmes). Depending on the department’s and even group’s culture, this duration may be strictly adhered to, or it may be the norm that you only register a thesis once you are confident that you can finish it in time. In other programmes, you are completely free on when you hand in your thesis.</p></li>\n<li><p>Some programmes have strict requirements on the length, layout, and structure of a thesis (which in turn strongly vary); other’s have no such restrictions at all.</p></li>\n<li><p>Some universities have no dissertation defence. Other universities call it a \"pre-submission seminar\" instead of a defence.</p></li>\n<li><p>The format of the “defence” — that is, the final thesis presentation/examination — varies very widely, from a public ceremony with multiple lectures (common in continental Europe) to a private oral exam (e.g. the <em>viva voce</em> of the traditional UK system). Usage of these terms also varies: often <em>defence</em> is used as an umbrella term covering all of these formats (as here); but often e.g. a <em>viva</em> may be considered as a different system entirely, not as a kind of defence. </p></li>\n<li><p>A defence often consists only or primarily of a talk by the candidate, but in some systems (e.g. Dutch and Scandinavian) members of the thesis committee also (or even exclusively) give talks.</p></li>\n<li><p>The length of a defence talk can vary considerably between programmes and even groups. In some cases, it’s just ten minutes; in others, it can take up to an hour. When the defence is an oral examination rather than a lecture, it may last longer, up to several hours.</p></li>\n<li><p>The admission and role of the audience in a defence can strongly vary. Some defences are completely open to the public; some can only be attended by other members of the university; some defences happen only before the examiners. The defence talk and the questions may be treated differently in this respect. Questions from the audience can also be treated completely different: In some cases they are forbidden; in others they are allowed but rare; in yet others they are common and encouraged; and in some cases, a defence is not complete without a question from the audience.</p></li>\n<li><p>The target audience of a defence may strongly differ even between groups. Some are supposed to directed at an expert audience familiar with the thesis. Others are supposed to be (mostly) understood by anybody from the field or even the faculty.</p></li>\n<li><p>The opposition to the presented thesis/dissertation may range from perfunctory, through merely curious, to making a serious attempt at rebutting the presenter's claims or the novelty and significance of the results.</p></li>\n<li><p>Customs after a successful defence vary greatly, from formal celebrations to <a href=\"https://www.bustle.com/p/the-weirdest-college-graduation-traditions-around-the-world-53434\" rel=\"nofollow noreferrer\">throwing food at the successful graduate</a>.</p></li>\n</ul>\n" }, { "answer_id": 4480, "author": "kcrisman", "author_id": 26466, "author_profile": "https://academia.meta.stackexchange.com/users/26466", "pm_score": 3, "selected": false, "text": "<h3>Student Body Properties</h3>\n\n<ul>\n<li><p>Some academic contexts do not have students at all but still fit within academia (e.g. the Institute for Advanced Study).</p></li>\n<li><p>Some have only what is usually called graduate students; others have only undergraduates.</p></li>\n<li><p>In some countries, an institution of higher learning may not be called a university unless it has graduate programs, or is a certain type; in others naming conventions have little relation to this.</p></li>\n<li><p>Some degree-granting institutions operate wholly within the online space, with nearly all part-time students; others only have full-time, on-site students. There are many, many ways to mix these nowadays.</p></li>\n<li><p>Some physical universities have nearly all students living off - often very far from - campus, while others are nearly completely residential.</p></li>\n<li><p>Which employee teaches what kind of student (or teaches at all, and how much) depends widely upon type of university, country, degree program(me), etc.</p></li>\n<li><p>Some student bodies are highly culturally and racially diverse, others are quite homogeneous. Sometimes certain programs are homogeneous, but not of the dominant ethnic group of the community or country. Some programs in a given university may recruit widely from other countries, while others at the same one will have nearly all local students. And of course some student bodies are homogeneous and local, but do not fully reflect the community surrounding the university.</p></li>\n<li><p>The same as the previous point, except regarding diversity of economic statuses. Naturally there are many times this point is strongly related to the previous point, but it is not always the case, particularly when students studying outside their country of origin is involved.</p></li>\n<li><p>Certain universities have a common language of instruction which is <em>not</em> the local language, or even the first (or second or third ...) language of most students. Sometimes this is because there is no clear common language and a lingua franca is chosen. Some universities are <a href=\"https://www.sun.ac.za/english/Lists/news/DispForm.aspx?ID=5154\" rel=\"nofollow noreferrer\">bilingual</a> or more.</p></li>\n</ul>\n" }, { "answer_id": 5257, "author": "Wrzlprmft", "author_id": 7734, "author_profile": "https://academia.meta.stackexchange.com/users/7734", "pm_score": 0, "selected": false, "text": "<h3>Academic Self-Administration</h3>\n<ul>\n<li><p>The role of the head of a faculty, department, institute, or similar can be seen as anything between:</p>\n<ul>\n<li>a prestigious and powerful role that people strife for, requires years of experience (as a professor), and that people stay in for long times,</li>\n<li>a nuisance that only distracts from more important tasks (such as heading a research group), that changes yearly based on an established rota, and where there are rules what arguments suffice to reject the role. Showing interest in the role is seen as a red flag.</li>\n</ul>\n</li>\n<li><p>There can be considerable differences on how many layers academic administration has and how narrow their scope is, even within a country or university. For example, the structural hierarchy for the same topic at universities of comparable size can be <em>university → faculty for science → department of mathematics → institute for statistics</em> or just <em>university → faculty for statistics.</em></p>\n</li>\n</ul>\n" } ]

[ "https://academia.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/4471", "https://academia.meta.stackexchange.com", "https://academia.meta.stackexchange.com/users/7734/" ]

[ { "answer_id": 4487, "author": "StrongBad", "author_id": 929, "author_profile": "https://academia.meta.stackexchange.com/users/929", "pm_score": 3, "selected": false, "text": "<p>It is not a mistake, but rather a privilege: <a href=\"https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/230865/increase-close-vote-weight-for-gold-tag-badge-holders\">Increase close vote weight for gold tag badge holders</a></p>\n\n<p>It only works on duplicates so it should only impact things that are generally less controversial. If you don't want to unilaterally close something as a duplicate, you can always leave a comment.</p>\n" }, { "answer_id": 4488, "author": "Bryan Krause", "author_id": 63475, "author_profile": "https://academia.meta.stackexchange.com/users/63475", "pm_score": 2, "selected": false, "text": "<p>Following my comment suggesting you ask at the main meta if anywhere, and in agreement with @StrongBad's intuition that it would be unlikely to be fruitful, I decided to check what else has been said on Meta on this topic...</p>\n\n<p>In an answer to a question asking <a href=\"https://meta.stackexchange.com/a/231507/401068\">How Do I Opt Out of Privileges?</a> referring to this particular privilege, Shog9 points out that users with this ability <em>also have a gold-tag ability in the opposite direction</em>. If you've made a mistake and marked something as duplicate and had it closed instantly when you were actually unsure, you can reopen it and your reopen vote is also binding.</p>\n" } ]

[ "https://academia.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/4486", "https://academia.meta.stackexchange.com", "https://academia.meta.stackexchange.com/users/75368/" ]

[ { "answer_id": 4490, "author": "Buffy", "author_id": 75368, "author_profile": "https://academia.meta.stackexchange.com/users/75368", "pm_score": -1, "selected": false, "text": "<p>I'll make no objection. I thought my edit made for an interesting on-topic question and also commented apologies in advance to the OP. Anyone with sufficient rep to edit could change it back as was done. Fine. I have no issue with it. </p>\n\n<p>I deleted my answer, as it applied more to the edited question than the original, which I agree was off topic. Again, no worries. </p>\n" }, { "answer_id": 4491, "author": "xxxxxxxxx", "author_id": 37771, "author_profile": "https://academia.meta.stackexchange.com/users/37771", "pm_score": 4, "selected": false, "text": "<p>I thought it was strange to edit a question that was clearly off-topic into something very different simply for the sake of \"saving\" it. It also introduces weird things, like the OP of the off-topic question gaining or losing reputation based on up/downvotes to a question they clearly didn't ask. I felt it would make more sense for the altered question to be asked as a new post.</p>\n\n<p>I'm fine with any decision on the matter (I certainly wouldn't repeatedly revert).</p>\n" }, { "answer_id": 4492, "author": "Buffy", "author_id": 75368, "author_profile": "https://academia.meta.stackexchange.com/users/75368", "pm_score": 1, "selected": false, "text": "<p>Let me note that there have been other questions here that have been edited to change (IMO) the intent as it seemed to be expressed by the OP. I think that such things need to be handled consistently. It was that memory, actually, that seemed to give me \"permission\" to make the change. </p>\n\n<p>I won't speak, however, in favor of allowing such changes and generally don't favor them. And I've hesitated as well to roll back those changes. </p>\n" }, { "answer_id": 4497, "author": "Flyto", "author_id": 8394, "author_profile": "https://academia.meta.stackexchange.com/users/8394", "pm_score": 2, "selected": false, "text": "<p>Edits to questions by people who are not the author should never change the basic intent of the question. It's really, really rude to the author. If such an edit is proposed, it should be rejected.</p>\n\n<p>I've been on the receiving end of such edits on another site, where my question has been changed into something different to what I asked, and IMHO into something asinine. I've had to contact moderators to get my name taken off it. </p>\n" } ]

[ "https://academia.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/4489", "https://academia.meta.stackexchange.com", "https://academia.meta.stackexchange.com/users/929/" ]

[ { "answer_id": 4494, "author": "Wrzlprmft", "author_id": 7734, "author_profile": "https://academia.meta.stackexchange.com/users/7734", "pm_score": 3, "selected": false, "text": "<h3>Proposed Guideline</h3>\n\n<p>I think two good lines to draw are:</p>\n\n<ul>\n<li><p>Answers to the edited question must still be potentially useful for the asker.</p></li>\n<li><p>The context of the question should not be distorted, i.e., no information should be added or changed. (Removing irrelevant details and including information from comments by the asker is fine though.)</p></li>\n</ul>\n\n<h3>Rationale</h3>\n\n<p>The main thing that distinguishes the asker from other users is that they can accept an answer that helped them and provide further information if needed. If the edit is so drastic that this cannot be expected anymore, it is going too far. In this case the editor should ask a new question instead, since they are the master of the new question rather than the original asker.</p>\n\n<p>Another take on this is that the author’s <strong>underlying</strong> intent should be preserved, by which I mean the problem that the asker wants to solve and not the question they are asking about it.</p>\n\n<h3>Examples</h3>\n\n<ul>\n<li><p>If somebody asks a question <a href=\"https://academia.meta.stackexchange.com/q/3657/7734\">shopping</a> for a thing, it is fine to edit it to ask about <em>how</em> to find the thing (if the resulting question is sufficiently focused, no duplicate, etc.). Answers to this question still help the asker. The underlying intent (“I want help finding a thing.”) is preserved.</p></li>\n<li><p>If the asker describes a situation, but fails to ask an actual question about it, it is acceptable to make an educated guess about what the asker wants to know and edit it in.</p></li>\n<li><p>Changing the situation of a question on workplace etiquette in industry to an analogous one about etiquette in academia is not acceptable. Answers to the latter cannot be expected to help the asker and can be even misleading since academia is different from industry. (Instead flag such questions for migration to <a href=\"https://workplace.stackexchange.com/\">The Workplace</a>, if they are otherwise fine.)</p></li>\n<li><p>It is not acceptable to “build a <a href=\"https://meta.stackexchange.com/q/14470/255554\">boat</a>” from a question, i.e., to add “in academia” (or equivalent), if we have reason to believe that the asker is not in academia.</p></li>\n</ul>\n" }, { "answer_id": 4495, "author": "Buffy", "author_id": 75368, "author_profile": "https://academia.meta.stackexchange.com/users/75368", "pm_score": 0, "selected": false, "text": "<p>Let me comment on my actions in editing a question that started this conversation. The OP of the question asked about facilitating the translation of a popular, but non-academic, book. The question was closed - rightly so. Perhaps the OP asked the question thinking that academics could probably provide answers about getting translations done. </p>\n\n<p>This is the current version of the question:<a href=\"https://academia.stackexchange.com/q/130945/75368\">I want a book to be translated into my native language?</a></p>\n\n<p>I then changed the question to one specifying the translation of an important academic book (but unnamed). My purpose was less to \"save\" the question, but to elicit answers (such as my own) which would actually help the OP with his/her question as well as those with a more on-topic issue of translation. My thought at the time was that any answer to the new question would probably also be valid as an answer to the question originally posed. </p>\n\n<p>What I did wan't exactly a generalization so as to cover academia, but a question whose answers would likely be broader than either specific question. </p>\n\n<p>But, I doubt that my edits would have been rolled back had I just done a pure generalization that covered both the OP's concern and typical academic concerns. Or at least, not rolled back as readily. I might, I suppose, just have removed the specific series title mentioned by the OP and left it at \"book\" or \"book that I consider important\". Would the same objection be made, I wonder? </p>\n\n<p>So, in some ways, it may be more important to ask \"What is useful here?\" rather than to be too \"picky\" about details. If my question was useful, both to the OP and to others, then it might have been ok to leave it. Or at least have a conversation in the Ivory Tower first. </p>\n\n<p>But note that I'm not arguing with the decisions made, but am interested in guidance for the future. </p>\n" } ]

[ "https://academia.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/4493", "https://academia.meta.stackexchange.com", "https://academia.meta.stackexchange.com/users/7734/" ]

[ { "answer_id": 4502, "author": "Maarten Buis", "author_id": 14471, "author_profile": "https://academia.meta.stackexchange.com/users/14471", "pm_score": 2, "selected": false, "text": "<p>For a survey to be meaningful you need to make sure it is somehow representative for some well defined population. The answers such a question on this forum will illicit are very unlikely to get anywhere close to that. In that case it just becomes a shopping question and should be closed. This forum can answer many but not all interesting questions.</p>\n\n<hr>\n\n<p>The way I understand the question is that there is a tradition on this forum to close shopping questions and Franck is of the opinion that this definition is too broad and results in closing potentially useful questions. In particular questions asking for survey of institution’s regulations. The idea is that each individual answer is too specific to be useful outside that particular institution, but all answers together give an overview of the kind of regulations available. So the key characteristic that differentiates such a survey question from a regular question, is that it is the entire collection of answers that gives useful information rather than the individual answers. </p>\n\n<p>As stated in my answer above I don't think that this is a good idea: we know quite a bit about surveys, and this is really not the way to do it.</p>\n" }, { "answer_id": 4504, "author": "StrongBad", "author_id": 929, "author_profile": "https://academia.meta.stackexchange.com/users/929", "pm_score": 3, "selected": false, "text": "<p>I think you are asking about questions that are requesting a pointer to, and brief summary of, a somewhat difficult to find systematic evaluation of an aspect of <em>academic life</em>. As we all know, finding literature on a new topic can be hard, and very time consuming, if you don't know the right terms to search for. A good answer to such a question would either (1) provide a link to the study, a brief summary of the key findings, and maybe some of the key terms to help future searches in the area or (2) explain the key issues in the area, the relevant databases, and that a search of the those databases did not turn up anything. The answer might then go on to explain why such a study is difficult. A bad answer would say what an individuals experience is with a particular university, or small group of universities.</p>\n\n<p>I think these types of questions are nominally within our scope. The problem is the questions tend to attract lots of bad answers and rarely provide good answers. They then often get swamped with attention and makes it hard for the community to manage them. I think a narrowly defined and clear question asking for leads regarding literature relating to <em>academic life</em> are on topic and should be left open. Broader and less clear questions should be actively closed and the OP encouraged to refine the question. Questions that are surveying the community about their experiences should be nuked.</p>\n" } ]

[ "https://academia.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/4501", "https://academia.meta.stackexchange.com", "https://academia.meta.stackexchange.com/users/452/" ]

[ { "answer_id": 4505, "author": "StrongBad", "author_id": 929, "author_profile": "https://academia.meta.stackexchange.com/users/929", "pm_score": 3, "selected": false, "text": "<p>Deleting a question after you get an answer is only possible if the answer does not have any upvotes. If you delete your question after getting an answer before it gets an upvote, that is a sure way to get a warning for a moderator and an eventual suspension.</p>\n\n<p>The SE system allows you to create unregistered guest accounts and even multiple registered accounts (although you need to create new email addresses) for exactly this reason. All we ask is that if you create multiple accounts (registered or unregistered), is that the accounts never interact (i.e., no voting for yourself or leaving comments from one user on another users posts). The reputation you gain on these accounts will not be linked.</p>\n" }, { "answer_id": 4506, "author": "Wrzlprmft", "author_id": 7734, "author_profile": "https://academia.meta.stackexchange.com/users/7734", "pm_score": 3, "selected": false, "text": "<blockquote>\n <p>However, some would-be-answerers rather aggressively insist that I disclose my field in order to answer my question. I'm wondering if there is some way around this-- i.e., how to guard my privacy while still offering enough information for an apt answer?</p>\n</blockquote>\n\n<p>I haven’t checked the comments on your questions specifically, but my general impression of these comments (and my intention when I make them) is to allow us to give you a more helpful or to-the-point answer.\nIf you accept that we cannot do this or sometimes your question is too broad, I see no problem with you omitting this information.\nTo pre-emptively avoid these comments, I suggest that you explicitly state an your question that you will not name your field to avoid identifiability.\nNote that if you can give a broad hint to your field (STEM, humanities, etc.; experimental, theoretical), this can still be helpful at times.</p>\n\n<blockquote>\n <p>I've already hidden other SE groups that I'm a member of</p>\n</blockquote>\n\n<p>Note that this (sadly) does not make you completely unidentifiable.\nEverybody who knows where to look can get to your network profile from a hidden account. (But not vice versa.)</p>\n\n<blockquote>\n <p>@ tags to old usernames remain</p>\n</blockquote>\n\n<p>As <a href=\"https://academia.meta.stackexchange.com/a/4505/7734\">StrongBad already noted</a>, if you want to avoid detection via this, it is legitimate to use a sockpuppet to ask questions.</p>\n\n<p>On this and more legitimate tricks to avoid detection, see <a href=\"https://academia.meta.stackexchange.com/q/3944/7734\">this Q&amp;A</a>.</p>\n" }, { "answer_id": 4507, "author": "Federico Poloni", "author_id": 958, "author_profile": "https://academia.meta.stackexchange.com/users/958", "pm_score": 2, "selected": false, "text": "<p>SE offers a feature to <a href=\"https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/96732/how-do-i-remove-my-name-from-a-post-in-accordance-with-cc-by-sa-3-0\">disassociate your account from a question</a> upon request, as mandated by the CC-BY-SA license it uses. However, </p>\n\n<ul>\n<li><p>the procedure is rather cumbersome (you need to contact support, and I suppose your query is handled by a human);</p></li>\n<li><p>it is not guaranteed that all references to your username will disappear: it takes a while for the username to be deleted from the database, and then it will still be present in older data dumps, in the internet archive, etc. Your question has already been linked to your username and to all your other questions on the SE network, and, as the old meme says, <a href=\"https://i.imgur.com/3TObCey.png\" rel=\"nofollow noreferrer\">one does not simply delete something from the internet</a>. </p></li>\n</ul>\n\n<p>Hence it is best to post sensitive questions anonymously from the start, if it happens again in future. I agree that the user interface does not make it easy: a \"post anonymously\" button in the Ask Question page would help.</p>\n\n<p>Now that you have already posted the question, a crude workaround to prevent further information leaks from your future activity on the SE network is: make a new Stack Exchange account and use that in future. I know it feels bad to lose all your reputation, but in the end it's just imaginary internet points.</p>\n" }, { "answer_id": 4508, "author": "Anonymous Physicist", "author_id": 13240, "author_profile": "https://academia.meta.stackexchange.com/users/13240", "pm_score": -1, "selected": false, "text": "<p>Do not post questions that put you at risk.</p>\n" }, { "answer_id": 4509, "author": "Scientist", "author_id": 66782, "author_profile": "https://academia.meta.stackexchange.com/users/66782", "pm_score": 0, "selected": false, "text": "<p>The best precaution one can take is to dissociate SE Academia account from outer hints that would give away his identity. Also avoiding disclosing too much of specific details is the safe path.\nNonetheless, you know what? My bet is that in most cases, the fear of being identified is almost complete paranoia. This website has apparently few users per institution, and the most active ones do not seem eager to investigate into other user's private details. Stalking isn't as trivial as it may seem to the common user, and plus, most academics are still unaware of the existence and power of such Q&amp;A websites.</p>\n\n<p>Unless you're really bashing a hot shot in some online-savvy department in the US or UK, I think you have little to fear. In case you work in a non-English speaking institution, you ought to just chill.</p>\n" } ]

[ "https://academia.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/4503", "https://academia.meta.stackexchange.com", "https://academia.meta.stackexchange.com/users/-1/" ]

[ { "answer_id": 4511, "author": "StrongBad", "author_id": 929, "author_profile": "https://academia.meta.stackexchange.com/users/929", "pm_score": 3, "selected": false, "text": "<p>I did most of the major editing on that answer. I was by no means trying to minimize how bad the described behavior was. My edit was a pretty coarse hack to remove what I felt was sexist content. At that level, I just didn't feel the description of the further misconduct was relevant. In hindsight, I totally agree that the additional misconduct being sexual misconduct and it being more severe is relevant. That additional behavior sounds like it was in fact sexual assault, so I would be happy, in principle, to see <em>other misconduct</em> changed to <em>sexual assault</em>.</p>\n\n<p>Looking back now, I also think the edit to remove the later promotion was also too coarse, and probably should be left, to a degree. Something like <em>the behavior didn't seem to hurt his career as he eventually became dean, but in the end, ...</em></p>\n\n<p>While in principle I don't see a problem with the edits, the user is currently suspended (you can see this on their profile page). This means they cannot participate here or contribute to the revision. I personally would hold off on making the edits until their suspension is over.</p>\n" }, { "answer_id": 4515, "author": "B. Goddard", "author_id": 85280, "author_profile": "https://academia.meta.stackexchange.com/users/85280", "pm_score": 1, "selected": true, "text": "<p>There was no \"sexist content.\" The whole point was that the (certified feminist) female professor accused the male professor of being insensitive to female needs. She said a sentence to me something like, \"He has no idea what a woman's relationship is to food.\" I think her assertion was that women are more emotionally attached to food. She was furious at the male prof for thinking that that women were just little men, rather than that women have a different body chemistry and a different metabolism. </p>\n\n<p>As I said in the original post, \"Don't ask me to sort this out.\" Sometimes feminism means treat women as if they were men. Other times, you have to be aware of the differences. Her accusations against the male prof was that his attitude was, \"If they want to act like men, then I'll treat them like men.\" </p>\n\n<p>Both the female prof and I protested to the provost. The forced dieting quietly went away. </p>\n\n<p>I was not privy to the exact nature of his later sexual misconduct. I understand it was something like this: The secretary was making copies and he cuddled up to her from behind saying something like \"need me to show you how to work that thing?\" He is and was a pig of a man and she immediately filed a grievance. As I said, the pig was a buddy of the provost (how else do you get to be dean only 3 years after your Ph.D?) who tried to smooth things out, but she remained adamant and left the school no choice but to \"let\" the pig resign. </p>\n\n<p>I'm surprised that, given that the first incident was considered sexual harassment, the subsequent sexual harassment was considered irrelevant. In the first incident, the harassment is subtle, but my friend ferreted it out. To prove that she was right, I included the second incident. </p>\n\n<p>In the original question, then, I'm suggesting that the OP's situation be looked at through the lens of harassment. Thin, athletic students only have to run for 50 minutes, while the fat kids have to run 3 hours. With the butchering of my post, NONE of this survived. </p>\n\n<p>Only on THIS stack exchange is there this bigotted culture of bullying people who don't talk just like you do. Most negative comments are \"you should have worded that like this...\" Almost never is the suggested change an improvement. Rather, it is usually some dumbing down of the language. Some people are not that bright, but they think they are, and whenever they get confused, they, very wrongly, think that 90% of people would be equally confused. But they are not. </p>\n\n<p>The bottom line is, people who can wrap their incivility in a right sort of cattiness are allowed to be as uncivil as they please. Whereas the neurologically different people, who can be quite bright, but don't have the social skills to word every sentence in the ultra PC way, or see the need to connect every single dot for some non-so-bright bigot who thinks he should run things. </p>\n\n<p>That the moderators refuse to even discuss this with me should be proof enough that they are afraid to have their bigotry exposed.</p>\n\n<p>But nothing will change the fact that they let their own kind be as abusive as they will, while then using the reactions to that abuse as an excuse to suppress and bully their target group. \"You're not autistic, you're an asshole.\" </p>\n\n<p>We will find our voice soon and the mods here will be exposed for their callous indifference to and often participation in the bullying of the spectrum. If they had the tiniest bit of tolerance or conscience, none of this nonsense would have happened.</p>\n" } ]

[ "https://academia.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/4510", "https://academia.meta.stackexchange.com", "https://academia.meta.stackexchange.com/users/111388/" ]

[ { "answer_id": 4514, "author": "StrongBad", "author_id": 929, "author_profile": "https://academia.meta.stackexchange.com/users/929", "pm_score": 3, "selected": false, "text": "<p>I am not sure you can, but your question is pretty unclear so maybe you can. It seems you are looking for recommendations about undergraduate programs to prepare your daughter for something. This is likely off topic. You say you think she wants to be a professor, but I am not sure how that relates to the rest of the question. Even if she wants to be a professor, a question about the best career path for becoming a professor is going to lead to opinion based answers. You should take a look at our <a href=\"https://academia.stackexchange.com/help\">help center</a> and familiarize yourself with our community.</p>\n" }, { "answer_id": 4533, "author": "Matt", "author_id": 15762, "author_profile": "https://academia.meta.stackexchange.com/users/15762", "pm_score": 1, "selected": true, "text": "<p>There's a legit question about whether/which academic jobs facilitate advocating for social/political change. </p>\n\n<p>For example, advocacy is a terrible fit for most science departments: even departments that don't mind the attention will be vastly more interested in the professor's ability to run a successful research program (i.e., land grants and publish papers). Political science might be an option, but I think most departments focus on how policy decisions are made rather than the policies themselves. I know even less about philosophy/bioethics, but those areas do seem more interested in staking out a position. I think this could probably be fleshed out into a more complete answer with examples, though I don't know enough to do it myself. </p>\n" } ]

[ "https://academia.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/4513", "https://academia.meta.stackexchange.com", "https://academia.meta.stackexchange.com/users/-1/" ]

[ { "answer_id": 4524, "author": "StrongBad", "author_id": 929, "author_profile": "https://academia.meta.stackexchange.com/users/929", "pm_score": 4, "selected": false, "text": "<p>I am still amazed that the community works and attracts high quality questions and answers and knowledge people. Further high quality answers tend to get up voted and low quality answers tend to get down voted, or less heavily up voted. Only rarely does something I think is wrong gain lots of support and it is usually a result of the HNQ list.</p>\n\n<p>I am not sure the issue is specific to Academia.SE. There are lots of site, including so called \"hard\" sites where people could vote based on what they want to be true. It just doesn't seem to happen.</p>\n" }, { "answer_id": 4525, "author": "user48953094", "author_id": 41661, "author_profile": "https://academia.meta.stackexchange.com/users/41661", "pm_score": -1, "selected": true, "text": "<p>I see the stackexchange system rather like a very democratic and efficient spam/filter system. The best answer might not appear always at the top, but in top 3. So I don't see how a premise is not fulfilled. It's a better filter/ranking system than google page rank at least ;-)</p>\n\n<p>academia stackexchange is as democratic as all other stackexchange sites technically, but I would judge voting here as rather aristrocratic, on many non-popular important and academia-specific questions mostly knowledgable users are voting like on expert sites like mathoverflow.se. Unknowledgable don't even understand the question. A downvote is pointless. A downvote doesn't exist also in real academia, there are papers which get cited, there are no papers getting down-cited. Would be a pointless feature. Positive feedback is enough. The downvote here rather points moderators to remove obvious spam/off-topic. Important content you find here and in literature via search algorithms and upvotes/citations/likes/links to a website etc...</p>\n\n<p>Last but not least, if a stackexchange site attracts experts depends on a lot of things. Mathoverflow.se works, theoreticalphysics.se did not and was closed:</p>\n\n<p><a href=\"https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/130361/why-did-theoretical-physics-fail\">Why did Theoretical Physics fail?</a></p>\n\n<p>But here the premise was wrong that high-level physics can work with a stackexchange format. For phyiscs in comparison to math/CS a forum format is much better. The physics.se site rather pushs professional physicists away due to the mass of laymen, popular and homework questions. This risk is not so high on academia.se as most questioner are PhD students, also for my taste the amount of undergraduate low level questions here in comparison to beta launching of this site is annoying, e.g. \"How do I know if I have passion?\" and alike questions.</p>\n\n<p>Don't think in premises, it's complex technology and hundreds of users here, sometimes it works for a distinct site topic, sometimes not. No reason to become philsophic or too academic :-) I'm much more surprised a site like politics.se or skeptics.se is working with the stackexchange format than academia.se. Most answers here are rather simple to vote in order of correctness/importance...</p>\n" }, { "answer_id": 4526, "author": "Fomite", "author_id": 118, "author_profile": "https://academia.meta.stackexchange.com/users/118", "pm_score": 4, "selected": false, "text": "<p>A few considerations:</p>\n\n<ol>\n<li>Not every question here is only answerable by faculty. What you'd propose would actually have to have a level <em>and</em> field specific filter. Can I credibly talk about the experience of say, a graduate student in linguistics? Nope. How many years do I get before my postdoc certification expires?</li>\n<li>I think people are not particularly shy about expressing their credentials if they think it matters for the question at hand.</li>\n<li>Beyond whether or not StackExchange would even do it, tying an account's capabilities to a credential inherently creates identifying information for the account. There are those who would not participate in the system if that was a requirement.</li>\n</ol>\n\n<p>Overall, I think it's pretty rare for me to find a question where an obviously wrong, \"How I imagine academia to be\" lingers as a top voted answer for very long.</p>\n" }, { "answer_id": 4527, "author": "Anonymous Physicist", "author_id": 13240, "author_profile": "https://academia.meta.stackexchange.com/users/13240", "pm_score": 3, "selected": false, "text": "<p>No. Decision making in academia is not based on credentials. It is based on peer review. Peer review is the best system we have for curriculum development and research. So it seems reasonable to assume it is the best system we have for stack exchange is also peer review.</p>\n\n<p>I hope for a better system some day, as peer review has many flaws. But credentialism does not work. For example, the well-known error by Einstein that was rejected following peer review.\n<a href=\"https://physicstoday.scitation.org/doi/10.1063/1.2117822?journalCode=pto\" rel=\"nofollow noreferrer\">https://physicstoday.scitation.org/doi/10.1063/1.2117822?journalCode=pto</a></p>\n" } ]

[ "https://academia.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/4523", "https://academia.meta.stackexchange.com", "https://academia.meta.stackexchange.com/users/58270/" ]

[ { "answer_id": 4529, "author": "Wrzlprmft", "author_id": 7734, "author_profile": "https://academia.meta.stackexchange.com/users/7734", "pm_score": 2, "selected": false, "text": "<p>The answer to your question mainly depends on four things:</p>\n\n<ul>\n<li>What exact contract did you sign with your former employer?</li>\n<li>What is the pertaining legislation?</li>\n<li>To what extent does the paper build on things you did, learnt, or similar while working for that employer?</li>\n<li>How much do you value your relationship to your previous employer?</li>\n</ul>\n\n<p>I therefore do not think your question would be well received for two reasons:</p>\n\n<ul>\n<li>In its current form, we can only answer with: “It depends (on the above points).” <a href=\"https://academia.meta.stackexchange.com/q/3406/7734\">We tend to close such questions.</a></li>\n<li>It is not really about academia, but about intellectual property in an industry setting. Your employer probably does not care whether you publish in an academic journal, on your blog, or similar.</li>\n</ul>\n\n<p>The only exception from this is if you think for some reason that your employer is challenging your right of publication on basis on the rules for academic authorship only, but that would be rather unusual.</p>\n\n<p>As for obtaining an answer to your question, I strongly suggest that you answer the four initial questions. Obviously most of these can only be answered by yourself. If you need help to understand the relevant laws in general, your question may be suited for <a href=\"https://workplace.stackexchange.com/\">The Workplace</a> or <a href=\"https://law.stackexchange.com/\">Law SE</a>. Note that on neither site (and the rest of the Internet) you will find free individual legal advice.</p>\n" }, { "answer_id": 4530, "author": "eykanal", "author_id": 73, "author_profile": "https://academia.meta.stackexchange.com/users/73", "pm_score": 2, "selected": false, "text": "<p>I agree with the bulk of wrzlprmft's assessment, but I slightly disagree with the conclusion. I think this <em>would</em> be an interesting question.</p>\n\n<p>The first point is something you should include to the best of your ability in the question itself (\"my contract limits my ability to...\") and will probably address more in comments as users probe. The second one is partly what you're looking to find out. The third one, while specific to your situation, is only moderately relevant, as I'm not really sure that it matters that much. Assuming we're talking about work done at the company in question (and not, for example, a <a href=\"https://fortune.com/2018/02/05/waymo-v-uber-what-you-need-to-know-about-the-high-stakes-self-driving-tech-trial/\" rel=\"nofollow noreferrer\">WayMo/Uber situation</a>), the only work that matters is what you did. The last question about relationship is always a factor but something you'll always have to assess for yourself.</p>\n\n<p>That all said, there are a number of visitors to this site who are academics working in industry, particularly in computer sciences. From our <a href=\"https://academia.stackexchange.com/help/on-topic\">FAQ</a>:</p>\n\n<blockquote>\n <p>This site is for academics of all levels – from students to senior researchers – as well as anyone in or interested in research-related or research-adjacent fields.</p>\n \n <p>If you have a question about...</p>\n \n <ul>\n <li>inner workings of research departments,</li>\n <li>academic writing and publishing,\n ...then you're in the right place!</li>\n </ul>\n</blockquote>\n\n<p>In that light, this definitely seems on-topic to me.</p>\n" } ]

[ "https://academia.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/4528", "https://academia.meta.stackexchange.com", "https://academia.meta.stackexchange.com/users/21968/" ]

[ { "answer_id": 4535, "author": "eykanal", "author_id": 73, "author_profile": "https://academia.meta.stackexchange.com/users/73", "pm_score": 4, "selected": false, "text": "<p>Nice question! Here's my two cents, with the caveat that this is only me; different mods moderate differently.</p>\n<ul>\n<li><p><strong>Time-consuming</strong> – This is a fairly laid-back site to moderate. Sure, flags pop up and comments need to be migrated and occasional bad actors pop up, but the community is pretty mature by now. The number of bad actors is quite low. The most time consuming part is just dealing with mundane flags. Pretty straightforward.</p>\n</li>\n<li><p><strong>Challenging</strong> – Moderators need to be willing to make people unhappy. In almost all cases, the person you are making unhappy is making a lot of <em>other</em> people unhappy, hence the moderation. That said, the fact that your job involves unilaterally silencing/removing/disciplining bad actors does take a certain personality. Don't sign up for this job expecting everyone to like you.</p>\n<p>On a similar note, you're going to make mistakes, and they'll be pretty public (<em><a href=\"https://academia.meta.stackexchange.com/a/810/73\">cough</a></em>), and you'll have to own up to it, or at least bear your frustration in silence. That can be challenging.</p>\n</li>\n<li><p><strong>Specifics to Academia.SE</strong> – There are a few of these, and my expectation is that if you're considering running for moderator, you should be familiar with general site mores. We tend to leave chat discussions running for longer than some other sites. We tend to treat off-topic questions somewhat strictly. In my opinion, we are a good deal slower/less inclined to close questions as duplicates than I think we should be. There are probably a bunch of other nuances, hopefully the regulars can help with this list.</p>\n</li>\n</ul>\n<hr />\n<p><em>Edit to add:</em> @Buffy, touché. It's worth mentioning that this comment thing is a completely typical moderator brouhaha. You do something that (you think) is what the community wants based on history/old meta posts/community mores/&quot;its what we always do&quot;/whatever, and then 20+ people publicly disagree with/pile on you, and any reply you make will probably be used against you in some way. If you're the kind of person who would get really bothered by this, you may not want to be a moderator.</p>\n<p>To be fair, this has been the most kind public disagreement I've seen in a while, so props to the whole community for not being meanieheads on this one.</p>\n" }, { "answer_id": 4536, "author": "StrongBad", "author_id": 929, "author_profile": "https://academia.meta.stackexchange.com/users/929", "pm_score": 3, "selected": false, "text": "<p>I am happy to add more if people ask specifics ...</p>\n\n<p>To give you an idea of workload, as a team we handle about 150 flags and delete 500 posts a month. Most of the flags are related to obsolete comments and easy to handle and the vast majority of the deleted posts are comments, many of which are moved to chat. We contact users privately about rule violations and suspensions a couple of times a month. </p>\n\n<p>Before becoming a mod on AC.SE, I was a moderator on a smaller beta site. This means I had knowledge about the tools and thought I understood what the job would be like. I assumed the worst part would be dealing with problematic users (the ones we have to contact by private message), but I was wrong. Our problematic users tend to either need to simply be told/reminded what the rules are or their behavior is so obviously problematic that all we have to do as moderators is go <strong><em>deleted</em></strong> (and I get to say it in my Strongbad voice). We really don't have many instances where we labor on a decision about what to do and when these cases do happen, a short discussion with the other moderators (both here and across the network) generally leads to a reasonable solution. I actually find it rewarding when my actions steer a user into becoming a valued contributor and when I can clean up obvious junk.</p>\n\n<p>The thing that I find most difficult as a moderator is dealing with long chains of comments. Deciding when they should be moved to chat and which ones to leave behind takes a lot of time and thought. No matter the decision, people get upset. These comment conversations happen frequently enough such that after being alerted by flags, we act unilaterally (we if we screw up we can always un-delete the comments). Again, in terms of scope, while we don't track how many comment threads we move to chat, with only 500 deleted posts a month, we maybe move 15-20 threads in a month as a team.</p>\n" }, { "answer_id": 4550, "author": "Wrzlprmft", "author_id": 7734, "author_profile": "https://academia.meta.stackexchange.com/users/7734", "pm_score": 3, "selected": false, "text": "<p><em>Blatantly stealing from <a href=\"https://graphicdesign.meta.stackexchange.com/a/3641/19174\">my own answer on Graphic Design SE</a>, but accounting for Academia’s peculiarities:</em></p>\n\n<p>First of all, the following are “duties” for the moderators as a team.\nAn individual moderator can always decline a specific task.\nAlso, a moderator can always take a break when they see fit.</p>\n\n<p>I would group the main moderator activities into three categories:</p>\n\n<h3>Flag handling</h3>\n\n<p>This can be all sorts of things from rudeness over migration requests to too many comments on a post. You can find some statistics on flag handling <a href=\"https://academia.meta.stackexchange.com/q/4392/7734\">here</a>, but it doesn’t tell you what kind of flags we get.</p>\n\n<p>Most importantly, the amount of time consumed by different flags varies wildly. For example, a clear case of a question posted as an answer with an existing constructive comment can be handled in five seconds. However, a too-many-comments flag usually requires you to read the question, answer, and all the comments and then make a decision which should be left where they are, completely deleted, or moved to a chatroom.</p>\n\n<p>The most prominent kind of flags in times of consumed handling time are certainly too-many-comments and individual comment flags. Since Academia by nature attracts a lot of comments, it also generates a lot of these flags.</p>\n\n<h3>Investigating and addressing problematic behaviour</h3>\n\n<p>This can be users who are frequently rude, commit vote fraud, perform consistently bad reviews, post subtle spam, vandalise their own posts, etc. Moderators have the tools to investigate this and react accordingly, which usually involves at least a moderator message and often a suspension.</p>\n\n<p>Such cases are more time-consuming than the average flag, but they happen less often. <a href=\"https://academia.meta.stackexchange.com/q/4392/7734\">In 2018, we sent 48 mod messages</a>, and this probably counts multiple messages, when there was some back and forth between the user and the moderators.\nThe challenge here is to gather the relevant information (with tools), read and assess it, decide how to react, and finally to communicate the result to the user in a constructive manner.</p>\n\n<p>I second <a href=\"https://academia.meta.stackexchange.com/a/4536/7734\">StrongBad’s answer</a> that one of the perks of Academia SE is there are very few users in the grey zone where you don’t know whether to do nothing, to warn, or to suspend.\nOn the other hand, since we deal with life-changing decisions, sensitive information, and ideologically charged topics quite frequently, things occasionally get serious.\nTypical manifestations are suicidal users, users wanting to purge all their content from the site, and users calling you a nazi because you deny them their constitutional right to be an arsehole.</p>\n\n<h3>Governance</h3>\n\n<p>Moderators can change some parts of the site’s interface and mechanics such as certain parts of the help centre, close reasons, tag synonyms, etc. In most cases, these are initiated by a community consensus. Moderators also act as an interface between the community and Stack Exchange (the company). </p>\n\n<p>In my opinion, moderators also need to incite discussions on meta and propose community rules if there is a pressing need.\nSometimes, only moderators can notice such problems since they have access to more information and see the community from a different angle.\nHowever, on Academia often the community takes the initiative here, and there are few such issues nowadays, since – at least as I see it – our policies have converged to something that works well and finds broad agreement within the community.</p>\n\n<p>These activities can consume some time, but if they do, they are fortunately not very urgent.</p>\n" } ]

[ "https://academia.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/4534", "https://academia.meta.stackexchange.com", "https://academia.meta.stackexchange.com/users/20058/" ]

[ { "answer_id": 4538, "author": "JNat", "author_id": 32458, "author_profile": "https://academia.meta.stackexchange.com/users/32458", "pm_score": 2, "selected": false, "text": "<p>Here is a set of general questions, gathered as very common questions asked every election. As mentioned in the instructions, the first two questions are guaranteed to show up in the Q&amp;A, while the others are if there aren't enough questions (or, if you like one enough, you may split it off as a separate answer for review within the community's 8). </p>\n\n<ul>\n<li>How would you deal with a user who produced a steady stream of valuable answers, but tends to generate a large number of arguments/flags from comments? </li>\n<li>How would you handle a situation where another mod closed/deleted/etc a question that you feel shouldn't have been?</li>\n</ul>\n\n<hr>\n\n<ul>\n<li>In your opinion, what do moderators do? </li>\n<li>A diamond will be attached to everything you say and have said in the past, including questions, answers and comments. Everything you will do will be seen under a different light. How do you feel about that? </li>\n<li>In what way do you feel that being a moderator will make you more effective as opposed to simply reaching 10k or 20k rep? </li>\n</ul>\n" }, { "answer_id": 4539, "author": "StrongBad", "author_id": 929, "author_profile": "https://academia.meta.stackexchange.com/users/929", "pm_score": 3, "selected": false, "text": "<p>What question or answer of yours on meta best exemplifies your philosophy on moderation? Why do you feel this is the best example?</p>\n" }, { "answer_id": 4540, "author": "StrongBad", "author_id": 929, "author_profile": "https://academia.meta.stackexchange.com/users/929", "pm_score": 3, "selected": false, "text": "<p>As a moderator, I find that comments are a tricky thing to deal with. Under what circumstances will you delete comments?</p>\n\n<p>Note that there are lots of flags that comments are obsolete/no longer needed.</p>\n" }, { "answer_id": 4541, "author": "StrongBad", "author_id": 929, "author_profile": "https://academia.meta.stackexchange.com/users/929", "pm_score": 3, "selected": false, "text": "<p>What is your time zone? What is the time period you are available for moderating our site everyday? Please specify the answer in UTC format.</p>\n\n<p>[Blatantly stolen from <a href=\"https://academia.meta.stackexchange.com/a/947/929\">scaaahu</a> in a past election.]</p>\n" }, { "answer_id": 4544, "author": "Massimo Ortolano", "author_id": 20058, "author_profile": "https://academia.meta.stackexchange.com/users/20058", "pm_score": 2, "selected": false, "text": "<p>Do you have any previous experience as a moderator, either on Stack Exchange or on other kind of communities (e.g. newsgroups, forums etc.)? </p>\n" }, { "answer_id": 4545, "author": "Massimo Ortolano", "author_id": 20058, "author_profile": "https://academia.meta.stackexchange.com/users/20058", "pm_score": 3, "selected": false, "text": "<p>What is your stance about the current scope of Academia Stack Exchange and how this is enforced? </p>\n\n<ul>\n<li>Should we close any question that does not <em>strictly</em> comply with the current scope?</li>\n<li>Should we be lenient and keep open questions that can potentially generate good answers even if borderline off-topic?</li>\n<li>Should we narrow or broaden the scope?</li>\n</ul>\n" }, { "answer_id": 4546, "author": "Massimo Ortolano", "author_id": 20058, "author_profile": "https://academia.meta.stackexchange.com/users/20058", "pm_score": 2, "selected": false, "text": "<p><em>Extracted from <a href=\"https://academia.meta.stackexchange.com/a/4538/20058\">this answer with multiple questions to allow individual voting</a></em></p>\n\n<p>In what way do you feel that being a moderator will make you more effective as opposed to simply reaching 10k or 20k rep?</p>\n" }, { "answer_id": 4547, "author": "Massimo Ortolano", "author_id": 20058, "author_profile": "https://academia.meta.stackexchange.com/users/20058", "pm_score": -1, "selected": false, "text": "<p><em>Extracted from <a href=\"https://academia.meta.stackexchange.com/a/4538/20058\">this answer with multiple questions to allow individual voting</a></em></p>\n\n<p>A diamond will be attached to everything you say and have said in the past, including questions, answers and comments. Everything you will do will be seen under a different light. How do you feel about that?</p>\n" }, { "answer_id": 4548, "author": "Bryan Krause", "author_id": 63475, "author_profile": "https://academia.meta.stackexchange.com/users/63475", "pm_score": 2, "selected": false, "text": "<p>Academia.SE frequently has questions rise high on the Hot Network Questions (HNQ); often these questions are on more controversial topics than the mean question here and attract visitors from across the SE community who otherwise don't participate here.</p>\n\n<p><em>What do you think the moderators' role should be with respect to HNQ list questions? How do you think presence on the HNQ list should affect moderation decisions?</em></p>\n" }, { "answer_id": 4559, "author": "Poidah", "author_id": 82652, "author_profile": "https://academia.meta.stackexchange.com/users/82652", "pm_score": 2, "selected": false, "text": "<p>New users and posters tend to struggle more than experienced users. What would you do as a moderator to improve the onboarding and also improve the welcome felt by new posters to Academic SE? </p>\n" } ]

[ "https://academia.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/4537", "https://academia.meta.stackexchange.com", "https://academia.meta.stackexchange.com/users/32458/" ]

[ { "answer_id": 4551, "author": "StrongBad", "author_id": 929, "author_profile": "https://academia.meta.stackexchange.com/users/929", "pm_score": 3, "selected": false, "text": "<p>It is not really the people but rather the tools we have and the expectations of new users. The Stack Exchange system is unabashedly a question and answer site and not a discussion forum. The system works great when a user asks a question that fits the format well. When a question is a poor fit, it gets put on hold. The hope is that while it is on hold the person who asked and other community members will work together to make the question a better fit. The problem is that we don't have particularly effective tools to help a new user understand what makes a good question different from a bad question.</p>\n\n<p>From the new users perspective, you have a question and the experienced users are shutting you down. That is obviously going to feel hostile. From the experienced users perspective, if the question is not a good fit, it needs to be shut down to keep the signal-to-noise ratio high. Sometimes they just shut it down, but often, they will try and point you in the correct direction. That direction is often read the help and a bunch of questions to try and learn what makes a good question. As hard as it might be to see, we are not trying to be hostile. We have a good idea about what works and what does not work.</p>\n\n<p>In regards to your questions, I see three problems. The first is that the answers need to apply to lots of people and not just you, second we like questions to have \"right answers\", and third the right answer for your questions depends entirely on you.</p>\n\n<p>For example, what classes should you take to prepare for a PhD in Political Science depends on obviously what classes a particular department requires, but more importantly on what classes you have taken, what you enjoy and what your specific goals are. In order to give you a good answer, we really need to know you. That of course means the answer is not useful to anyone else. If instead we give you a generic answer, then we are not really accomplishing our goal of providing high quality answers. The odds are the answer would just be excepts about admission requirements and required courses pulled from a few Political Science departments websites. Again, this does not help you or anyone. So instead of wasting our time and your time, we put the question on hold.</p>\n\n<p>We are a site about academia in general but not the specifics of individual fields. There are specialist sites on the SE network where you can sometimes get helpful information (e.g., Biology and Physics), but there isn't one for Political Science. This means that the SE system doesn't really have a place for questions about Political Science. If you can frame your questions to be more field agnostic, while still asking what you want, it might help.</p>\n" }, { "answer_id": 4552, "author": "eykanal", "author_id": 73, "author_profile": "https://academia.meta.stackexchange.com/users/73", "pm_score": 4, "selected": false, "text": "<p>Having read through your questions, it appears that you are misunderstanding the purpose of this website. Academia.SE is a place for academics to discuss academia, in general. There are many concepts that are common to all academics—dealing with grants, working with administrators, getting stuck in research, teaching, etc.—that newcomers (or even veterans) have difficulty dealing with. This site acts as a forum for discussion on those types of topics.</p>\n\n<p>However, no one on this site really knows each other. As such, any time people are asking questions very specific to them—what types of courses should I take based on my specific goals, how can I improve on my specific resume, how can I personally be more competitive for X—we can never help them sufficiently. As such, those questions are routinely closed as \"too specific\".</p>\n\n<p>I fully appreciate that there is nuance here, as the distinction between \"<a href=\"https://academia.stackexchange.com/q/47373/73\">how do I get a good letter</a>\" and \"how can I improve my application\" are sometimes subtle. This is often frustrating for newcomers... <a href=\"https://academia.stackexchange.com/search?q=improve+my+application+closed%3Atrue\">you're not the first to have a closed question of this type</a>. That said, since we really can't answer these questions, for the health of the overall community we close them.</p>\n\n<p>I'm sorry your experience has been so negative, but hopefully this will help you understand how this site <em>can</em> be useful in your academic life.</p>\n" }, { "answer_id": 4553, "author": "ff524", "author_id": 11365, "author_profile": "https://academia.meta.stackexchange.com/users/11365", "pm_score": 3, "selected": false, "text": "<p>The other answers try to explain why your posts were closed as \"off topic\", but I want to address other parts of your question:</p>\n\n<blockquote>\n <p>I have had one user on that site, solar mike or something, following me around and flagging everything as off topic. </p>\n</blockquote>\n\n<p>I understand that it can feel like you're being targeted when the same name appears over and over on the list of those who voted to close your post. But if there's a user who votes on many posts, you'll see their name a lot - not because you're being followed, just because they're a frequent voter</p>\n\n<blockquote>\n <p>I have also asked several times that if it's formatted poorly or too general, that I would appreciate being pointed to a more appropriate forum.</p>\n</blockquote>\n\n<p>Users of this site may not <em>know</em> a more appropriate forum to direct you to. They're frequent users of Academia Stack Exchange, they don't necessarily know what's in scope and out of scope on sites that are <em>not</em> Academia Stack Exchange. It's kind of like if the item you wanted was out of stock at a store, and you asked a store employee, \"Excuse me, but if you can't sell me this item, can you at least tell me what other store nearby has it in stock?\"</p>\n" }, { "answer_id": 4554, "author": "Anonymous Physicist", "author_id": 13240, "author_profile": "https://academia.meta.stackexchange.com/users/13240", "pm_score": 2, "selected": false, "text": "<p>In my experience, the issue is that new users have not read, understood, and followed the information on this page:</p>\n\n<p><a href=\"https://academia.stackexchange.com/help/on-topic\">https://academia.stackexchange.com/help/on-topic</a></p>\n\n<p>Flagging your question is not actually hostile. It's just following the local customs. </p>\n\n<p>As for Solar Mike following you around, I'm sure he reads every question posted here and flags all the ones that should be flagged.</p>\n\n<p>Finally, if you don't enjoy the content of this site, go elsewhere. This thing is basically a computer game, it's not really important. Personally, I do not even bother playing to win.</p>\n" }, { "answer_id": 4560, "author": "Wrzlprmft", "author_id": 7734, "author_profile": "https://academia.meta.stackexchange.com/users/7734", "pm_score": 2, "selected": false, "text": "<p><em>First, I am aware that I am the fourth moderator to answer your question. This probably happens because only we can easily see all your deleted posts. It is not our intention to pile up on you or similar. I am also aware that some of my points may be a bit redundant to the existing answers, but I want to keep the whole story in one place.</em></p>\n\n<p>We close questions for the following reasons (amongst others that are not relevant to your case):</p>\n\n<ul>\n<li><p>You ask multiple, distinct questions at once. This can usually be solved by reducing your post to one question. While other platforms tend to accept or even encourage questions being asked this way, I fail to see how this is an advantage.</p></li>\n<li><p>It is unclear what you are asking. In this case you can solve this by clarifying your question. There is no point in pointing you to other sites here, because we would first have to understand your issue and if we don’t, there is no reason to expect that others will.</p></li>\n<li><p>You ask for the recommendation, comparison, or evaluation of individual courses. We call this a <a href=\"https://academia.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/3657\">shopping question</a>, and the linked FAQ explains why we do not like them. You may find other platforms that accept these questions, but beware that the answers may be wrong since they are usually only based on the experience of a single person choosing a single path in life (which is one of the reasons why we disallow such questions).</p></li>\n<li><p><a href=\"https://academia.meta.stackexchange.com/q/3406/7734\">Questions that depend on your indvidual history and preferences</a>. Similar to shopping questions, you may find somebody who will give you an answer, but beware that giving you a useful answer requires somebody to familiarise themselves intensively with your specifics – which takes more time than most people are willing to spend for a stranger on the Internet. At the very least, this requires an intensive back and forth with you, which a question-and-answer platform is not suited for. For the career questions you have, the best person to ask is probably a professor at your alma mater, because they are somewhat familiar with your target field, already know your undergraduate programme, and know at least know you a bit.</p></li>\n<li><p>Duplicates of canonical questions. We use canonical questions to cover up some general information about basic topics that come up a lot and where we got tired of providing the same answer again and again with little variation. Sometimes it can happen that we close as a duplicate of a canonical question, because we cannot figure out from your question whether you know the basics. If you completely understood the canonical question, use it as a starting point for your question, in particular by showing us that it did not solve your problem.</p></li>\n</ul>\n\n<p>One of the points I am trying to make here is that while we may be able to point you to another platform which accepts your question indiscriminately, what you want may not be what you need. From another point of view, if we thought that asking these questions anywhere on the Internet would be a good idea, we would probably not have closed them in the first place.</p>\n\n<p>Another problem is that you appear to be treating question closure like whack-a-mole (with you being the mole): Once your question is closed or somebody comments that it should be closed in its current form, you delete it – instead of trying to edit the question to address the problems mentioned in the problems. You then post a question that often has the same problems, but is different in other respects, introducing new problems.</p>\n\n<p>For example, <a href=\"https://academia.stackexchange.com/q/131577/7734\">your very first question</a> (“How can I get some idea of how qualified I am to do a PhD in International Relations”) can be turned into a good one if you remove the surplus questions and streamline the convoluted details a bit.\nHowever, it never came to this since you deleted the question after a comment that guided you to get to know the site and improve your question and that your question <strong>might</strong> be closed (it never received a single close vote).</p>\n\n<p>Finally, our users have been giving you a lot of helpful advice on how to improve your question and links to FAQs what question we close and why – which you mostly ignored. For example, we were advising you several times that your posts are difficult to understand due to being convoluted; yet you self-assess your most recent question to be rambling.</p>\n" } ]

[ "https://academia.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/4549", "https://academia.meta.stackexchange.com", "https://academia.meta.stackexchange.com/users/109596/" ]

[ { "answer_id": 4556, "author": "Anonymous Physicist", "author_id": 13240, "author_profile": "https://academia.meta.stackexchange.com/users/13240", "pm_score": 1, "selected": false, "text": "<blockquote>\n <p>\"One of them simply stated that China was a dictatorship with little respect for the American patent system.\"</p>\n</blockquote>\n\n<p>\"Simply stated\" isn't quite correct, it also answered the question, and the statements about China are supporting information for the answer. The answer given is to do nothing.</p>\n\n<p>I didn't see any reason for the answer to be flagged or edited. It's firmly critical, but reasonable.</p>\n" }, { "answer_id": 4557, "author": "eykanal", "author_id": 73, "author_profile": "https://academia.meta.stackexchange.com/users/73", "pm_score": 1, "selected": false, "text": "<p>Just to post what I was thinking at the time, <strong>no, this was not inappropriate</strong>. The original question simply stated that \"China is a dictatorship\" (which is irrelevant here) and that they \"have a national policy of hacking and stealing\" (which both isn't true and is pretty slanderous). The edits added some background for readers unfamiliar with the actual situation. Granted, much of this is pretty public knowledge—I found all the links on the first page of a pretty straightforward Google search—but that doesn't mean everyone knows it.</p>\n" }, { "answer_id": 4558, "author": "Nobody", "author_id": 15193, "author_profile": "https://academia.meta.stackexchange.com/users/15193", "pm_score": 2, "selected": false, "text": "<blockquote>\n <p>You can't do much in China. China is a dictatorship, and it appears to\n have a national policy of hacking businesses to steal their code and\n data. No reason to expect them to respect your rights to your PhD\n thesis.</p>\n</blockquote>\n\n<p>I don't see anything salvageable in there. The intention clearly is to write that China is a terrible country and has no IP protection at all. Replacing this with a correct nuanced view is against the spirit of this paragraph.</p>\n\n<blockquote>\n <p>As you say that your advisor works for a UK university, you might be\n able to do something there. I have no idea if that's a good idea or\n not. Similarly, if anyone tries to claim rights to your invention\n outside of China, it's possible you could do something.</p>\n</blockquote>\n\n<p>So the author has \"no idea\" and says that some unspecified action might be possible or desirable or not, as long as it's not in China where it's certainly not possible.</p>\n\n<p>This is augmented with actual facts which weren't even hinted at in the original.</p>\n\n<blockquote>\n <p>Lastly, while certainly suspicious, I wouldn't take it as proven that\n your advisor was responsible, at least not based on what you've\n written.</p>\n</blockquote>\n\n<p>This last paragraph is good and important and the only reason I see to keep the answer around at all.</p>\n\n<p>But it's the last paragraph, and so I assume it was vastly overshadowed by the anti-China views expressed in the first and second paragraph in the decision process of the up and down voters.</p>\n\n<p>I think it's anti-democratic and against the spirit of this network to subvert the votes of so many people towards an entirely different answer.</p>\n\n<p>If undesirable content is upvoted I think in general it makes more sense to:</p>\n\n<ol>\n<li>Add good other answers and trust in the users to upvote them more.</li>\n<li>I've also seen special notes added to answers (outside the answer text) which say that it's not up to the standards of a site.</li>\n<li>As a last resort deletion is more honest than to change an answer into its opposite, even if it means the answer would be trimmed down to the one useful sentence.</li>\n</ol>\n\n<p>(no hard feelings)</p>\n" } ]

[ "https://academia.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/4555", "https://academia.meta.stackexchange.com", "https://academia.meta.stackexchange.com/users/73/" ]

[ { "answer_id": 4564, "author": "Massimo Ortolano", "author_id": 20058, "author_profile": "https://academia.meta.stackexchange.com/users/20058", "pm_score": 3, "selected": false, "text": "<h1>Massimo Ortolano’s answers</h1>\n\n<p>Here are my answers to the questionnaire. Some of the questions were already asked during the 2018 election: my opinion on these has not significantly changed during the last year and half and I've thus reported a few of the <a href=\"https://academia.meta.stackexchange.com/a/4034/20058\">old answers</a>.</p>\n\n<blockquote>\n <ol>\n <li>What is your time zone? What is the time period you are available for moderating our site everyday? Please specify the answer in UTC format.</li>\n </ol>\n</blockquote>\n\n<p>My time zone is that of Central European Time, UTC+1 (UTC+2 during summer time). I'm usually intermittently available throughout all day, but I cannot specify a fixed time period because my availability depends on my work schedule, in particular lectures, meetings and experiments. Overall, I may be available for from 30 min a day, to about 1 hour, depending on the days. </p>\n\n<blockquote>\n <ol start=\"2\">\n <li>New users and posters tend to struggle more than experienced users. What would you do as a moderator to improve the onboarding and also improve the welcome felt by new posters to Academia SE?</li>\n </ol>\n</blockquote>\n\n<p>This is an age-old problem that affects most if not all of the online communities, not only those from Stack Exchange. The components of this problem are the expectations of the newcomers, those of the community, the size of the community (one can guide just that much what thousands of people tell to each other), the composition of the community (yielding, for instance, an acceptance bias toward certain questions with respect to others), the limitations of the platform (discoverability of the help center, visibility and form of guiding messages etc.) and — indeed — personality of the moderators.</p>\n\n<p>Honestly, I don't have a definitive solution, and probably no one has (see also the attempts from the Stack Exchange staff). What I did so far is to use comments, our Meta and chat to explain the source of the issues, to help to better understand the culture of the site, or to convice the community that certain questions can be on topic (I'm not claiming that I've been successful in any way). This is also commonly done by our moderators. I think that a few meta questions and answers exemplifying my approach to this problem can be the following:</p>\n\n<p><a href=\"https://academia.meta.stackexchange.com/a/4044/20058\">https://academia.meta.stackexchange.com/a/4044/20058</a></p>\n\n<p><a href=\"https://academia.meta.stackexchange.com/a/4371/20058\">https://academia.meta.stackexchange.com/a/4371/20058</a></p>\n\n<p><a href=\"https://academia.meta.stackexchange.com/a/4111/20058\">https://academia.meta.stackexchange.com/a/4111/20058</a></p>\n\n<p><a href=\"https://academia.meta.stackexchange.com/a/4258/20058\">https://academia.meta.stackexchange.com/a/4258/20058</a></p>\n\n<p><a href=\"https://academia.meta.stackexchange.com/q/4269/20058\">Could we please reopen these questions about salary and treat all salary questions in a uniform way?</a></p>\n\n<p><a href=\"https://academia.meta.stackexchange.com/q/3530/20058\">Double degree: why was this question closed as duplicate?</a></p>\n\n<p>To sum up, I'd continue along these lines, maybe in a more systematic way. </p>\n\n<blockquote>\n <ol start=\"3\">\n <li>Do you have any previous experience as a moderator, either on Stack Exchange or on other kind of communities (e.g. newsgroups, forums etc.)? </li>\n </ol>\n</blockquote>\n\n<p>Yes, I've been an administrator and moderator of an Italian forum about circuit theory, electronics, physics and mathematics. </p>\n\n<blockquote>\n <ol start=\"4\">\n <li>What question or answer of yours on meta best exemplifies your philosophy on moderation? Why do you feel this is the best example?</li>\n </ol>\n</blockquote>\n\n<p>This one:</p>\n\n<p><a href=\"https://academia.meta.stackexchange.com/a/2027/20058\">https://academia.meta.stackexchange.com/a/2027/20058</a></p>\n\n<p>Even though at first glance it might not seem directly related to moderation, I choose this answer because I think it exemplifies well my understanding of people's way of voting, and the way in which complains about up or downvotes should be handled.</p>\n\n<blockquote>\n <ol start=\"5\">\n <li>In what way do you feel that being a moderator will make you more effective as opposed to simply reaching 10k or 20k rep?</li>\n </ol>\n</blockquote>\n\n<p>Well, really, the tools that are at disposal of 10k or 20k users are really not so effective. In practice, as a standard user, one can only bring to the attention of the community and the moderators a possible issue. Then, a few actions are triggered by the collective action of the community (e.g. enough spam flags can trigger the automatic deletion of a post), but most of the other actions should be taken by the moderators.</p>\n\n<blockquote>\n <ol start=\"6\">\n <li>How would you deal with a user who produced a steady stream of valuable answers, but tends to generate a large number of arguments/flags from comments?</li>\n </ol>\n</blockquote>\n\n<p>I wouldn't deal alone: I'm convinced that problematic cases like this one should be discussed among all the moderators. I'd first propose to have a private chat with the user to convince them to avoid this kind of disruptive behaviour. I'd consider suspension as a last resort.</p>\n\n<blockquote>\n <ol start=\"7\">\n <li>How would you handle a situation where another mod closed/deleted/etc a question that you feel shouldn't have been?</li>\n </ol>\n</blockquote>\n\n<p>I think that for borderline cases we should leave the decision to the community. Therefore, I wouldn't reopen or undelete the question unilaterally, but I'd propose to the other moderator to agree on publishing a meta question to see what the community thinks about the closure/deletion/etc.</p>\n\n<blockquote>\n <ol start=\"8\">\n <li>What do you think the moderators' role should be with respect to Hot Network Questions list questions, given their potential for controversy and \"passerby\" users from the network? How do you think presence on the HNQ list should affect moderation decisions, given its frequency?</li>\n </ol>\n</blockquote>\n\n<p>This is a tricky point. <a href=\"https://academia.meta.stackexchange.com/q/3853/20058\">In this meta question</a> I proposed that we introduce a post notice for controversial questions but, at the same time, I suggested in <a href=\"https://academia.meta.stackexchange.com/a/4455/20058\">this answer</a> that we shouldn't remove questions from the HNQ list. The most upvoted answers in that Q&amp;A suggest that we should remove from the HNQ list questions related to \"suicide or severe psychic health problems\" and when \"the asker is a victim of sexual discrimination or misconduct\": this is certainly a sensible thing to do, but I think that more should be done to prevent people in particularly difficult situations to give easily recognizable details when asking questions, because removing a question from the HNQ list is just too slow of an action to be really effective if someone has malicious intentions. Here, the Stack Exchange staff should provide more mechanisms to help this prevention (for example, with dedicated tag warnings, with <a href=\"https://academia.meta.stackexchange.com/q/2218/20058\"><em>improved visibility</em></a>).</p>\n\n<blockquote>\n <ol start=\"9\">\n <li>Comments can be tricky to deal with, and are often flagged as obsolete/no longer needed. Under what circumstances will you delete comments?</li>\n </ol>\n</blockquote>\n\n<p>Comments are really another tricky point for at least two reasons. First, there is a clear discrepancy between the intended usage of comments from the Stack Exchange staff and the intended usage from many users. Second, it appears that moderators have limited tools to deal with comments. For instance, at present, comments can be moved to chat only once (there are suggestions to improve these tools, but we don't know if and when they will be implemented).</p>\n\n<p>In principle, I think that comments should be deleted only when they are rude or offensive, or when they become obsolete. A long list of comments can be moved to chat, but I'd avoid deletion. However, for answers, I think that comments that point out significant technical, regulatory or legal flaws should stay attached to the answers and not moved to chat or deleted. Of course, this principles might not be fully applicable because of the limitations of the moderation tools.</p>\n\n<blockquote>\n <ol start=\"10\">\n <li>What is your stance about the current scope of Academia Stack Exchange and how this is enforced? Should we close any question that does not strictly comply with the current scope? Should we be lenient and keep open questions that can potentially generate good answers even if borderline off-topic? Should we narrow or broaden the scope?</li>\n </ol>\n</blockquote>\n\n<p>It's clear that we receive many questions that are off-topic according to the current policy, but it's also clear that there are several users who are willing to answers these questions because, well, it's useful. And we have many examples of borderline off-topic questions which generated wonderful answers (<a href=\"https://academia.stackexchange.com/a/2221/20058\">this one from JeffE</a> is probably the archetype of such an excellent answer to a very personal question). So, in general, I'm inclined to be lenient, but I'd also suggest to those who think that answering certain types of now off-topic questions could be useful to a general audience to bring it up on our Meta to propose to broaden the scope. The important thing is to reach sufficient consesus to have a uniform treatment of certain questions. I'll be therefore happy to broaden the scope in case of well-conceived proposals.</p>\n" }, { "answer_id": 4566, "author": "cag51", "author_id": 79875, "author_profile": "https://academia.meta.stackexchange.com/users/79875", "pm_score": 3, "selected": false, "text": "<h1>Cag51’s answers</h1>\n\n<blockquote>\n <ol>\n <li>What is your time zone? What is the time period you are available for moderating our site everyday? Please specify the answer in UTC format.</li>\n </ol>\n</blockquote>\n\n<p><strong>Eastern Time (UTC-5).</strong> I tend to check the site several times throughout the day, but would make my most sustained investments late in the night (e.g., 0400 or 0600 UTC). </p>\n\n<blockquote>\n <ol start=\"2\">\n <li>New users and posters tend to struggle more than experienced users. What would you do as a moderator to improve the onboarding and also improve the welcome felt by new posters to Academia SE?</li>\n </ol>\n</blockquote>\n\n<p><strong>Encourage personalized responses.</strong> I feel vicariously sad when I see someone provide a detailed, specific, well-written question and they get downvoted and their question is closed as a duplicate of a super-vague question like “how do graduate admissions work?”. True, our scope excludes overly individualized questions – but a kind note explaining this, perhaps with an encouraging word, could bridge the gap.</p>\n\n<blockquote>\n <ol start=\"3\">\n <li>Do you have any previous experience as a moderator, either on Stack Exchange or on other kind of communities (e.g. newsgroups, forums etc.)?</li>\n </ol>\n</blockquote>\n\n<p><strong>Not on SE or similar.</strong> Certainly I hold professional leadership positions, but nothing like this.</p>\n\n<blockquote>\n <ol start=\"4\">\n <li>What question or answer of yours on meta best exemplifies your philosophy on moderation? Why do you feel this is the best example?</li>\n </ol>\n</blockquote>\n\n<p><a href=\"https://academia.meta.stackexchange.com/a/4456/79875\"><strong>This one</strong></a>. For one thing, I have rather few to pick from (see below). But more generally, I think it’s important to remember that questions that seem obvious or uninteresting to experienced researchers can be exceptionally important, and not at all obvious, for new users. Given this, I dislike it when people make condescending remarks in the comments (whether toward new or established users). </p>\n\n<blockquote>\n <ol start=\"5\">\n <li>In what way do you feel that being a moderator will make you more effective as opposed to simply reaching 10k or 20k rep?</li>\n </ol>\n</blockquote>\n\n<p><strong>I view them as fundamentally different roles.</strong> As a high-rep user, I focus on answering questions, voting, and editing questions. As a diamond moderator, my answers and comments will be much more forceful, and thus I will have to use them much more sparingly. On the other hand, being a diamond moderator allows me to help the community in a different way – namely, providing timely review of flags, and being much more active on meta. </p>\n\n<blockquote>\n <ol start=\"6\">\n <li>How would you deal with a user who produced a steady stream of valuable answers, but tends to generate a large number of arguments/flags from comments?</li>\n </ol>\n</blockquote>\n\n<p><strong>I would apply my judgment based on the nature of arguments or flags.</strong> If it is just a matter of poor word choice or over-enthusiasm, I would post a comment to try to defuse the situation. If I think the user is really stepping over the line, I might try a friendly modmail, in coordination with the other mods. If there is really egregious conduct, then I would coordinate with the other mods about more decisive action. </p>\n\n<blockquote>\n <ol start=\"7\">\n <li>How would you handle a situation where another mod closed/deleted/etc a question that you feel shouldn't have been?</li>\n </ol>\n</blockquote>\n\n<p><strong>Very carefully.</strong> The most common case is probably that the other moderator thought the question was unsalvageable, whereas I can take the time to (try to) salvage it. In this case, I would try to salvage the question (perhaps with a note to the other moderator to avoid misunderstanding). The community can always vote to close if they disagree with me. For more systematic cases, I would discuss with the other mod and/or open a discussion on meta. </p>\n\n<blockquote>\n <ol start=\"8\">\n <li>What do you think the moderators' role should be with respect to Hot Network Questions list questions, given their potential for controversy and \"passerby\" users from the network? How do you think presence on the HNQ list should affect moderation decisions, given its frequency?</li>\n </ol>\n</blockquote>\n\n<p><strong>For the most part, I would treat these questions as any other question.</strong> Many users find us from HNQs, so I’m reluctant to cull questions from the HNQ list. Certain cases, though, are either so personal (e.g., mental health issues) or so subtle (e.g., nuances of particular academic sub-cultures) that we should discourage answers from non-academicians. This is generally in line with what the community has already decided. </p>\n\n<blockquote>\n <ol start=\"9\">\n <li>Comments can be tricky to deal with, and are often flagged as obsolete/no longer needed. Under what circumstances will you delete comments?</li>\n </ol>\n</blockquote>\n\n<p><strong>Sparingly.</strong> Deleting comments is a drastic action. Still, I will consider (case-by-case) deleting:</p>\n\n<ul>\n<li>obsolete comments (e.g., suggesting an improvement that has been adopted)</li>\n<li>insults (e.g., beyond reasonable discussion or disagreement)</li>\n<li>clear-cut answers in the comments – after asking the author to post it as an actual answer. Of course, there are a lot of caveats here – I wouldn’t usually delete partial answers, or answers on closed questions that might be useful to the OP.</li>\n<li>Comments that disregard direct instructions, such as on controversial posts where users have been told that “comments may request clarification ONLY”. </li>\n</ul>\n\n<blockquote>\n <ol start=\"10\">\n <li>What is your stance about the current scope of Academia Stack Exchange and how this is enforced? Should we close any question that does not strictly comply with the current scope? Should we be lenient and keep open questions that can potentially generate good answers even if borderline off-topic? Should we narrow or broaden the scope?</li>\n </ol>\n</blockquote>\n\n<p><strong>I would not take drastic, unilateral action, but I do discourage closing interesting questions.</strong> It seems like most popular questions get closed and then reopened, in some cases more than once. While moderators shouldn’t, for the most part, open or close questions single-handedly, my personal “stance” is to accept interesting questions even if there is grounds for closing them. </p>\n" }, { "answer_id": 4568, "author": "M'vy", "author_id": 925, "author_profile": "https://academia.meta.stackexchange.com/users/925", "pm_score": 2, "selected": false, "text": "<h1>M'vy’s answers</h1>\n\n<blockquote>\n <p>What is your time zone? What is the time period you are available for moderating our site everyday? Please specify the answer in UTC format.</p>\n</blockquote>\n\n<p>I am currently living in the UK. I am usually off-work from 18:00 UTC and up until 0:00 UTC. Week-ends are usually a time where I do have more availability. Also, I am somehow available during work hours (i.e. 8:00 UTC - 18:00 UTC)., though in a more restricted fashion of course, but this should be enough to handle urgent matters.</p>\n\n<blockquote>\n <p>New users and posters tend to struggle more than experienced users. What would you do as a moderator to improve the onboarding and also improve the welcome felt by new posters to Academia SE?</p>\n</blockquote>\n\n<p>Being that it is impossible to pre-educate newcomers, it is necessary to work with the already established experienced users. It is easy to get caught in the pitfall of group identity and exclude anyone who does not conform (I have been guilty of this before), and everyone at some point needs to be reminded of it. We need to raise attention when people behave incorrectly, and are discouraging newcomers to participate instead of giving them proper pointers to get better. </p>\n\n<p>As to how to make newcomers get better, I think the best approach is to have them in the chat room, it's really easier to explain things there than in comments. Obviously all newcomers aren't necessarily keen on been thrown into a room full of people, so this is not a silver bullet. And sometimes a simple address in the comments will be enough. Moderators have a unique position that can allow mediation between the two parties. </p>\n\n<blockquote>\n <p>Do you have any previous experience as a moderator, either on Stack Exchange or on other kind of communities (e.g. newsgroups, forums etc.)?</p>\n</blockquote>\n\n<p>I have moderated a lot of different places, from private forums to 5000+ members Facebook Groups. I also used to have mods privileges (reputation based) on some Stacks in beta.</p>\n\n<blockquote>\n <p>What question or answer of yours on meta best exemplifies your philosophy on moderation? Why do you feel this is the best example?</p>\n</blockquote>\n\n<p>Unfortunately, I do not have much example to give from the AC meta. However, I have been quite active on other stacks in the past, most notably <a href=\"https://security.stackexchange.com/users/1574/\">Security</a>, <a href=\"https://gaming.stackexchange.com/users/7709/\">Arqade</a> and <a href=\"https://french.stackexchange.com/users/28/\">French Language&amp; Usage</a>, and used to be active on <a href=\"https://meta.stackexchange.com/users/158321/\">Meta</a> as well</p>\n\n<p>I would summarise my moderation philosophy here on slack as this: moderators should be as invisible as possible. The majority of moderation should come from the community itself. There are only a few things that requires a fully-fledged moderator, and even if some cases requires a swift and decisive action, it is in the end the community that defines how the community itself grows and where it's headed. </p>\n\n<p>If I had to chose some meta topic to illustrate this it would be <a href=\"https://security.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/3007/is-this-type-of-behaviour-acceptable/3008#3008\">this one</a> or <a href=\"https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/96122/is-doesnt-work-for-me-a-reasonable-reason-to-downvote-an-answer/96124#96124\">this one</a></p>\n\n<blockquote>\n <p>In what way do you feel that being a moderator will make you more effective as opposed to simply reaching 10k or 20k rep?</p>\n</blockquote>\n\n<p>These tools are really designed for different things. The 10k/20k moderators tools brings the most experienced user in the community some way to shape it in a collaborative fashion. Also, unless there are many active high-reputation users, it is unlikely that action will be swift, and when it has to be that's when moderators have to come into play. </p>\n\n<blockquote>\n <p>How would you deal with a user who produced a steady stream of valuable answers, but tends to generate a large number of arguments/flags from comments?</p>\n</blockquote>\n\n<p>I think that the best thing is to inform the user about it, communicate before taking any harsh action. Chat, message are here for this. In the last resort (if no improvements come out of this), I suggest to discuss it with the other mods and/or with the community to find the best answer to it.</p>\n\n<p>I'm gonna use a quote from <a href=\"https://security.stackexchange.com/users/485/rory-alsop\">Rory Alsop</a> here, because I think it clearly states the goal here: \"We need to encourage the good behaviours and be robust with the bad\".</p>\n\n<blockquote>\n <p>How would you handle a situation where another mod closed/deleted/etc a question that you feel shouldn't have been?</p>\n</blockquote>\n\n<p>Get in touch, communicate, get to know why and see if it was a 'close call', or if there is real hard reasons why this shouldn't be here. If it's arguable, try to find a suitable course of action by including the necessary people. We are all humans with different perspectives and not everything is a black and white situation. </p>\n\n<blockquote>\n <p>What do you think the moderators' role should be with respect to Hot Network Questions list questions, given their potential for controversy and \"passerby\" users from the network? How do you think presence on the HNQ list should affect moderation decisions, given its frequency?</p>\n</blockquote>\n\n<p>There is a clear need to monitor these questions more closely. It's more than probable that this kind of question will require protection. In the general case, I think HNQ are a good thing, as it increases the visibility of the community. There could be some cases where this kind of visibility would be detrimental or hurtful to people. In which case removing them from HNQ would be advised. </p>\n\n<blockquote>\n <p>Comments can be tricky to deal with, and are often flagged as obsolete/no longer needed. Under what circumstances will you delete comments?</p>\n</blockquote>\n\n<p>Comments that do not comply with the accepted etiquette of public forum should be deleted without question. \nAs for other types of comments, the question is often to see if the comment is detrimental to the question/answer. Sometimes an obsolete comment can help someone get an up-to-date source. Sometimes it would give a bad advice. It's mostly a case by case situation. </p>\n\n<blockquote>\n <p>What is your stance about the current scope of Academia Stack Exchange and how this is enforced? Should we close any question that does not strictly comply with the current scope? Should we be lenient and keep open questions that can potentially generate good answers even if borderline off-topic? Should we narrow or broaden the scope?</p>\n</blockquote>\n\n<p>Scope is a complicated matter on StackExchange for various reasons. Overlapping scopes with other stacks, controversial topics and opinion based questions, to name a few. There are questions that clearly would not be good on any stacks, these clearly should be dealt with in a strict manner. For the rest, it is not just a matter for moderators, but also the community. If the people do not feel like the question should be closed, it can be an opportunity to see if it brings value to the site. If it does not, it will always be time to close it, and learn for next time. If it does, raising awareness of it on meta would be a good thing to do, so that the community can become aware of it, and have a say on whether they think it wants to see more of these questions or not in the future. </p>\n" } ]

[ "https://academia.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/4561", "https://academia.meta.stackexchange.com", "https://academia.meta.stackexchange.com/users/32458/" ]

[ { "answer_id": 4572, "author": "ff524", "author_id": 11365, "author_profile": "https://academia.meta.stackexchange.com/users/11365", "pm_score": 3, "selected": false, "text": "<p>I don't think it's so obvious that it's off topic. I think it's borderline. I reviewed flags on it as a diamond moderator, and decided that it would be better to let the community handle it, rather than close it unilaterally, because it wasn't so obviously off topic to me. Some users thought that it was off topic, and voted to close. Some users thought it was an acceptable question, and voted to \"Leave open\" in the review queue. Some users thought it was a good question, and voted it up, or answered it.</p>\n\n<p>Please don't comment \"But it's so obviously off topic because...\" - I'm not saying it should be reopened, or that those who voted to close were wrong. I'm just saying that what is obviously off topic to you, may seem acceptable to others, and I guess that's what happened here. Questions that are borderline tend to linger for a while before they are closed (if they are closed at all).</p>\n\n<p>I think your guess that it stayed open because users thought it was off topic, but answered it anyway to gain reputation, is probably wrong. There are only four users who have close vote privileges who answered this question. There are many, many, many more users with close vote privileges who didn't answer the question, and also didn't vote to close. Obviously those other users were not motivated by reputation. The much more likely explanation is that the question wasn't so obviously off topic to them.</p>\n" }, { "answer_id": 4573, "author": "eykanal", "author_id": 73, "author_profile": "https://academia.meta.stackexchange.com/users/73", "pm_score": 3, "selected": false, "text": "<p>I disagree with quite a few assumptions in your question.</p>\n\n<ul>\n<li><p>You suggest that fact that the question was slow to be closed is a bad thing. In most cases, that's simply part of the culture on this forum... we tend to allow discussion to go on. Whether that's \"bad\" or not is a matter of opinion, and many of our users seem fine with this more laid-back approach to moderation.</p></li>\n<li><p>You also seem to suggest that moderators should have stepped in earlier. I think we, as a team, have made it fairly clear that we tend to operate with a very light touch. There are very few cases where we simply step in and shut something down, particularly more borderline cases like this one. Personally, I tend to wait for a number of high-rep users to vote for closure before casting the final (automatically binding) vote. This approach has worked well in the past, and I don't think its something the community is clamoring for us to change.</p></li>\n</ul>\n" } ]

[ "https://academia.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/4571", "https://academia.meta.stackexchange.com", "https://academia.meta.stackexchange.com/users/98164/" ]

[ { "answer_id": 4585, "author": "Scott Seidman", "author_id": 20457, "author_profile": "https://academia.meta.stackexchange.com/users/20457", "pm_score": 1, "selected": false, "text": "<p>Frankly, holding elections in this environment, without informing users, or worse, candidates, that this was going on, was the wrong thing to do.</p>\n" }, { "answer_id": 4586, "author": "anonymous", "author_id": 7269, "author_profile": "https://academia.meta.stackexchange.com/users/7269", "pm_score": 4, "selected": false, "text": "<p>In case it gets lost in all of the noise, Sara Chipps (Director of Public Q&amp;A) posted an official response on Meta Stack Overflow: <a href=\"https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/334248/an-update-to-our-community-and-an-apology\">An Update to our Community and an Apology</a></p>\n" }, { "answer_id": 4589, "author": "jakebeal", "author_id": 22733, "author_profile": "https://academia.meta.stackexchange.com/users/22733", "pm_score": 4, "selected": false, "text": "<p>@StrongBad, thank you for balancing your expressions of concern with a willingness to continue to stay constructive and to moderate.</p>\n\n<p>I have been following the discussions, and while it certainly appears that the company's employees did not handle this situation well, I also am not impressed by the most highly voted responses of the community. In reading those reactions, I come away with an impression of people who have come to feel rather entitled based on their degree of activity in the StackExchange community. </p>\n\n<p>Personally, I try to remember that at the end of the day, this place is really about the people who come looking for answers---most of whom never even ask a question. That some of us enjoy spending time here, providing those answers, and even building some community seems to me to be quite secondary. </p>\n\n<p>We'll see how the company sorts things out on its end---frankly, I think that responding slowly and giving people a chance to settle down may be one of their best choices right now. In the mean time, carrying on with the things that brought people here in the first place seems like a good idea.</p>\n" }, { "answer_id": 4606, "author": "posdef", "author_id": 5674, "author_profile": "https://academia.meta.stackexchange.com/users/5674", "pm_score": 3, "selected": false, "text": "<h2>Preamble</h2>\n\n<p>Wow.. I stumbled on this subject when I went to SO.meta to post about perceived decline in quality of answers and increasingly level of garbage, so I was going to ask about whether or not there was a decline in interest as well as lapse of moderation. </p>\n\n<p>It took a great deal of time to figure out the sequence of events and try to get the nuances of the whole ordeal, and I am sure there is a lot happening behind the scenes that we \"mere mortals\" don't get to see. </p>\n\n<p>I don't have the rep to write this on the SE.meta where the \"apologies\" from the SE staff came out, so it partially relates to your post @StrongBad, and partially to the subject as a whole. I hope you forgive me if parts of what I write here don't seem relevant to you.</p>\n\n<h2>Speculating at the \"why\"</h2>\n\n<p>I feel this is extremely discouraging but to some extent a natural consequence of the near exponential growth of SE sites.^* The main income of these sites is traffic so as the network grew, it needed to cater to a larger and larger crowd. The way I see it that has several critical and profound challenges (in no particular order):</p>\n\n<ol>\n<li><p>It became harder and harder to have guidelines that was <strong>relevant and agreeable for all</strong> the communities. </p></li>\n<li><p><strong>SE staff became more and more distanced from the community</strong>, I remember the times where the SE staff would often post on Meta, and occasionally give insights to the way the company reasoned behind the scenes. They weighed in on feature requests as well as encouraged growth on newer communities</p></li>\n<li><p>As the network grew hungrier for new users, and reach out to more people, the level of \"noise\" increased. Here I mean duplicate, low-quality questions and answers. The need for moderation increases as the crowd increases. This too has an important implication, as the community grows in size, the dissent also increases. Despite sometimes pretending otherwise, there are inevitable differences even within a community. What seems like a normal way to express an opinion to one person may come across as offensive or insulting to another. There are cultural components to that, as well as other personal factors which are clearly hard (if not impossible) to know in advance. So staff, moderators and users will likely clash at some point, inevitably so... </p></li>\n<li><p>Together with the previous item, as the network grew the perceived value of the network may have changed in the eyes of the \"subject-matter-experts\", especially if the \"noise\" is not kept below a certain level. </p></li>\n</ol>\n\n<h2>Where I stand</h2>\n\n<p>All that being said, I am not sure where we are headed. I don't believe it'll be \"business as usual\" not after this much turmoil. I also don't believe things will be \"fixed\". Most of all I don't believe in the sincerity of the apologies provided by the SE staff.</p>\n\n<p>Personally I don't really care about how they will do right by the people they have wronged, that's between company and the individuals. I don't care for the apologies, since I trust actions not the words.^** I also don't care much about the change of CoC relating to the use of pronouns (possibly because my native language does not use different pronouns based on gender). </p>\n\n<p>What I <strong>do</strong> care about is how the company treats people who volunteer to improve their product. Let's remember one thing, the primary unique value proposition of this place is the fact that this is a place that brings \"experts and enthusiasts\" together, where we help each other solve our problems, learn and grow. <strong>So we bring the value, they provide the medium.</strong> In other words, we are the product not necessarily the customer. Let's try to keep that in mind. </p>\n\n<p>Moderators especially voluntarily take time to improve the site, and to make sure there is productive, respectful and civil discourse. As far as I know (please correct me otherwise) community moderators get <strong>zero</strong> financial benefits for doing the extra work. </p>\n\n<p>That's the real issue in my eyes, the network is too large, perhaps <a href=\"http://gph.is/28O4JDe\" rel=\"nofollow noreferrer\">too large to fail</a>. So they probably feel (or felt) that roughing some feathers is not gonna be an issue. There will be people sticking around, or joining a year or two down the road, to provide the content. They treat their main assets as expendable objects. That's what I find the most troubling!</p>\n\n<h2>TLDR</h2>\n\n<p>Last but not least I have <strong>no trust what-so-ever</strong> for the staff/executives at SE, for no other reason than that they are representing a company. Companies have financial interests, and in general (at least in my experience) only care for their customers (or ethical/moral standpoints) when it's profitable i.e. when not doing that would be harmful for business. </p>\n\n<p>Trust is an inherently human thing; I trust the people I can shake hands with, look into the eyes of, and perhaps, have a beer with. I don't trust anyone that's on the other side of the ocean from me, and more importantly has a vested financial interest in the subject matter. </p>\n\n<p>That's what I would have liked to write as an answer to David's or Sara's \"apology\". You want to win back people's trust, show them you actually care about the community, and not see them as a business asset.</p>\n\n<hr>\n\n<p>^* Not immediately relevant perhaps, but the company is based in NYC as far as I know and I am guessing at some point they have started to cave in to pressures of finances, reason in the more conventional terms of economics and profitability.</p>\n\n<p>^** When I was reading the apologies provided by SE staff, specifically David and Sara, it is clear to me that the language has been carefully structured, probably heavily consulted by the legal team. In that sense, reminiscent of the apology letters/statements by professional athletes after some PR scandal. </p>\n\n<p>I see no remorse, and no acknowledgement of what really went wrong. I also see no real change in sight. It's essentially; \"<em>our game our rules, if you don't like it then stop playing</em>\"</p>\n" } ]

[ "https://academia.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/4576", "https://academia.meta.stackexchange.com", "https://academia.meta.stackexchange.com/users/929/" ]

[ { "answer_id": 4580, "author": "StrongBad", "author_id": 929, "author_profile": "https://academia.meta.stackexchange.com/users/929", "pm_score": 4, "selected": false, "text": "<p>Congrats to the winners, thank you to M'vy for also running and thank you aeismail for all you past work.</p>\n" }, { "answer_id": 4581, "author": "cag51", "author_id": 79875, "author_profile": "https://academia.meta.stackexchange.com/users/79875", "pm_score": 3, "selected": false, "text": "<p>Thanks to all for your confidence / votes ... my happiness at being elected is tempered only by my sadness to learn that aeismail is stepping down. </p>\n" }, { "answer_id": 4582, "author": "Buffy", "author_id": 75368, "author_profile": "https://academia.meta.stackexchange.com/users/75368", "pm_score": 3, "selected": false, "text": "<p>Sorry to see aeismail go as moderator. I hope you can still participate at a high level. </p>\n\n<p>And if the two new mods continue to contribute as mods as they have as members, the site will be in good hands. </p>\n\n<p>Congratulations. </p>\n" }, { "answer_id": 4583, "author": "Massimo Ortolano", "author_id": 20058, "author_profile": "https://academia.meta.stackexchange.com/users/20058", "pm_score": 2, "selected": false, "text": "<p>Thanks to all those who participated in this election, and especially thank you aeismail for the work done so far!</p>\n" }, { "answer_id": 4584, "author": "M'vy", "author_id": 925, "author_profile": "https://academia.meta.stackexchange.com/users/925", "pm_score": 2, "selected": false, "text": "<p>Congratulations to both of you. You have many challenges lying in front of you now, and I wish you good luck to tackle all of them!</p>\n\n<p>Thank you aeismail for all your good work as well, we will miss you.</p>\n" } ]

[ "https://academia.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/4579", "https://academia.meta.stackexchange.com", "https://academia.meta.stackexchange.com/users/7682/" ]

[ { "answer_id": 4591, "author": "cag51", "author_id": 79875, "author_profile": "https://academia.meta.stackexchange.com/users/79875", "pm_score": -1, "selected": false, "text": "<p>Moderators should destroy all answers-in-the-comments they come across, perhaps after posting a reminder and inviting users to convert their comment to an answer. Perhaps there can be a grace period when there is no overlap between answers-in-the-comments and true answers. </p>\n" }, { "answer_id": 4592, "author": "cag51", "author_id": 79875, "author_profile": "https://academia.meta.stackexchange.com/users/79875", "pm_score": -1, "selected": false, "text": "<p>Moderators should destroy answers-in-the-comments that users flag, but should not proactively seek them out. </p>\n\n<p>This seems to be the status quo, though it does lead to some confusion when some are deleted and others are not deleted. </p>\n" }, { "answer_id": 4594, "author": "cag51", "author_id": 79875, "author_profile": "https://academia.meta.stackexchange.com/users/79875", "pm_score": 0, "selected": false, "text": "<p>Moderators should leave answers-in-the-comments alone unless there is some additional reason why they should be deleted.</p>\n" }, { "answer_id": 4595, "author": "jakebeal", "author_id": 22733, "author_profile": "https://academia.meta.stackexchange.com/users/22733", "pm_score": 1, "selected": false, "text": "<p>Insofar as I can see, the only real cost to \"answers in the comments\" is questions that go effectively unanswered---in any question receiving significant attention, equivalent material from the comments typically quickly makes it into at least some answer.</p>\n\n<p>Answers in the comments are also often <em>good</em> for people who want to be helpful anyway to a person whose question is off-topic and should be closed.</p>\n\n<p>For on-topic questions that have their answers in the comments, I have often encouraged people to transform \"answer in the comments\" into an official answer, often saying that I would like them to do it so that I can vote for them. Many people respond well to this. When this fails, sometimes I add my own answer expanding on the comments.</p>\n\n<p>My suggestion to moderators, then, would be:</p>\n\n<ol>\n<li>For recent questions, don't worry about it. The situation will often resolve itself without moderator intervention with the aid of other users.</li>\n<li>For older questions, add a comment suggesting that the comment transform to an answer---and maybe see if other long-time users will help with this as well.</li>\n</ol>\n\n<p>But I don't see any particular reason to bother deleting them.</p>\n" }, { "answer_id": 4596, "author": "xLeitix", "author_id": 10094, "author_profile": "https://academia.meta.stackexchange.com/users/10094", "pm_score": 3, "selected": false, "text": "<p>Stack Exchange has a fairly clear policy on this I think - flag answers-in-comments, ask the poster to write an answer instead, destroy it after some time (days?).</p>\n\n<p>If anything this community has historically been too lenient on answers-in-comments, not too harsh.</p>\n\n<hr>\n\n<p>I actually feel pretty strongly about this. Answers-in-comments are sometimes witty and to-the-point, but rarely high-quality (they can't be, there isn't enough space in a comment). Yet, if you post a snippy (hence highly-upvoted) \"answer\" as a comment to the question, it's the first thing a user sees, even before the accepted / highly upvoted actual answers. <strong>This breaks the Stack Exchange model where highly upvoted answers should float to the top</strong>.</p>\n\n<p>And this isn't even to speak of the other problem with comments, namely that they can't be downvoted, so a controversial comment is never kept in check by downvotes the way an answer would be. I truly think this trains people to write controversial and/or offensive stuff in comments rather than actual answers, which, again, breaks the way Stack Exchange is supposed to work. Kill them with fire, and kill them hard.</p>\n\n<hr>\n\n<p>All that said, I am myself (very much) guilty of writing too many comments and too few answers. It's just so much easier to write a quick comment than a full answer, and the fact that one does not have to \"fear\" any downvotes for a terrible take only exacerbate this. The only way to combat this, in my opinion, is to more strongly implement the \"comments are ephemeral\" idea of Stack Exchange. In an ideal world, comments would be auto-deleted after a few days, but since we appear to not be getting this feature, the mods at least have my full support to aggressively delete comments (including my own, which, again I know I am writing way, way too much).</p>\n" }, { "answer_id": 4597, "author": "Wrzlprmft", "author_id": 7734, "author_profile": "https://academia.meta.stackexchange.com/users/7734", "pm_score": 2, "selected": false, "text": "<p>While I welcome your initiative, I do not think we should answer the question how diamond moderators should act on this in isolation. If we want to act stronger on answers in comments, this must be encoded in a clear policy on when answers in comments should be deleted and how both, users and moderators, should act upon them.</p>\n\n<p>I therefore propose to postpone this question and first decide whether we want less (or no) answers in comments in general. More specifically, I propose to ask first:</p>\n\n<blockquote>\n <p>What kind of answers in comments do we want to keep on the long run?</p>\n</blockquote>\n\n<p>… and then see how we go about realising the result.</p>\n" }, { "answer_id": 4598, "author": "Tommi", "author_id": 13017, "author_profile": "https://academia.meta.stackexchange.com/users/13017", "pm_score": -1, "selected": false, "text": "<p>I think rpg.SE has a good policy here. Quoting an answer by mxyzplk:\n <a href=\"https://rpg.meta.stackexchange.com/a/6534/3263\">https://rpg.meta.stackexchange.com/a/6534/3263</a></p>\n\n<blockquote>\n <p>You should not answer in comments. Not partial answers, not full answers. Not \"leads on\" an answer. Not \"I would answer but I'm tired/just woke up/am drunk so I'll just say this...\" Not answers that you think aren’t good enough to post as answers. Not little helpful tips, not helpful suggestions, not useful anecdotes. These will be deleted. Answer in answers.</p>\n \n <p>And if your answer isn’t even good enough for you to want to put it in an answer post, just don’t post it at all then.</p>\n \n <p>Answering in comments does the following things.</p>\n \n <ol>\n <li>It bypasses question closes. They're closed for a reason.</li>\n <li>It provides an answer that can't be marked as an answer for future people's knowledge.</li>\n <li>It contributes to long comment debates as you can comment on an answer, but it's unclear what you're commenting on in a comment thread.</li>\n <li>It is \"cheating\" by locking your answer to the top. Answers with higher votes/accepted answers should go to the top to indicate their quality. Bypassing that by sticking your answer in a comment on the question is unacceptable.</li>\n <li>It bypasses all our quality control mechanisms: we can't downvote your \"answer\", edit it, or comment on it to request clarification or improvements. Answers also bump a question to the top so that people will scrutinize the answer; comments don't do this.</li>\n <li>It gets in the way of people who are busy using comments correctly to improve the question.</li>\n </ol>\n \n <p>The long and short of it is, every part of how how the site functions, all of which have lengthy justification as being part of the process of SE - rep, answers, accepts, edits, votes, etc. - is obviated by using comments for answers. So every good goal of all that functionality is nullified by this practice.</p>\n \n <p>Now, \"but the hapless questioner could use that info!\" In nearly all cases someone posts the same information in a (much more comprehensive) answer. Or take the time yourself to write a real answer. We don't like crappy questions or crappy answers, and we'd rather not have the Q or A than to have one that doesn't meet site quality (hence closes/deletes, part of the standard SE functionality). If you don't care enough to write a real answer don't, the likelihood that you're the only person in the world/on the site that knows that bit of info is very small.</p>\n \n <p>While users are welcome to steal the info in the comments to generate answers of their own, that will not slow the pace of dealing with the answers-in-comments via flagging and deletion.</p>\n</blockquote>\n" }, { "answer_id": 4599, "author": "Buffy", "author_id": 75368, "author_profile": "https://academia.meta.stackexchange.com/users/75368", "pm_score": 3, "selected": false, "text": "<p>I don't think the question here is as clear as you present it. This is because the site itself is more than just \"ask a question - get some answers\". Many of the \"questions\" are actually pleas for help in very difficult situations. Some of them are career ending situations. People \"asking\" these \"questions\" need advice and the advice they need isn't really question-answer amenable. </p>\n\n<p>I think that as long as we accept that characterization of the site then some comments that \"might be\" answers need to be retained, though suggestions to the writer than they convert them to answers is usually good. I often do this, actually. </p>\n\n<p>Another issue is that a lot of people, myself included, don't like to write single sentence \"answers\", even when a single sentence is all that is needed. But, often enough, that is all the writer of the comment has to say, given time and other constraints. Such answers are likely to be deleted in any case. </p>\n\n<p>One other issue is that I sometimes vote to close a question as off topic for some reason, but the writer still desperately needs advice. I don't think voting to close is consistent with answering and seldom do it. But a bit of advice to the writer is still a proper (humane) thing to do. So, I'll write a comment - even a fairly extensive one. </p>\n\n<p>People here need advice, not just answers. </p>\n\n<p>I think the mods should use judgement, not a fixed rule. Some comment-answers are fine. Others should be converted to answers. Some should be deleted. But that is why the mods are people with experience in academia, not machines, and not mere administrators. </p>\n" } ]

[ "https://academia.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/4590", "https://academia.meta.stackexchange.com", "https://academia.meta.stackexchange.com/users/79875/" ]

[ { "answer_id": 4602, "author": "cag51", "author_id": 79875, "author_profile": "https://academia.meta.stackexchange.com/users/79875", "pm_score": 3, "selected": false, "text": "<p><strong>We should keep high-quality answers-as-comments on closed questions when there is little overlap between the answers and the comments.</strong> In such cases, we can offer advice to the OP even if their question is not a good fit for our format. </p>\n\n<p>Note the caveats:</p>\n\n<ul>\n<li><strong>High-quality</strong>. Since there is no opportunity to downvote comments, this proposal does not extend to low-quality answers-as-comments. </li>\n<li><strong>Little overlap between comments and answers.</strong> If the comment is already covered by an answer, the comment is essentially a \"super upvote,\" which is not constructive. </li>\n</ul>\n" }, { "answer_id": 4603, "author": "cag51", "author_id": 79875, "author_profile": "https://academia.meta.stackexchange.com/users/79875", "pm_score": -1, "selected": false, "text": "<p><strong>We should keep high-quality answers-as-comments when they are posted to old, inactive questions and do not overlap with existing answers.</strong> I am referring to answers-in-comments that are much younger than the question they answer.</p>\n\n<p>We should still encourage the OP (or someone else) to convert the comments to an answer. But since the question is inactive and most of the answer-posting and voting is likely finished, the cost of deleting a valuable comment is usually higher than the cost of allowing answers-in-comments.</p>\n" }, { "answer_id": 4604, "author": "Bryan Krause", "author_id": 63475, "author_profile": "https://academia.meta.stackexchange.com/users/63475", "pm_score": 2, "selected": false, "text": "<p><strong>Generic, brief comment answers should be kept, including but not limited to those on questions that are otherwise closed for off-topic/too-specific reasons</strong></p>\n\n<p>Examples would be general advice to seek some sort of professional counselling/therapy/mental health services, and advice that someone should ask their advisor/supervisor/mentor/PI.</p>\n\n<p>These are general enough that they are unlikely to require down votes, and fit many situations that are otherwise not appropriate or not solvable questions for SE.</p>\n" }, { "answer_id": 4614, "author": "Anonymous Physicist", "author_id": 13240, "author_profile": "https://academia.meta.stackexchange.com/users/13240", "pm_score": -1, "selected": false, "text": "<p>Do nothing. Answers in comments are not a problem that needs solving.</p>\n" } ]

[ "https://academia.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/4600", "https://academia.meta.stackexchange.com", "https://academia.meta.stackexchange.com/users/7734/" ]

[ { "answer_id": 4615, "author": "jakebeal", "author_id": 22733, "author_profile": "https://academia.meta.stackexchange.com/users/22733", "pm_score": 1, "selected": false, "text": "<p>I would tend to say let's leave them be. Yes, there are two distinct meaning here, but :</p>\n\n<ol>\n<li>the meanings are closely related (at least in the US system), and </li>\n<li>the number of questions is small enough that it's probably not causing any real difficulties to have them lumped together.</li>\n</ol>\n" }, { "answer_id": 4616, "author": "Anonymous Physicist", "author_id": 13240, "author_profile": "https://academia.meta.stackexchange.com/users/13240", "pm_score": 3, "selected": true, "text": "<ul>\n<li>Eliminate the tag as too vague</li>\n<li>Create a new tag for \"Liberal Arts Colleges\"</li>\n</ul>\n\n<p>The current tag description is wrong. \"Liberal arts\" does not mean arts and humanities. The traditional meaning is grammar, logic, rhetoric, arithmetic, geometry, astronomy, and music. Other sciences are not in the traditional list because they did not exist at the time the list was made.</p>\n" } ]

[ "https://academia.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/4601", "https://academia.meta.stackexchange.com", "https://academia.meta.stackexchange.com/users/13017/" ]

[ { "answer_id": 4608, "author": "xLeitix", "author_id": 10094, "author_profile": "https://academia.meta.stackexchange.com/users/10094", "pm_score": 4, "selected": false, "text": "<p>Thank you for this update!</p>\n\n<p>I know it's a touchy subject at the moment, but just taken at face value I am actually rather happy about this new CoC and the thought behind it. Especially:</p>\n\n<blockquote>\n <p>Based on these discussions it seems SE's take on the situation is that if you are trying to avoid a user's pronouns, then you are on thin ice regardless of if your objection is on religious, grammatical, or thought police grounds, or any other argument.</p>\n</blockquote>\n\n<p>I have to say that I support this line of thinking. If we want Stack Exchange to be a truly inclusive community, avoiding the use of a preferred pronoun because you don't agree with them isn't good enough.</p>\n\n<p>That said, it seems almost like a theoretical issue on this Stack Exchange. From the top of my head I can't think of a single question / discussion here that did not fall into either \"person clearly identifies as male -> use him\", \"person clearly identifies as female -> use her\", or \"no identifiable gender -> use them\". It's my understanding that this is still completely ok with the new CoC.</p>\n" }, { "answer_id": 4612, "author": "Thomas", "author_id": 44249, "author_profile": "https://academia.meta.stackexchange.com/users/44249", "pm_score": 3, "selected": false, "text": "<p>I only became aware of this policy and the controversy surrounding it yesterday. I wholeheartedly agree that the intent of the policy is admirable -- StackExchange should be inclusive of all gender identities. However, I am astounded by how poorly this has been implemented.</p>\n\n<p>I think there are three issues that are causing uproar across the SE network:</p>\n\n<ol>\n<li>Under the new Code of Conduct, gender-neutral language (e.g., using name only instead of pronouns) is not acceptable in certain circumstances. </li>\n<li>Details of those circumstances are unclear. Where is the line drawn with respect to bad-faith pronouns? How do you decide if the intent of gender-neutral language is to avoid preferred pronouns?</li>\n<li>StackExchange's management of the issue has not been reasonable. One moderator was summarily \"fired\" for unclear reasons (<a href=\"https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/334248/an-update-to-our-community-and-an-apology\">allegedly</a> for repeatedly violating the CoC, but this is <a href=\"https://cellio.dreamwidth.org/2019/10/05/stack-overflow-fiasco-timeline.html\" rel=\"nofollow noreferrer\">disputed</a>). <a href=\"https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/333965/firing-mods-and-forced-relicensing-is-stack-exchange-still-interested-in-cooper\">Several</a> other moderators have \"resigned\" or suspended moderation in protest, <a href=\"https://academia.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/4588/leave-of-absence\">including one moderator here</a>.</li>\n</ol>\n\n<p>I really appreciate what SE offers and I am saddened to see this issue becoming so acrimonious. (We hardly even use pronouns.) So I hope that these issues are resolved amicably soon. </p>\n" }, { "answer_id": 4618, "author": "Community", "author_id": -1, "author_profile": "https://academia.meta.stackexchange.com/users/-1", "pm_score": 3, "selected": false, "text": "<p>Speaking from the \"other side\", I would like to commend you on your thoroughly professional summary of the acrimony:</p>\n\n<blockquote>\n <p>\"In addition to the public discussion, there are also private\n discussion about how to enforce these changes. Based on these\n discussions it seems SE's take on the situation is that if you are\n trying to avoid a user's pronouns, then you are on thin ice regardless\n of if your objection is on religious, grammatical, or thought police\n grounds, or any other argument.\"</p>\n</blockquote>\n\n<p>I'll finish with my point of view, but in maintenance of this high tone, allow me point out additional logs on this fire: </p>\n\n<ul>\n<li>Coerced speech (debatable, but hardly dismissable out of hand)</li>\n<li>The predictable and often demonstrated use of policies like this to exclude those who feel that words do not harm people, and who would like to go on using the English language</li>\n<li>Political and corporate standards of \"truth\" frequently differ from those verifiable through science, and hard sciences vs soft science display the same disparity </li>\n</ul>\n\n<p>I bring up that last not to litigate the issue, but to point out that it still exists. </p>\n\n<p>This new CoC shuts down conversation, even on the topic of sex/gender/culture issues, by making abominable any discussion which strays from a corporate-friendly approach.</p>\n\n<p>Orwell's point was that if the language is controlled, then that which may be said is thereby controlled.</p>\n\n<p>My most neutral analysis, which I think should be agreeable to a majority of SE users, is that this is an example of the corporate side of SE stepping across a line of propriety in what should be a community-managed matter. I understand and sympathize with the corporate motivation to ensure a squeaky clean, unassailably politically correct platform. I feel they have gone too far in providing this level of comfort to themselves.</p>\n\n<p>My strictly personal position is this -- I am not about to use a bunch of made-up pronouns. Pronouns in English are a closed set. English of course lacks a dedicated second person plural (as distinct from the singular \"you\"), which is why it has evolved \"y'all\". No code of conduct anywhere states that I must use the term \"y'all\" in order not to offend pluralities. It's not the business of the organization which runs a website to police at that level. \"Y'all\" is debated on a continuing basis between those who like it and those who don't. Likewise, if I don;t like the neologisms \"xe\" and \"tey\", I should remain free to point out, without being abusive, that I do not recognize these arbitrary additions to the language. I would of course expect some flak for that.</p>\n\n<p>I would not expect to be counseled by a corporate droid, or kicked off of a site dedicated to the sharing of knowledge through the medium of language.</p>\n" } ]

[ "https://academia.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/4607", "https://academia.meta.stackexchange.com", "https://academia.meta.stackexchange.com/users/929/" ]

[ { "answer_id": 4611, "author": "Laurel", "author_id": 56207, "author_profile": "https://academia.meta.stackexchange.com/users/56207", "pm_score": 2, "selected": false, "text": "<p>If the <em>about me</em> is the only thing we look at, then not very many (~64 although I’m not sure if any are false positives or if I’m missing anyone). Run (and feel free to modify) <a href=\"https://data.stackexchange.com/academia/query/1124484\" rel=\"nofollow noreferrer\">this query</a>:</p>\n\n<pre><code>select aboutme, id as [User Link] from users \nwhere aboutme like '%she/%' or aboutme like '%her/%'\nor aboutme like '%he/%' or aboutme like '%him/%' or aboutme like '%his/%'\nor aboutme like '%they/%' or aboutme like '%them/%' or aboutme like '%their/%'\n</code></pre>\n\n<p>I’m sure some people mention their pronouns in their posts and comments, but it’s unlikely to be formatted as conveniently. And quite a few people people heavily imply what their pronouns are (e.g. by saying that they’re a woman). </p>\n" }, { "answer_id": 4613, "author": "jakebeal", "author_id": 22733, "author_profile": "https://academia.meta.stackexchange.com/users/22733", "pm_score": 6, "selected": true, "text": "<p>@Laurel's idea was excellent, but the specific query checks only for the three most common pronouns and gets a bunch of false positives. If you query specifically for \"pronoun\", it checks for neopronouns as well:</p>\n\n<pre><code>select aboutme, id as [User Link] from users \nwhere aboutme like '%pronoun%' \n</code></pre>\n\n<p>From this, as of this writing one finds the following 46 results:</p>\n\n<ul>\n<li>False matches, generally profiles talking about pronounciation: 7</li>\n<li>He, she, they, or \"don't care\" preferences: 25</li>\n<li>Preference for a neo-pronoun: 2: 1 ze/hir, 1 ne/nim/nir</li>\n<li>People being obnoxious, mostly clearly because they are upset about the recent code of conduct changes: 10\n\n<ul>\n<li>\"englishisnotaconlangyoudontgettoinventnewpronounsanymorethannewtenses\"</li>\n<li>\"we\" (evidence: post about CoC change)</li>\n<li>\"the one who respects LGBTQ++, lavander, pink, blue, green, and everybody else, but considers the new SE CoC rules on gender pronouns an absurd and harmful stupidity\"</li>\n<li>\"His Most Eminent Gracious Majesty\"</li>\n<li>Spivak pronouns, but \"I Sexually Identify as an Attack Helicopter\"</li>\n<li>\"His majesty, the infallible genius\" </li>\n<li>\"–æ–Ω, –µ–≥–æ, –Ω–µ–≥–æ, –µ–º—É, –Ω–µ–º—É, –∏–º, –Ω–∏–º, –æ –Ω—ë–º\"</li>\n<li>\"old fart\"</li>\n<li>\"My third-person pronouns are I/me/my/mine. Use them or get banned, twansphobes.\"</li>\n<li>\"Voi use voi/void/voids/voids/voidself as pronouns\" (evidence: comments about CoC change)</li>\n</ul></li>\n<li>Confusing statements: 2\n\n<ul>\n<li>\"Preferred pronouns: none. Please use alternative sentence structures to avoid gendered and gender neutral language when referring to me.\"</li>\n<li>\"Preferred pronoun: The gender-neutral \"it\". As I'm an alien and my race doesn't have any sexes ...\"</li>\n</ul></li>\n</ul>\n\n<p>Furthermore, of the obnoxious or confusing profile statements, precisely one has any significant activity on this site.</p>\n\n<p>Bottom line: respectful pronoun use on Academia.SE should currently be easy.</p>\n" } ]

[ "https://academia.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/4610", "https://academia.meta.stackexchange.com", "https://academia.meta.stackexchange.com/users/19607/" ]

[ { "answer_id": 4620, "author": "StrongBad", "author_id": 929, "author_profile": "https://academia.meta.stackexchange.com/users/929", "pm_score": 4, "selected": true, "text": "<p>I don't think the word \"bizarre\" is too loaded with negative meaning, but to me it is more negative than \"unusual\". If the word bizarre was in the body of the question and I was editing it for another reason, I would probably change it. I would not edit the body of a question to only change the word \"bizarre\". In the word was used in the title of a question, I think an edit to only change the word would not be out of place. As the question is now closed, I would want to see a more substantial edit so we can consider reopening the question.</p>\n\n<p>Getting into an edit war over the word is not useful. If the edit gets rolled back, bringing it up in meta or chat or flagging it would be fine.</p>\n" }, { "answer_id": 4621, "author": "cag51", "author_id": 79875, "author_profile": "https://academia.meta.stackexchange.com/users/79875", "pm_score": 2, "selected": false, "text": "<p>When I retitled the question and introduced the word \"bizarre\", I was deliberately reusing OP's language from the body text. To me it seemed like OP was asking whether this was \"bizarre\" rather than \"unusual.\" In particular, the question seemed to be whether this was something they could complain about to administrators.</p>\n\n<p>That said, I would not be inclined to start an edit war if someone were to change the word \"bizarre.\" Perhaps \"acceptable\" would be a good choice.</p>\n" } ]

[ "https://academia.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/4619", "https://academia.meta.stackexchange.com", "https://academia.meta.stackexchange.com/users/26708/" ]

[ { "answer_id": 4624, "author": "StrongBad", "author_id": 929, "author_profile": "https://academia.meta.stackexchange.com/users/929", "pm_score": 3, "selected": false, "text": "<p>Your question is pretty broad and has a lot of background. I think it really boils down to </p>\n\n<blockquote>\n <p>I want to know what to expect if I start pursuing a PhD in an unrelated field altogether, given that I have a PhD already. (Something like this post.) Possible considerations that don't have to be precisely answered: could my current PhD be a hindrance in getting accepted into a new program? Will my supervisors and colleagues see my past PhD as an asset, or as weird-looking mole they will try to politely ignore? What are other questions should I ask myself to make sure this is something I really want?</p>\n</blockquote>\n\n<p>At the highest and broadest level</p>\n\n<blockquote>\n <p>I want to know what to expect if I start pursuing a PhD in an unrelated field altogether, given that I have a PhD already.</p>\n</blockquote>\n\n<p>and</p>\n\n<blockquote>\n <p>What are other questions should I ask myself to make sure this is something I really want?</p>\n</blockquote>\n\n<p>seem very related to the linked \"duplicate\" question and do not seem like great fits for the site. In this case the problem with the question being broad is that it overlaps with other things and it becomes difficult to focus on the unique aspects of the question. The rest of the gist seems different from the duplicate question and a much better fit.</p>\n\n<blockquote>\n <p>Could my current PhD be a hindrance in getting accepted into a new program?</p>\n</blockquote>\n\n<p>and</p>\n\n<blockquote>\n <p>Will my supervisors and colleagues see my past PhD as an asset, or as weird-looking mole they will try to politely ignore?</p>\n</blockquote>\n\n<p>Why not ask those two questions as stand alone and separate questions. Maybe from there you will see a way forward to getting at the deeper aspects of what you want to know.</p>\n" }, { "answer_id": 4625, "author": "cag51", "author_id": 79875, "author_profile": "https://academia.meta.stackexchange.com/users/79875", "pm_score": 2, "selected": false, "text": "<p>I agree it's not a duplicate of the linked question, but I also agree with StrongBad that it's quite broad. If you like, we could change the close reason to \"too broad.\" Given the excellent answers already there, I would not want to substantially rewrite the question at this point (though you're welcome to open a new, more focused question as StrongBad suggests).</p>\n\n<blockquote>\n <p>I wonder if part of the issue is that my question deals with possessing two PhDs at once, the very notion of which seems to trigger many academics.</p>\n</blockquote>\n\n<p>Maybe, but I suspect (another) part of the issue is <em>concision</em>: your question is very long and contains a lot of extraneous information. I suspect you could easily reduce the length by 50%. Of course, this <em>shouldn't</em> affect the determination of whether it's a duplicate -- but reviewers are not perfect. It's easy to just read \"a bunch of personal factors....two PhDs....yeah, it probably boils down to the same question.\"</p>\n" }, { "answer_id": 4642, "author": "Anonymous Physicist", "author_id": 13240, "author_profile": "https://academia.meta.stackexchange.com/users/13240", "pm_score": 0, "selected": false, "text": "<p>Apparently, I'm responsible for initiating the close reason. I did read the question in detail, but not the revisions that had not happened at the time. Here is why I voted to close:</p>\n\n<p>Your question was \"What should I expect if I do X?\" The correct answer is \"Don't do X.\" Therefore I consider the question to be a duplicate of \"Should I do X?\" because they have the same answer. There's no reason to have both questions on this site. </p>\n\n<p>As edited, your question is primarily opinion based, so I don't feel it should be reopened. </p>\n\n<p>I'm sorry you didn't like our answer to your question. You are not likely to get a better one elsewhere, because few people have two PhDs, and most of them are not like you.</p>\n" }, { "answer_id": 4650, "author": "Brian Tompsett - 汤莱恩", "author_id": 26708, "author_profile": "https://academia.meta.stackexchange.com/users/26708", "pm_score": 0, "selected": false, "text": "<p>I have looked at the latest edit, and now it looks like the question comes down to:</p>\n\n<blockquote>\n <p>The answer to this question strongly depends on individual factors such as a certain person’s preferences, a given institution’s regulations, the exact contents of your work or your personal values. Thus only someone familiar can answer this question and it cannot be generalised to apply to others. (See <a href=\"https://academia.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/3406\">this discussion</a> for more info.)</p>\n</blockquote>\n\n<p>Which is another reason it is not suitable for our format, so I have left it closed also.</p>\n" } ]

[ "https://academia.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/4623", "https://academia.meta.stackexchange.com", "https://academia.meta.stackexchange.com/users/-1/" ]

[ { "answer_id": 4628, "author": "StrongBad", "author_id": 929, "author_profile": "https://academia.meta.stackexchange.com/users/929", "pm_score": 2, "selected": false, "text": "<p>There seems to be a lot in your question. I will try my best to answer what I see, if I miss something, let me know ...</p>\n\n<blockquote>\n <p>What are implication for Academia SE users of recent licence changes and moderators disatisfaction and revolt?</p>\n</blockquote>\n\n<p>The license was changed from CC 3.0 to CC 4.0. There are some immediate effects of that as the terms of the licenses are different. There is also the issue that SE has now set a precedent of retroactively re-licensing our content. This has raised the question of what prevents them in the future of attempting to re-licensing our content under a more restrictive license. The effect on Academia.SE users of the moderator dissatisfaction and revolt is pretty limited. We are still handling flags and user issues in a timely manner.</p>\n\n<blockquote>\n <p>Another one wrote A request for SE employees and CMs User Apparente was suspended That user was very nice and insightful, wonder what happened.</p>\n</blockquote>\n\n<p>I requested something in that question for CMs. I doubt anything will come out of it. The linked user was not suspended on Academia.SE so there really is nothing anyone, but that user, can say.</p>\n\n<blockquote>\n <p>Everything I read it seems like moderators knew from the start of this year that something is going wrong, however they proceed with election for new moderators.</p>\n</blockquote>\n\n<p>There are lots of things wrong, but I am confident that if we could go back to the beginning of the year, or even prior to the election scheduling, that few moderators would have predicted things going as poorly as they have. No one was trying to mislead anyone.</p>\n\n<blockquote>\n <p>When I asked one user why she didn't apply for a position, she told me that big troubles are coming, now I understand on what she implied, however, if you all knew that why moderators kept us in dark?</p>\n</blockquote>\n\n<p>I have no idea what this user told you, but apart from things we are not allowed to tell you, we don't keep you in the dark. In general, the things we are not allowed to tell you are \"relatively small\" (like what an individual said or PII) or scheduled for a widespread announcement.</p>\n\n<blockquote>\n <p>We as ordinary users how should react to these new changes on SE, are we somehow affected?</p>\n</blockquote>\n\n<p>I think each user needs to decide how they feel about the changed in the ToS regarding the right to sue, the ads and the fingerprinting associated with them, the re-licensing, and the public slandering of an SE user/moderator.</p>\n\n<blockquote>\n <p>are our identities and location sold to third parties now?</p>\n</blockquote>\n\n<p>I am not aware of any public change to the policies regarding the use of our identities and location, but this is not something I have been following.</p>\n\n<blockquote>\n <p>Also moderators that suspend their activities commented or implied that they will come back, so what is the issue than?</p>\n</blockquote>\n\n<p>I don't understand this question at all.</p>\n" }, { "answer_id": 4629, "author": "Massimo Ortolano", "author_id": 20058, "author_profile": "https://academia.meta.stackexchange.com/users/20058", "pm_score": 2, "selected": false, "text": "<p>The recent troublesome events have been extensively discussed on the main Meta, and I don't think there's anything significant we can add here. </p>\n\n<blockquote>\n <p>Everything I read it seems like moderators knew from the start of this year that something is going wrong, however they proceed with election for new moderators.</p>\n</blockquote>\n\n<p>There was nothing wrong at the start of this year and the troublesome events took place when elections had already started. As a candidate, I was well aware of the ongoing discussion on the main Meta.</p>\n\n<blockquote>\n <p>if you all knew that why moderators kept us in dark?</p>\n</blockquote>\n\n<p>I don't think anyone was \"kept in the dark\". During the election things were evolving and probably no one had a clear understanding of the ongoing events. Note also that people here participate with different levels of involvement. For many, events that are not specifically connected to asking and answering questions on this site are totally irrelevant. In other words, those who are interested in the meta-life of Stack Exchange may be a negligible minority.</p>\n\n<blockquote>\n <p>We as ordinary users how should react to these new changes on SE, are we somehow affected?</p>\n</blockquote>\n\n<p>It's up to you: How do you consider your participation to Stack Exchange? How do you use it? How do you react to troublesome events in your life? </p>\n\n<blockquote>\n <p>are our identities and location sold to third parties now?</p>\n</blockquote>\n\n<p>There's no reason whatsoever to think this.</p>\n\n<blockquote>\n <p>Also moderators that suspend their activities commented or implied that they will come back, so what is the issue than?</p>\n</blockquote>\n\n<p>I don't understand this point. Suspending the moderation activity is a form of protest against certain actions from Stack Exchange, the company. Protestants may withdraw their action if the issues that led to the protest are resolved. </p>\n" } ]

[ "https://academia.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/4627", "https://academia.meta.stackexchange.com", "https://academia.meta.stackexchange.com/users/41198/" ]

[ { "answer_id": 4633, "author": "cag51", "author_id": 79875, "author_profile": "https://academia.meta.stackexchange.com/users/79875", "pm_score": 3, "selected": false, "text": "<p>It looks like there is a <a href=\"https://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/writing\" class=\"post-tag\" title=\"show questions tagged &#39;writing&#39;\" rel=\"tag\">writing</a> tag already, with the description:</p>\n\n<blockquote>\n <p>Academic writing is intended for a critical and informed audience, based on closely investigated knowledge, and posits ideas or arguments.</p>\n</blockquote>\n\n<p>Would \"academic-writing\" be a better name or synonym for this tag? Given the nature of the site, I'm inclined to think that the \"academic\" qualifier is implied. After all, questions about non-academic writing wouldn't be on-topic here. </p>\n" }, { "answer_id": 4634, "author": "Massimo Ortolano", "author_id": 20058, "author_profile": "https://academia.meta.stackexchange.com/users/20058", "pm_score": 2, "selected": false, "text": "<p>In addition to <a href=\"https://academia.meta.stackexchange.com/a/4633/20058\">cag51's answer</a>, there is also a <a href=\"https://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/writing-style\" class=\"post-tag\" title=\"show questions tagged &#39;writing-style&#39;\" rel=\"tag\">writing-style</a> tag. I think that the two tags cover the range of questions we get here about academic writing.</p>\n\n<p>We can maybe create the tag synonyms \"academic-writing\" and \"academic-writing-style\" (for symmetry). However, the <a href=\"https://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/writing\" class=\"post-tag\" title=\"show questions tagged &#39;writing&#39;\" rel=\"tag\">writing</a> tag has already the synonym <a href=\"https://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/scientific-writing\" class=\"post-tag\" title=\"show questions tagged &#39;scientific-writing&#39;\" rel=\"tag\">scientific-writing</a>. I'm not particularly keen on having a proliferation of tags, maybe it's better to rationalize a bit on this one.</p>\n" }, { "answer_id": 4635, "author": "April Salutes Monica C.", "author_id": 104438, "author_profile": "https://academia.meta.stackexchange.com/users/104438", "pm_score": 1, "selected": false, "text": "<p>Also on writing.SE, we handle writing questions, including academic ones, technical writing ones, and other non-fiction, so migrating to that site may be a useful option? (Not like Writing has any mods left, of course.)</p>\n" } ]

[ "https://academia.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/4632", "https://academia.meta.stackexchange.com", "https://academia.meta.stackexchange.com/users/81424/" ]

[ { "answer_id": 4641, "author": "Wrzlprmft", "author_id": 7734, "author_profile": "https://academia.meta.stackexchange.com/users/7734", "pm_score": 2, "selected": false, "text": "<p>Just answering the technical side of this: If you go to <a href=\"https://academia.stackexchange.com/posts/142194/revisions\">the question’s edit history</a>, you can see that it was reopened shortly after being closed (and by whom).</p>\n" }, { "answer_id": 4643, "author": "Massimo Ortolano", "author_id": 20058, "author_profile": "https://academia.meta.stackexchange.com/users/20058", "pm_score": 4, "selected": false, "text": "<p>The question is open now because it was actually reopened by the votes of five users. </p>\n\n<p>Once the question was reopened, since other comments were piling up, I deleted the few comments discussing closing and reopening because it seemed that there were no other objections (the fact it was New Year's Eve may be a reason, though). The deleted comments were:</p>\n\n<ul>\n<li><blockquote>\n <p>I am genuinely curious. What is the purpose of closing? OP asks some\n useful questions that can potentially have good answers. Maybe others\n experienced a similar situation and can provide a general answer.</p>\n</blockquote></li>\n<li><blockquote>\n <p>Voting to reopen. Even if there's not a simple, concrete answer, a\n good response could be something like how to go about a fact-finding\n mission. If this instructor wants help figuring out student feedback\n and improving their course to make a better environment for all of\n their students.. I mean, isn't that a really good sort of question?</p>\n</blockquote></li>\n<li><blockquote>\n <p>Voting to reopen. Thanks for insights</p>\n</blockquote></li>\n</ul>\n\n<p>I left your comment for the suggestion \"Try asking your students\", which may be valuable.</p>\n" }, { "answer_id": 4671, "author": "Nat", "author_id": 38709, "author_profile": "https://academia.meta.stackexchange.com/users/38709", "pm_score": 2, "selected": false, "text": "<p><strong><em>tl;dr</em>–</strong> The question was answerable because someone could post the information necessary to help the asker figure out what they were asking about. While this may've meant telling the asker that they had some investigation to do, that's perfectly fine – just like it's fine to give abstract answers on SE.Math or instructions on how to figure out a computer problem on SE.SuperUser.</p>\n<hr />\n<p>Somewhat belated, but wanted to explain my reason for voting to reopen...</p>\n<hr />\n<h3>Discussion: Good answers are maximally concrete, but sometimes that's still pretty abstract.</h3>\n<p>Hypothetically, say someone on SE.Math asks:</p>\n<blockquote>\n<p>If <em>x</em> + <em>y</em> = 2 and <em>x</em> = 1, what's <em>y</em>?</p>\n</blockquote>\n<p>Then we'd tell them that <em>y</em> = 1.</p>\n<p>But say someone asks:</p>\n<blockquote>\n<p>If <em>x</em> + <em>y</em> = 2, what's <em>y</em>?</p>\n</blockquote>\n<p>Should we close their question for not having enough information? Or, is it okay to be abstract in saying that <em>y</em> = 2 - <em>x</em>?</p>\n<p>I'd frame this as an issue of <a href=\"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fold_(higher-order_function)\" rel=\"nofollow noreferrer\">folding</a> <a href=\"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abstract_syntax_tree\" rel=\"nofollow noreferrer\">abstract syntax trees</a>. When we answer questions, we:</p>\n<ol>\n<li><p>Parse the question.</p>\n</li>\n<li><p>Fold it as much as possible.</p>\n</li>\n<li><p>Post the result as an answer.</p>\n</li>\n</ol>\n<p>For example, when answering either SE.Math question, you'd probably arrive at the fact that <em>y</em> = 2 - <em>x</em>. However:</p>\n<ol>\n<li><p>In the first case, you continue to find that <em>y</em> = 1 because you're able to.</p>\n</li>\n<li><p>In the second case, you stop and post <em>y</em> = 2 - <em>x</em> because that's as far as you can go.</p>\n</li>\n</ol>\n<p>Point being that questions are still answerable even if we don't have enough information to &quot;<em>fully</em>&quot; answer them.</p>\n<hr />\n<h3>The SE.Academia question discussed in this SE.Academia.Meta question could be answered abstractly.</h3>\n<p>With respect to <a href=\"https://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/142194/\">this SE.Academia question</a>, it'd seem hard to give a concrete answer (like <em>y</em> = 1) to why the asker's female students gave them lower scores than their male students.</p>\n<p>Still, it seems like we could answer it.</p>\n<p>I'd suggest something like this:</p>\n<ol>\n<li><p>Put yourself in the asker's shoes.</p>\n</li>\n<li><p>Imagine how you'd find the answer to this problem.</p>\n</li>\n<li><p>Fold it as far as possible.</p>\n</li>\n<li><p>Post the answer.</p>\n</li>\n</ol>\n<p>Of course, there'd be a lot of ways that you could, in theory, find an answer to the question.</p>\n<p>For example, one possible answer might be:</p>\n<ol>\n<li><p>Invent a time machine.</p>\n</li>\n<li><p>Go forward into the future to where there's thought-reading technology.</p>\n</li>\n<li><p>Bring that technology back to the present.</p>\n</li>\n<li><p>Use it to figure out what the students' reasonings were.</p>\n</li>\n</ol>\n<p>That'd be sorta like telling the SE.Math person that they should get a quantum-computer to find an approximate solution for <em>y</em>. Which, obviously, would be a bad answer despite technical correctness.</p>\n<p>Instead, good abstract answers ought to be reasonably implementable. For example, a good answer might:</p>\n<ol>\n<li><p>Present the space of likely explanations based on published researched or/and personal experience.</p>\n</li>\n<li><p>Suggest a practical methodology for narrowing down the presented possibilities to as few as possible (ideally one).</p>\n</li>\n</ol>\n<p>For example, a good answer might be like:</p>\n<blockquote>\n<p>Studies have shown that, when there's a gender disparity in student feedback, it's likely due to one of the following reasons:</p>\n<ol>\n<li><p>Teaching style appealed more to one gender than the other.</p>\n</li>\n<li><p>Subject was more interesting to one gender than the other.</p>\n</li>\n<li><p>Students perceived instructor as having been sexist.</p>\n</li>\n</ol>\n<p>In order to determine which of these common explanations may be applicable to your case, you should:</p>\n<ol>\n<li><p>Perform <a href=\"https://academia.stackexchange.com/\">this inventory</a> to determine if your teaching style has a gender bias.</p>\n</li>\n<li><p>Check <a href=\"https://academia.stackexchange.com/\">this table</a> for gender preference statistics on your field, and then <a href=\"https://academia.stackexchange.com/\">this correlation</a> to estimate the expected effect on student feedback.</p>\n</li>\n<li><p>Consult with your TA's to get their opinions on if perceived sexism may've been an issue.</p>\n</li>\n</ol>\n</blockquote>\n<p>Of course, if the asker had included more information, e.g.</p>\n<ol>\n<li><p>a detailed description of their teaching style;</p>\n</li>\n<li><p>a full description of their subject and course content;</p>\n</li>\n<li><p>feedback from their TA's on if there may've been perceived sexism;</p>\n</li>\n</ol>\n<p>then instead of posting the more abstract answer, we could fold it into a more concrete conclusion.</p>\n<p>The point's just that we don't need to simply say something like</p>\n<blockquote>\n<p>Your female students were more bored by the subject matter than your male students.</p>\n</blockquote>\n<p>if we don't actually know that to be the case.</p>\n<hr />\n<h3>Conclusion: The question was answerable, even if not concretely.</h3>\n<p>In short, while there may not have been enough information to precisely explain the gender disparity that the asker saw in their student evaluations, a good answer wouldn't need to provide such a concrete answer any more than a good SE.Math answer would need to provide a specific number.</p>\n<p>Instead, it's okay to give an asker a framework that they can use to find their concrete answer. For example:</p>\n<ol>\n<li><p>If someone's asking for a solution to a math problem, it's okay to give an algebraic response instead of a number.</p>\n</li>\n<li><p>If someone's asking how to fix their computer, it's okay to give them instructions on how to diagnose the problem before actually telling them how to fix it.</p>\n</li>\n<li><p>If someone's asking about how to interpret student feedback, it's okay to give them instructions on how to go about examining that feedback.</p>\n</li>\n</ol>\n" } ]

[ "https://academia.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/4640", "https://academia.meta.stackexchange.com", "https://academia.meta.stackexchange.com/users/13240/" ]

[ { "answer_id": 4646, "author": "Anonymous Physicist", "author_id": 13240, "author_profile": "https://academia.meta.stackexchange.com/users/13240", "pm_score": 2, "selected": false, "text": "<blockquote>\n <p>The core values of the company began to shift and outwardly it seems building strong communities was no longer the focus, making money was.</p>\n</blockquote>\n\n<p>I'm confused about why you think this. The company was definitely founded to make money from the start. The initial focus on community was a step towards that. What is amazing here is that it was such a long-term strategy. </p>\n\n<p>I do not see why you should expect a company to put anything ahead of profits. There are exceptions (social enterprises) but I never saw any signs Stack Exchange was an exception.</p>\n" }, { "answer_id": 4647, "author": "gerrit", "author_id": 1033, "author_profile": "https://academia.meta.stackexchange.com/users/1033", "pm_score": 5, "selected": false, "text": "<h2><strong>Thank you for your service!</strong></h2>\n\n<p>We will miss you and your contributions as user and moderator. They were always excellent. The site will not be the same without you. All the best!</p>\n\n<p>^{(I could try to write a long essay, but I don't think I could find the right words, so I will stop here.)}</p>\n" }, { "answer_id": 4648, "author": "Paulo Cereda", "author_id": 46993, "author_profile": "https://academia.meta.stackexchange.com/users/46993", "pm_score": 5, "selected": false, "text": "<p>To a significant amount of researchers out there, life in academia is rough, even brutal and toxic. Poor students have their lives, hopes and dreams sucked out of their bodies, for the sake of production, of science, of progress, breaking the shackles of ignorance for the good of mankind. It is a heavy burden, sometimes too heavy.</p>\n\n<p><em>Wir müssen wissen, wir werden wissen!</em></p>\n\n<p>Most of the time, at a high price. We get stressed. We get lost. Sometimes, we cry for help in the hopes some blessed soul will lend a hand. It happens, thankfully. But some cries, most of them surely, go unnoticed. Students suffer to reach deadlines, to get papers accepted in conferences and journals, to get a good insight, to come up with innovation, to make a difference. They struggle so hard to not fall apart, to not break into pieces. It is common to hear <em>\"Where's the revised version of your paper?\"</em> instead <em>\"What was the last time you ate? Are you hungry?\"</em>. We want to harvest knowledge at the expense of the well being of students.</p>\n\n<p>When in despair, where to go, where to find a escape valve?</p>\n\n<p>I do believe one of the answers to this question is <a href=\"https://academia.stackexchange.com/\">this very website</a>. You all bring hope to poor students that are struggling with their academic lives, providing technical advices and guidances without, however, losing the kindness needed to address such themes in a humanized way.</p>\n\n<p><em>And that is where you, Dr. StrongBad, really shines.</em> <code>:)</code></p>\n\n<p>We know each other from the TeX community. Sometimes, we have a nice conversation in the chat room. Speaking of which, the vast majority of the chat residents has a doctorate degree. These people are experts in their fields, work in renowed universities. But, when hanging out in there, we never cared about our OrcID profiles, our titles, our h-indices or any of this academic balderdash. We are just a bunch of wacky people having legimitate fun, helping and instructing each other the best we could.</p>\n\n<p>Your work in this community reflects the exact same ideal we all hold dear. You are a superb moderator and you will surely be missed in this community, as well as in the TeX corner. I completely understand the motivations for your resignation, and I share your concerns with the future of SE/SO as well.</p>\n\n<p>Thank you very much for making academic life a better, less frustrating experience for most researchers, scholars, lecturers and students out there! Kudos to you and to all the moderators in this website!</p>\n\n<p>A great hug from the TeX community! Quack! <code>:)</code></p>\n" }, { "answer_id": 4649, "author": "Buffy", "author_id": 75368, "author_profile": "https://academia.meta.stackexchange.com/users/75368", "pm_score": 4, "selected": false, "text": "<p>Maybe you'd reconsider. The only way this place can get better is if the people who care enough to contribute stay around and keep at it. </p>\n\n<p>I hope it isn't just general burnout though. For that, a break might be enough. </p>\n\n<hr>\n\n<p>Since this is the academia forum, let me add that the administration of universities also do some stupid and terrible things on occasion. But few faculty leave in protest. Many of us have experienced such things, I guess. The situation isn't exactly the same, since giving up volunteer work isn't the same as giving up a job. But, still, it is the ones that stay that have a chance to make a change. </p>\n" }, { "answer_id": 4695, "author": "Federico Poloni", "author_id": 958, "author_profile": "https://academia.meta.stackexchange.com/users/958", "pm_score": -1, "selected": false, "text": "<p>I'm adding an answer to point out the last interaction here, in case you missed it; it is now buried in the edit history. On April 2, @Wrzlprmft added the tag <a href=\"https://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/status-review\" class=\"post-tag\" title=\"show questions tagged &#39;status-review&#39;\" rel=\"tag\">status-review</a> to this question, which (after a recent change) is the preferred way to <a href=\"https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/345032/community-and-moderator-guidelines-for-escalating-issues-via-new-response-proces?cb=1\">ask for SE staff attention on important posts in metas</a>. One week after, SE employee @JNat silently removed the tag without addressing the issue and without an edit comment.</p>\n" } ]

[ "https://academia.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/4645", "https://academia.meta.stackexchange.com", "https://academia.meta.stackexchange.com/users/929/" ]

[ { "answer_id": 4654, "author": "eykanal", "author_id": 73, "author_profile": "https://academia.meta.stackexchange.com/users/73", "pm_score": 3, "selected": false, "text": "<p>The answer is honestly quite accurate, but uses unnecessarily opinionated language. I would prefer if the answer would be simply factual, possibly as follows:</p>\n\n<blockquote>\n <p>This question has only one correct answer, unfortunately. Providing anything other than a positive \"I support diversity through &lt;methods&gt;\" is likely to significantly harm your application.</p>\n</blockquote>\n\n<p>The above says the same thing as the current answer but without the attitude.</p>\n" }, { "answer_id": 4655, "author": "Martin Argerami", "author_id": 542, "author_profile": "https://academia.meta.stackexchange.com/users/542", "pm_score": 4, "selected": false, "text": "<p>At the moment I'm writing this, it is the highest voted answer. To me, that's the community's answer.</p>\n\n<p>Deciding what to do about it in meta, is not what \"the community wants\" but rather what a the much smaller group who frequents meta wants.</p>\n" }, { "answer_id": 4656, "author": "DJClayworth", "author_id": 1128, "author_profile": "https://academia.meta.stackexchange.com/users/1128", "pm_score": 3, "selected": false, "text": "<p>The answer is actually not an answer to the question. The question asks about what to say in response to the interview question. It specifically says \"Which aspects [do] I need to cover to delivering a winning answer?\" </p>\n\n<p>The answer does not address that issue at all. It presumes the questioner is really asking about whether diversity is 'valid\", and merely provides political commentary on whether they should go along with it or not.</p>\n\n<p>We respond to this by downvoting. Also by upvoting the much better answers that there are to the question.</p>\n\n<p>Let us also take not of the fact that writing this answer is the user's ONLY activity on Academia. It's a drive-by answer.</p>\n" }, { "answer_id": 4657, "author": "ObscureOwl", "author_id": 115975, "author_profile": "https://academia.meta.stackexchange.com/users/115975", "pm_score": 4, "selected": false, "text": "<p>The OP's post talks about \"how\" questions posed in the interview. \"How\" do you support X. That implies that the decision is already been made that X should be supported.</p>\n\n<p>In that sense, the controversial answer and eykanal's suggested version are both not really answers to the \"how\", or to the \"what aspects\" questions of the OP.</p>\n\n<p>That doesn't make paulj's answer untrue; it <em>is</em> a political issue. Society put a political question to the university (\"what are you going to do about diversity\"). Whatever response the university gives is political. To do something about diversity is political; to not do something is also political.</p>\n\n<p>I think that with cag51's edits that removed some incendiary language, the answer as it stands now represents a reasonable perspective. (Even if I don't really agree with the undertone.)</p>\n" }, { "answer_id": 4658, "author": "Bryan Krause", "author_id": 63475, "author_profile": "https://academia.meta.stackexchange.com/users/63475", "pm_score": 4, "selected": false, "text": "<p>I think it's likely that the voting on this particular Q&amp;A has been tilted by exposure to the Hot Network Questions, and the answer is by someone who hasn't participated on Academia.SE before. I have a bit of doubt that the answer is supported by any particular experience of the answerer, and instead is based on their biased view of what academia is and what academic hires involve.</p>\n\n<p>It really seems like \"HNQ bait\" to me, rather than an answer meant to be helpful to the OP. I think it distracts from other answers that help OP to understand what is meant by these sorts of questions.</p>\n\n<p>That said, I think it's difficult to moderate this sort of answer. I've downvoted it, and upvoted the other answers I think are actually helpful. I think that's all we can really do.</p>\n" }, { "answer_id": 4659, "author": "Scott Seidman", "author_id": 20457, "author_profile": "https://academia.meta.stackexchange.com/users/20457", "pm_score": 1, "selected": false, "text": "<p>Why are you so sure it's correct? Does the answerer provide any data suggesting that people who have a poor answer to such questions don't get hired? Have they sat on a search committee that eliminated a candidate based on this factor? This is anecdotal at best, and wrong at worst. </p>\n\n<p>Then again, I suppose \"I have no commitment to promoting diversity, and my actions will be counter to such efforts\" would be a fine reason to not hire someone onto a campus committed to a diverse student body. I'm curious about whether \"I haven't considered diversity issues\" would eliminate a candidate, but until the answerer can provide some background establishing credibility, I have no reason to believe that the answerer has any more insight that I might.</p>\n\n<p>Note that in the sense that the answer does not answer the asker's question, it's not a real answer. It's a rant.</p>\n\n<p>In any case, I suggest it doesn't meet the \"be nice\" standard, as there are much less offensive ways to say the same thing, and the answerer hasn't even tried to phrase this nicely. I don't care if I'm personally offended, but there is a community standard, in writing. I may or may not agree with it, but via my participation, I signed on to it, and if I didn't want to adhere to that standard, I would stop participating.</p>\n" }, { "answer_id": 4660, "author": "Elizabeth Henning", "author_id": 77539, "author_profile": "https://academia.meta.stackexchange.com/users/77539", "pm_score": 2, "selected": false, "text": "<p>Imagine an answer to an analogous question on Workplace SE saying that if you attack the hiring manager's priorities or you criticize the stated organizational goals, you won't get the job. Well, duh. Why should they hire someone contemptuous of what they're trying to accomplish?</p>\n\n<p>I'm pretty sure such an answer wouldn't do very well on Workplace SE. The difference here is that a lot more people think their uninformed opinions about academia are worth something. Also, the answer score may have been affected by the users that drift in from the HNQ. Just downvote.</p>\n" } ]

[ "https://academia.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/4653", "https://academia.meta.stackexchange.com", "https://academia.meta.stackexchange.com/users/73/" ]

[ { "answer_id": 4670, "author": "Wrzlprmft", "author_id": 7734, "author_profile": "https://academia.meta.stackexchange.com/users/7734", "pm_score": 3, "selected": false, "text": "<h3>Summary</h3>\n\n<p>The ease of research is easily underestimated and we can produce valuable answers to such questions.\nTherefore, we should not have a close reason or general policy to close such questions.\nInstead, we can use existing mechanisms to deal with these questions: comment, downvote, and (in extreme cases) close as unclear.</p>\n\n<h3>Canned Close Reasons</h3>\n\n<p>We can only have three custom close reasons.\nSince the proposed close reason would be needed much less frequently than the existing ones (shopping, individual factors, generic off-scope), I would not touch this.</p>\n\n<p>That being said, the canned close reasons exist to ease reviewing and provide more information for askers than the usual comments would.\nThey do not limit what we can close:\nWe can close questions for something other than a canned reason, in particular if we agree on this on Meta.\nSo, for the remainder of my answer I will be addressing the question:</p>\n\n<h3>Do we want to close citation-style questions that do not show prior research?</h3>\n\n<p>In general, prior research is not a strict requirement for Stack Exchange questions anymore.\nStack Exchange aims to be the thing that you find when you search the Internet for certain questions.</p>\n\n<p>Still, single sites can decide that they do not want certain types of questions without evidence of prior research.\nTo take the example you mention, on language sites (like English Language &amp; Usage or German Language, which I moderate), the asker has to argue why a dictionary did not help (in most cases).\nThis is not because we want evidence that the asker consulted a dictionary (they usually have); this is because we cannot give them a helpful answer without knowing why the dictionary did not.\nOtherwise we can only create or cite a dictionary entry, which is pointless:\nDictionaries already exist and do a far better job at it than Stack Exchange sites.\nFinally note that bad questions that can be answered by a dictionary are a major problem on language sites.</p>\n\n<p>I do not think this translates to questions about applying citation style guides:</p>\n\n<ul>\n<li><p>It is a real no-brainer to find something in a dictionary, in particular a digital one. Finding something in a style guide is far more difficult. You may still consider it easy, but then you probably know the relevant keywords, etc.</p></li>\n<li><p>A concise summary or application of a style guide to a specific case makes the Internet a better place as it allows people to get the desired information quicker than otherwise. Replicating a dictionary entry doesn’t.</p></li>\n<li><p>We are not overrun by citation-style questions, let alone those without prior research. In fact roughly half of the questions you cite at least mention some prior research (though it could be more detailed).</p></li>\n</ul>\n\n<p>Finally, there is a meta reason to avoid this kind of closure: It will be misunderstood and abused by some close voters (which happens frequently on language sites). For most questions on this site, it does not make sense to require of prior research.</p>\n\n<h3>What can we do instead?</h3>\n\n<ul>\n<li><p>Downvote. That a question that could be easily answered by a quick look in the pertinent style guide is a valid reason.</p></li>\n<li><p>Leave a comment asking the asker to edit their question to elaborate why their research did not help them. Keep in mind and mention that this is to better understand their problem and thus be able to better help them.</p></li>\n<li><p>In extreme cases, e.g., where the asker already provides a quote from the style guide that appears to answer their question: Close the question as unclear.</p></li>\n</ul>\n" }, { "answer_id": 4672, "author": "Massimo Ortolano", "author_id": 20058, "author_profile": "https://academia.meta.stackexchange.com/users/20058", "pm_score": 2, "selected": false, "text": "<p>Let me give a less \"formal\" answer than <a href=\"https://academia.meta.stackexchange.com/a/4670/20058\">Wrzlprmft's one</a>.</p>\n\n<p>In my experience, style guides are seldom complete, and are frequently of not-so-easy interpretation, especially for novices. I saw people advocating the closure of questions about style by saying \"read the style guide!\", when the style guide doesn't even exist, or is either incomplete or seldom respected by the journals that should adopt it (along the years, I had a few fights with copy-editors who, in the first turn of proofs, made changes which were against their own journal style guide).</p>\n\n<blockquote>\n <p>I would love to be able to flag these for closing for lack of research, but Academia.SE doesn't have this close reason.</p>\n</blockquote>\n\n<p>What you would love, in view of the above, would be a very bad idea for this community, leading to its impoverishment. A lot of us have spent many years reading style guides, interpreting their nuances, and seeing them applied by the copy editors: I think we should be willing to share this knowledge, without the constraints of a bureaucratic close reason.</p>\n" } ]

[ "https://academia.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/4669", "https://academia.meta.stackexchange.com", "https://academia.meta.stackexchange.com/users/43873/" ]

[ { "answer_id": 4674, "author": "Jeff", "author_id": 57314, "author_profile": "https://academia.meta.stackexchange.com/users/57314", "pm_score": 3, "selected": false, "text": "<p>This is a good idea. I was also wondering about this in regards to software shopping questions. We've had at least three recently:</p>\n\n<p><a href=\"https://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/145321/creating-a-secure-test-environment-for-a-lab-practical\">Creating a secure test environment for a lab practical</a></p>\n\n<p><a href=\"https://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/145280/alternatives-to-big-name-proprietary-remote-lecturing-tools\">Alternatives to big-name proprietary remote-lecturing tools</a></p>\n\n<p><a href=\"https://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/145222/software-to-live-stream-presentations\">Software to live-stream presentations</a></p>\n\n<p>Two of which are closed, and one which I expect will be. But at the same time, this seems like a reasonable site to come to in order to find this sort of information. Should we direct these sorts of questions to the chat?</p>\n" }, { "answer_id": 4677, "author": "Wrzlprmft", "author_id": 7734, "author_profile": "https://academia.meta.stackexchange.com/users/7734", "pm_score": 2, "selected": false, "text": "<p>I created <a href=\"https://academia.meta.stackexchange.com/q/4680/7734\">a Meta post</a> to welcome and guide people visiting our site for this particular reason, collecting relevant questions and giving instructions for new questions. Please contribute, in particular by collecting relevant questions.</p>\n" }, { "answer_id": 4696, "author": "Nemo", "author_id": 32575, "author_profile": "https://academia.meta.stackexchange.com/users/32575", "pm_score": 0, "selected": false, "text": "<p>A few other groups are also busy in this field and open to participation:</p>\n\n<ul>\n<li><a href=\"https://www.eff.org/issues/covid-19\" rel=\"nofollow noreferrer\">EFF</a></li>\n<li><a href=\"https://wiki.fsfe.org/action/edit/Activities/FreeSoftware4RemoteWorking\" rel=\"nofollow noreferrer\">FSFE</a></li>\n<li><a href=\"https://libreplanet.org/wiki/Remote_Communication\" rel=\"nofollow noreferrer\">FSF</a></li>\n<li><a href=\"https://www.ifla.org/covid-19-and-libraries\" rel=\"nofollow noreferrer\">IFLA</a></li>\n<li><a href=\"https://noyb.eu/en/interrupted-transmission\" rel=\"nofollow noreferrer\">NOYB</a></li>\n<li><a href=\"https://sfconservancy.org/blog/2020/mar/17/remotetools/\" rel=\"nofollow noreferrer\">SFC</a></li>\n</ul>\n\n<p>In other languages:</p>\n\n<ul>\n<li><a href=\"https://www.chapril.org/-services-.html\" rel=\"nofollow noreferrer\">Chapril</a></li>\n<li><a href=\"https://www.continuitepedagogique.org/\" rel=\"nofollow noreferrer\">Continuité Pédagogique</a></li>\n<li><a href=\"https://framablog.org/2020/04/04/pour-un-plan-national-pour-la-culture-ouverte-leducation-ouverte-et-la-sante-ouverte/\" rel=\"nofollow noreferrer\">Framasoft</a></li>\n<li><a href=\"https://iorestoacasa.work/\" rel=\"nofollow noreferrer\">iorestoacasa.work</a></li>\n<li><a href=\"https://it.wikibooks.org/wiki/Software_libero_a_scuola/Solidariet%C3%A0_digitale\" rel=\"nofollow noreferrer\">Italian Wikibooks</a></li>\n</ul>\n" } ]

[ "https://academia.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/4673", "https://academia.meta.stackexchange.com", "https://academia.meta.stackexchange.com/users/20457/" ]

[ { "answer_id": 4676, "author": "cag51", "author_id": 79875, "author_profile": "https://academia.meta.stackexchange.com/users/79875", "pm_score": 2, "selected": false, "text": "<p>As you say, two of these questions are closed. The third seems like it might be salvageable: the title text (<a href=\"https://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/145321/creating-a-secure-test-environment-for-a-lab-practical\">Creating a secure test environment for a lab practical</a>) does not ask for a specific \"shopping\" recommendation, but the second paragraph does seem like it is asking for either a software solution (which is shopping) or technical help (which is off-topic). Perhaps someone will edit it, or perhaps it will be closed, but it seems like things are generally working as they should. </p>\n\n<blockquote>\n <p>These have been very slow to earn closure votes, with the still open one sitting at one vote for several days, which suggests a lot of the people who spend time in the review queues don't see them as closure-worthy. </p>\n</blockquote>\n\n<p>One possibility is that users found the resource requests useful/interesting even if they are technically off-topic, and so chose to \"skip\" voting on the question. Perhaps the recently-created <a href=\"https://chat.stackexchange.com/rooms/105448/online-learning-chat\">chat</a> will fill this need. </p>\n" }, { "answer_id": 4678, "author": "Wrzlprmft", "author_id": 7734, "author_profile": "https://academia.meta.stackexchange.com/users/7734", "pm_score": 2, "selected": false, "text": "<h1>Status Quo</h1>\n\n<p>There has never been a clear consensus whether shopping questions extend to software.\nHence it is missing from <a href=\"https://academia.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/3657/why-was-my-question-put-on-hold-for-shopping\">the shopping FAQ</a>.\nHaving a policy for this is long overdue.\nI suggest:</p>\n\n<h1>Suggested Policy</h1>\n\n<ol>\n<li><p>Do not close questions on how to solve a practical problem that is specific to academia or teaching. If the answer is to use a software (commercial or not) with certain features, that’s okay. Such a software can be explicitly named, but a good answer provides a list of alternatives (should they exist). It is even okay to ask such a question if the answer is most likely a software.</p></li>\n<li><p>Do not close questions that seek recommendations of software for purposes that are specific to academia or teaching, for example software for managing grades, courses, citations. However, such questions must adhere to <a href=\"https://softwarerecs.stackexchange.com/help/on-topic\">these established rules</a> from Software Recommendations SE.</p></li>\n<li><p>Close questions that seek recommendation of software that has a more general target audience, e.g., software for general video broadcasting or collaborative editing. These are best asked on <a href=\"https://softwarerecs.stackexchange.com/help/on-topic\">Software Recommendations SE</a>. Very roughly speaking, telling people to use a software for collaborative editing is within our expertise and scope; telling them which collaborative-editing software is best is not (when they already know that they want a collaborative editing software, and have no further academia-specific needs).</p></li>\n<li><p>If possible, edit questions to those described in Point 1, i.e., asking how to solve a problem. This even applies to questions as described in Point 2.</p></li>\n</ol>\n\n<h3>Rationale</h3>\n\n<p>There are two purposes of closing questions (that are relevant here):</p>\n\n<ul>\n<li><p>Avoid questions that we cannot answer or whose answers we cannot reasonably evaluate.\nThe proposed policy limits questions to those which really need the expertise of academics (as opposed to general software specialists), so this is fulfilled.</p></li>\n<li><p>Avoid questions that are not well suited for the Stack Exchange format in general, e.g., due to having no objective best answer.\nThis is why we close questions shopping for journals, universities, fields, and similar.\nThe existence of Software Recommendations SE shows that such questions can work – if they adhere to strict guidelines on the specifics of the software.\nSuch questions are not anymore about “What is the best citation software in general?” but “What citation software fulfils fulfils my specific requirements?”.\nIn contrast to questions shopping for journals or universities:</p>\n\n<ul>\n<li>these requirements can actually be described within the scope of a question</li>\n<li>there is little risk of the typical bad answers to shopping questions (e.g., from people blindly championing their field, university, etc.),</li>\n<li>we are not giving anybody the illusion that we can reasonably make a life decision for them.</li>\n</ul></li>\n</ul>\n\n<h3>Your Examples</h3>\n\n<ul>\n<li><p><a href=\"https://academia.stackexchange.com/q/145321/7734\">Creating a secure test environment for a programming lab practical</a> should not be closed as per Point 1: The question is asking for solving a specific problem, not necessarily with software. For example, a valid answer to this question could also be that it is inherently impossible to achieve the desired behaviour.</p></li>\n<li><p><a href=\"https://academia.stackexchange.com/q/145280/7734\">Alternatives to big-name proprietary remote-lecturing tools</a> and <a href=\"https://academia.stackexchange.com/q/145222/7734\">Software to live-stream presentations</a> fall under Point 2, though they seem duplicates of each other.</p></li>\n</ul>\n\n<p>Point 4 avoids unnecessary closures, <a href=\"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/XY_problem\" rel=\"nofollow noreferrer\">XY problems</a> and the resulting comment explosions, and focuses questions on our main area of expertise.</p>\n\n<h3>“I agree with everything but Point 2”</h3>\n\n<p>Please feel free to suggest the respective alternative as a separate answer, so it can be voted upon.\nYou can either copy my policy and modify the respective part or write something like “Wrzlprmft’s answer, except Point 2”.\nIdeally provide a rationale.</p>\n" }, { "answer_id": 4679, "author": "Federico Poloni", "author_id": 958, "author_profile": "https://academia.meta.stackexchange.com/users/958", "pm_score": 4, "selected": false, "text": "<p>(Disclaimer: I am the author of <a href=\"https://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/145280/alternatives-to-big-name-proprietary-remote-lecturing-tools\">Alternatives to big-name proprietary remote-lecturing tools</a> )</p>\n\n<h2>First of all: we make the rules</h2>\n\n<p>We are free to consider on-topic whichever questions we deem answerable or useful to academics. The fact that \"no shopping questions\" is a thing, in general, should not prevent us from accepting these questions. If we believe they are good ones, we can make an exception or modify the scope of the \"shopping\" definition.</p>\n\n<p>Are these useful questions for academics? In my view, <strong>yes</strong>. Using software to teach, do research and write papers is a part of our work. These questions are intrinsically more answerable than university-shopping or conference-shopping questions.</p>\n\n<h2>Softwarerecs.se is a bad idea for specialized needs</h2>\n\n<p>I have already it written several times in comments, but I believe [softwarerecs.se] is a bad idea. <strong>Suppose you need to find a good linear algebra book; would you ask a linear algebra expert, or a \"book expert\"?</strong> Questions on the software needs of academics are much more likely to receive a useful answer from the audience of our site than from the audience of softwarerecs.se.</p>\n\n<p>We people who use conferencing software for teaching have different needs than the other users in industry. For instance, I imagine that typically people in industry do not have a video-conference with one person speaking most of the time and 200 other passive users who are mostly listening and should not have their mics on all the time. They (often) do not need to share and record written notes, or to reproduce complicated mathematical formulas in chat.</p>\n\n<p>To sum up, I think that <strong>this is the right site for this kind of questions</strong>, and that <strong>we should amend the definition of \"shopping question\" to make them on-topic</strong> if they are not on topic already.</p>\n" }, { "answer_id": 4684, "author": "Anonymous Physicist", "author_id": 13240, "author_profile": "https://academia.meta.stackexchange.com/users/13240", "pm_score": -1, "selected": false, "text": "<p>Suggested Policy: Close questions that seek recommendations for software for teaching purposes, for example software for managing grades, courses, lectures, and citations.</p>\n\n<p>Rationale: These questions are <strong>uninteresting</strong> to site users. Most of them will also be opinion-based, as the different software companies have mostly copied each other's features. Most people only have experience with their own institution's software licenses, so for proprietary software few people will have broad experience to inform their opinions.</p>\n" }, { "answer_id": 4686, "author": "user3209815", "author_id": 14133, "author_profile": "https://academia.meta.stackexchange.com/users/14133", "pm_score": 2, "selected": false, "text": "<p>I would like to focus on 2 out of the 3 debated questions, as I believe that 2 of them fall into the same category: \"Software to live-stream presentations\" and \"Creating a secure test environment for a programming lab practical\". The first, I voted to close as shopping question and the second I voted to leave open.</p>\n\n<p>The guiding principle for me is what would constitute the accepted answer. </p>\n\n<p>I think that the same rationale would also apply for the highest upvoted answer, but first for reasons of brevity and second, because we are talking about the closing of a question, it seems closer related to the OP than the upvotes, I base the following discussion on the accepted answer.</p>\n\n<p>The first question asks for software recommendations for streaming presentations in an academic environment. Framed as such, natural answers would entail what the posters' experiences with such tools were in the past (e.g. Skype, Slack, Teams, ...). Suppose now it attracts three answers, each listing three suggestions with the rationale why the tool did work for the poster (i.e. we are looking at \"complete\" answers of similar quality). What would the criteria be for OP to accept the answer? What he likes best? What he ends up using? The first answer? In my opinion this ceases to be Q&amp;A and becomes a forum post all inclusive with extensive chat-like commenting. Members of the community will tend to upvote based on their preferences and perhaps even downvote based on their bad experiences with the tools, again, because there is no other inherent quality that might differentiate the answers. Further, what would be the benefit for a prospective reader? Plagued with the same question, happy to have found it already answered, how would he interpret the answers? Simply put, such questions merit a discussion and lists of preferences. I guess that it also could be construed as opinion-based under circumstances, but either way, closing material. </p>\n\n<p>Further, this is the epitome of \"boat programming\" question. I.e.: \"As an academic, what tools should I use for live-stream presentations in order to facilitate lectures, office hours and exams?\". The same tools are used in industry, family meetings, online role-playing games, etc. for a reason: the use cases are the same (need to communicate with a group, possibly with video support, share documents, present, etc.). So, the fact that the tool is for academia makes it in no way different or more special.</p>\n\n<p>As for the second question, although it could be seen as a shopping question, there is a another question, more relevant to Academia SE, underneath: how do we secure the integrity of exams that are forced to be conducted remotely. A serious question which warrants serious consideration and quality of answers, which would also be applicable to other readers. This is also a good example, as one can compare the answers in both questions. So, at worst, this question needs some editing for clarification, but I wouldn't consider it a shopping question.</p>\n" } ]

[ "https://academia.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/4675", "https://academia.meta.stackexchange.com", "https://academia.meta.stackexchange.com/users/57314/" ]

[ { "answer_id": 4681, "author": "Wrzlprmft", "author_id": 7734, "author_profile": "https://academia.meta.stackexchange.com/users/7734", "pm_score": 5, "selected": false, "text": "<h1>Remote teaching, studying, and exams</h1>\n\n<h3>General and Other</h3>\n\n<ul>\n<li><p><a href=\"https://academia.stackexchange.com/q/145370\">Tips for transition to online classrooms given university shutdowns in response to COVID-19</a></p></li>\n<li><p><a href=\"https://academia.stackexchange.com/q/83224\">How to get students to use the course forum?</a></p></li>\n<li><p><a href=\"https://academia.stackexchange.com/q/49881\">What makes an online course a valuable learning experience for a student?</a></p></li>\n<li><p><a href=\"https://academia.stackexchange.com/q/54275\">How much work is preparing a MOOC-ish course</a></p></li>\n<li><p><a href=\"https://academia.stackexchange.com/q/145732\">How should faculty implement STEM classes that require hands-on lab experience in online learning platforms given COVID-19 pandemic?</a></p></li>\n<li><p><a href=\"https://matheducators.stackexchange.com/q/18031/75\">How shall we teach math online?</a> (Math Educators SE)</p></li>\n<li><p><a href=\"https://cseducators.stackexchange.com/q/6236/25\">Tools for running classes remotely</a> (Computer-Science Educators SE)</p></li>\n<li><p><a href=\"https://anygoodthing.com/2020/03/12/please-do-a-bad-job-of-putting-your-courses-online/\" rel=\"nofollow noreferrer\">Please do a bad job of putting your courses online</a> (blog post about time investment and differences between emergency online teaching and regular one; somewhat US-specific)</p></li>\n<li><p><a href=\"https://www.tonybates.ca/2020/03/09/advice-to-those-about-to-teach-online-because-of-the-corona-virus/\" rel=\"nofollow noreferrer\">Advice to those about to teach online because of the corona-virus</a> (Tony Bates)</p></li>\n<li><p><a href=\"https://homonym.ca/published/online-teaching-with-the-most-basic-of-tools-email/\" rel=\"nofollow noreferrer\">Online Teaching with the most basic of tools – email</a> (Homonym)</p></li>\n<li><p><a href=\"https://www.insidehighered.com/advice/2020/03/11/practical-advice-instructors-faced-abrupt-move-online-teaching-opinion\" rel=\"nofollow noreferrer\">So You Want to Temporarily Teach Online</a> (Inside Higher Ed)</p></li>\n<li><p><a href=\"https://www.edutopia.org/article/what-teachers-china-have-learned-past-month\" rel=\"nofollow noreferrer\">What Teachers in China Have Learned in the Past Month</a> (Edutopia)</p></li>\n</ul>\n\n<h3>Other Collections (all external)</h3>\n\n<ul>\n<li><p><a href=\"https://library.educause.edu/topics/information-technology-management-and-leadership/covid19\" rel=\"nofollow noreferrer\">Educause</a></p></li>\n<li><p><a href=\"https://distancedesigneducation.wordpress.com/\" rel=\"nofollow noreferrer\">Distance Design Education</a> (blog dedicated to the eponymous topic, but with broader applicability)</p></li>\n</ul>\n\n<h3>Exams, Exercises, and other Evaluation</h3>\n\n<ul>\n<li><p><a href=\"https://academia.stackexchange.com/q/145494\">What methods can be used in online exams to genuinely test the students&#39; knowledge and capabilities?</a></p></li>\n<li><p><a href=\"https://academia.stackexchange.com/q/145102\">How to detect cheating when students take online quizzes or exams from home?</a></p></li>\n<li><p><a href=\"https://academia.stackexchange.com/q/147884\">Can online recording of work area at home be made a mandatory criterion for passing exams midway through a course?</a></p></li>\n<li><p><a href=\"https://academia.stackexchange.com/q/145321\">Creating a secure test environment for a programming lab practical</a></p></li>\n<li><p><a href=\"https://academia.stackexchange.com/q/145362\">YouTube video assignments?</a></p></li>\n<li><p><a href=\"https://academia.stackexchange.com/q/16250\">Online tool for receiving student files</a></p></li>\n<li><p><a href=\"https://academia.stackexchange.com/q/3611\">How is a Coursera exam typically conducted?</a></p></li>\n<li><p><a href=\"https://academia.stackexchange.com/q/114001\">Are online exam proctoring services efficient and trustworthy?</a></p></li>\n<li><p><a href=\"https://academia.stackexchange.com/q/79083\">Should a professor give students a take-home exam when the answers might be available online?</a></p></li>\n<li><p><a href=\"https://academia.stackexchange.com/q/147978\">Other students can easily cheat on a test and the grading system is relative – should I cheat and what else can I do?</a></p></li>\n<li><p><a href=\"https://academia.stackexchange.com/q/38073\">How to prevent cheating on take-home exams</a></p></li>\n<li><p><a href=\"https://academia.stackexchange.com/q/102064\">Fellow student asked question from take-home exam on Stack Exchange</a></p></li>\n<li><p><a href=\"https://cseducators.stackexchange.com/q/6231/25\">How to design online tests and prevent cheating?</a> (Computer-Science Educators SE)</p></li>\n<li><p><a href=\"https://cseducators.stackexchange.com/q/6234/25\">What evaluation methods can be used that don't involve testing but are adaptable to online courses</a> (Computer-Science Educators SE)</p></li>\n</ul>\n\n<h3>Lectures and interactions</h3>\n\n<ul>\n<li><p><a href=\"https://academia.stackexchange.com/q/145280\">Alternatives to big-name proprietary remote-lecturing tools</a></p></li>\n<li><p><a href=\"https://academia.stackexchange.com/q/145222\">Software to live-stream presentations</a></p></li>\n<li><p><a href=\"https://academia.stackexchange.com/q/10214\">How do you record your lectures?</a></p></li>\n<li><p><a href=\"https://academia.stackexchange.com/q/2862\">How to create PDF of slides with audio?</a></p></li>\n<li><p><a href=\"https://academia.stackexchange.com/q/13875\">Etiquette or useful guidelines while making video lectures</a></p></li>\n<li><p><a href=\"https://academia.stackexchange.com/q/61282\">How important is seeing the face of the instructor?</a></p></li>\n<li><p><a href=\"https://academia.stackexchange.com/q/42639\">Is there any system that enables online office hours?</a></p></li>\n<li><p><a href=\"https://academia.stackexchange.com/q/9221\">How much effort does it take to record video courses?</a></p></li>\n<li><p><a href=\"https://academia.stackexchange.com/q/145389\">Using Discord to support online teaching</a></p></li>\n<li><p><a href=\"https://academia.stackexchange.com/q/145820\">My professor is not teaching his online course himself, but uses publicly available videos instead. Is this appropriate?</a></p></li>\n<li><p><a href=\"https://matheducators.stackexchange.com/q/18030/75\">Online Whiteboard Application with Simple Latex Support</a> (Math Educators SE)</p></li>\n</ul>\n\n<h3>Course Design and Material</h3>\n\n<ul>\n<li><p><a href=\"https://academia.stackexchange.com/q/107721\">Online vs hard copy, which texts are students more likely to read?</a></p></li>\n<li><p><a href=\"https://academia.stackexchange.com/q/14257\">Are there any legal issues in having someone&#39;s book as the basis and as a textbook for an online course?</a></p></li>\n<li><p><a href=\"https://academia.stackexchange.com/q/56906\">Digital media rights for online courses (US)</a></p></li>\n<li><p><a href=\"https://academia.stackexchange.com/q/19944\">Can you describe a required online science course that used discussion well?</a></p></li>\n<li><p><a href=\"https://academia.stackexchange.com/q/7514\">How to read a textbook for distance learning coursework - do I need to work on fact recall, or is understanding enough?</a></p></li>\n</ul>\n\n<h3>Humour</h3>\n\n<ul>\n<li><a href=\"https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CCe5PaeAeew\" rel=\"nofollow noreferrer\">Michael Bruening\n– I will survive (teaching online)</a> (YouTube)</li>\n</ul>\n" }, { "answer_id": 4682, "author": "Wrzlprmft", "author_id": 7734, "author_profile": "https://academia.meta.stackexchange.com/users/7734", "pm_score": 4, "selected": false, "text": "<h1>Conferences</h1>\n\n<ul>\n<li><p><a href=\"https://academia.stackexchange.com/q/145068\">How to deal with the COVID-19 outbreak while organizing a conference?</a></p></li>\n<li><p><a href=\"https://academia.stackexchange.com/q/145328\">Can I put an invited talk on my CV if the conference was canceled?</a></p></li>\n</ul>\n" }, { "answer_id": 4683, "author": "Wrzlprmft", "author_id": 7734, "author_profile": "https://academia.meta.stackexchange.com/users/7734", "pm_score": 4, "selected": false, "text": "<h1>Other questions and resources pertaining to the COVID-19 crisis</h1>\n\n<h3>Publications</h3>\n\n<ul>\n<li><a href=\"https://academia.stackexchange.com/q/145243\">In this time of crisis, would the journals Nature and Science prioritize papers about COVID-19?</a></li>\n<li><a href=\"https://academia.stackexchange.com/q/145583\">Has the rate of papers uploaded to arXiv changed due to Covid-19?</a></li>\n<li><a href=\"https://academia.stackexchange.com/q/145539\">How does the COVID-19 crisis affect durations of peer review and editorial handling?</a></li>\n<li><a href=\"https://academia.stackexchange.com/q/145638\">Acknowledging local government for quarantine measures</a></li>\n</ul>\n\n<h3>Remote collaborations, job interviews, etc.</h3>\n\n<ul>\n<li><a href=\"https://academia.stackexchange.com/q/2071\">What are useful tips and tricks for collaborating remotely?</a></li>\n<li><a href=\"https://academia.stackexchange.com/q/36886\">How could one prepare for a telecon interview for a government lab?</a></li>\n<li><a href=\"https://academia.stackexchange.com/q/1137\">Advice/guidance when interviewing for a faculty or postdoc job via Skype or phone?</a></li>\n<li><a href=\"https://academia.stackexchange.com/q/43940\">What kind of video conference software do academics use?</a></li>\n<li><a href=\"https://academia.stackexchange.com/q/64873\">How to present a paper via skype?</a></li>\n<li><a href=\"https://academia.stackexchange.com/q/101890\">Evaluation criteria for 3-minute teaching demonstration over Skype?</a></li>\n<li><a href=\"https://academia.stackexchange.com/q/145238\">Coronavirus, school lockdown and future uncertainty</a></li>\n<li><a href=\"https://academia.stackexchange.com/q/145516\">Asking for status of faculty position search during coronavirus pandemic</a></li>\n<li><a href=\"https://academia.stackexchange.com/q/145877\">How can I best adapt my seminar slides for a virtual presentation?</a></li>\n<li><a href=\"https://www.media.mit.edu/posts/a-few-simple-tips-for-better-online-meetings-covid-19-edition/\" rel=\"nofollow noreferrer\">A few simple tips for better online meetings (COVID-19 edition)</a> (MIT Media Lab)</li>\n</ul>\n\n<h3>Employment and Applications</h3>\n\n<ul>\n<li><a href=\"https://academia.stackexchange.com/q/145653\">Postdoc position &quot;on hold&quot; due to covid-19</a></li>\n<li><a href=\"https://academia.stackexchange.com/q/145566\">academic job offers during Coronavirus</a></li>\n<li><a href=\"https://academia.stackexchange.com/q/145962\">Who might lose a job in academia due to covid19?</a></li>\n<li><a href=\"https://academia.stackexchange.com/q/145807\">Can I still ask my prospective advisor (guide) for a confirmation letter in the middle of Covid-19</a></li>\n<li><a href=\"https://academia.stackexchange.com/q/145677\">Can PhD programs rescind their PhD offers from this cycle due to COVID-19?</a></li>\n</ul>\n\n<h3>Working from home or without direct contact</h3>\n\n<ul>\n<li><a href=\"https://stackoverflow.blog/2020/03/12/working-from-home-tips-from-our-experienced-remote-employees\">Working from home tips from our experienced remote employees</a> (Stack Overflow Blog)</li>\n</ul>\n" } ]

[ "https://academia.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/4680", "https://academia.meta.stackexchange.com", "https://academia.meta.stackexchange.com/users/7734/" ]

[ { "answer_id": 4688, "author": "Wrzlprmft", "author_id": 7734, "author_profile": "https://academia.meta.stackexchange.com/users/7734", "pm_score": 2, "selected": false, "text": "<h3>Background</h3>\n\n<p>The answer in question was posted on <a href=\"https://academia.stackexchange.com/q/145763/7734\">this question</a>, which is a hot network question with 2k views as of now.\nThe answer’s full content was:</p>\n\n<blockquote>\n <blockquote>\n <p>Am I putting undue weight on this [...]?</p>\n </blockquote>\n \n <p>Yes.</p>\n</blockquote>\n\n<p>At the time it was posted, there were two other answers in the same direction (but with explanation). At the time it was deleted, it had +17|−4 votes. In the comments on the answer, there was some discussion going on whether this should be a comment or not, etc., with the highest voted comment saying that this should not be a comment.</p>\n\n<h3>My Decision</h3>\n\n<p>I deleted this answer for two reasons:</p>\n\n<ul>\n<li><p>It is rude for the reasons I elaborated in general <a href=\"https://meta.stackexchange.com/a/345478/255554\">here</a>.\nSpecifically, the answer mocks the asker and nothing else by implying that they are too stupid to find out the answer themselves (or similar).\nJust consider how you would feel if somebody replied to <a href=\"https://academia.stackexchange.com/q/133177/7734\">this question of yours</a> only with “not at all” and that answer got a highly positive score.\nThere is a small chance that this was not intended as rude, but even then we have to assume that it will be perceived as such and should be deleted for that reason (mind that I only deleted this and did not nuke this with a <em>rude or abusive</em> flag coming with further repercussions such as a −100 reputation penalty).</p></li>\n<li><p>It adds nothing whatsoever to the existing answers (at the time of its posting). It is common SE policy to delete such answers, even though they rarely happen on our site, where different answers along the same lines usually offer different approaches of explanation or similar.</p></li>\n</ul>\n\n<p>I stand by my decision.</p>\n\n<h3>Further Thoughts</h3>\n\n<ul>\n<li><blockquote>\n <p>Votes indicate the first reason is wrong - it was a high quality answer.</p>\n</blockquote>\n\n<p>Do you honestly believe that this answer has a high quality?\n(If yes, what features make it high quality?)\nVotes rather indicate that some users, presumably HNQ visitors, like to pile up on mocking the asker.\nIn fact, given that most HNQ visitors cannot downvote, that answer has a rather bad vote ratio (+17|−4).</p></li>\n<li><blockquote>\n <p>Matters of answer quality should be decided by vote.</p>\n</blockquote>\n\n<p>This is not a matter of quality.\nQuality is not really a deletion reason and not the reason why I deleted that answer.\n(Yes, there is a <em>very low quality</em> flag, but all posts that could be flagged with it can also be deleted for other reasons.)</p></li>\n<li><p>We usually implicitly assume for all questions that they are asking for an explanation.\nGoing by this, the answer in question can additionally be deleted for not being an answer to the question.</p></li>\n<li><p>Whatever that answer is, it is clearly not a comment as it does none of the things comments are for.\nYou called this answer a comment, indicating that you do not think it should be an answer.\nAs it should neither be an answer nor a comment, only deletion remains.</p></li>\n<li><p>If we accept such answers, somebody could go around and post one <em>yes</em> and one <em>no</em> answer each to a huge portion of our questions.\nThey could then delete the least popular answer after a while.\nDo you want that?</p></li>\n<li><blockquote>\n <p>I do consider shorter answers to be better in many cases.</p>\n</blockquote>\n\n<p>I agree that a more concise explanation can be better than a long one:\nIt may be easier to grasp or simply convey the same content in shorter time.\nBut here we are talking about no explanation whatsoever.\nThere is nothing to grasp.\nI can skim almost any answer in the same answer in the same time to get its tendency (if not, it should be arguably edited to add a summary or similar).\nIn this specific case, the first line of the <a href=\"https://academia.stackexchange.com/a/145765/7734\">current top answer</a> (which was there first) already contains as much as the answer in question.</p></li>\n</ul>\n" }, { "answer_id": 4689, "author": "Massimo Ortolano", "author_id": 20058, "author_profile": "https://academia.meta.stackexchange.com/users/20058", "pm_score": 2, "selected": false, "text": "<p>As much as I love short answers—and I really <em>do</em> love short answers both here and in real life—, I think that the deleted answer was way too laconic in that it failed to explain the reason for which the below highlighted part of the question is presumably wrong:</p>\n\n<blockquote>\n <p>Am I putting undue weight on this, or <strong>am I right to think that, if I'm going to devote an entire day (sometimes two days) to peer-reviewing an unknown colleague's paper, and since I anyway cannot say yes to all the requests I get, I might as well do it for authors who don't appear to take this effort for granted?</strong></p>\n</blockquote>\n\n<p>Note also that before the deletion, the author had been invited in a comment by David Z to expand their answer:</p>\n\n<blockquote>\n <p>it'd be better to expand this answer with another paragraph that gives some reasoning behind the statement.</p>\n</blockquote>\n\n<p>But to this invitation, there was no follow up, not even an explanation of why such a short answer would suffice.</p>\n\n<p>Overall, I therefore think that the deletion was warranted, even though I don't think that <em>yes/no</em> answers should be considered rude—I definitely don't think that this was the intention of the answer's author—and I'd advise against flagging as such.</p>\n" } ]

[ "https://academia.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/4687", "https://academia.meta.stackexchange.com", "https://academia.meta.stackexchange.com/users/13240/" ]

[ { "answer_id": 4698, "author": "cag51", "author_id": 79875, "author_profile": "https://academia.meta.stackexchange.com/users/79875", "pm_score": 5, "selected": true, "text": "<p>I think the question we were hoping OP would ask is this one:</p>\n\n<blockquote>\n <p>Is it common to leave academia after 40? What factors should I consider when deciding whether to leave? </p>\n</blockquote>\n\n<p>I would that would be a great, on-topic question.</p>\n\n<p>But instead, the question was: </p>\n\n<blockquote>\n <p>Does anyone have managed [sic] to leave academia after 40? And are you happy with the change? I need to hear happy stories.</p>\n</blockquote>\n\n<p>Our Q&amp;A / voting format is not compatible with story requests (how would we vote for the \"best\" story? Or the \"happiest\"?). </p>\n\n<p>If we had caught this at an earlier stage, I would suggest that we edit and reopen. But there are now half a dozen answers (including the top one) that provide anecdotes.</p>\n\n<p>So, I recommend that OP (or someone else) asks a new, answerable question. We can then post a comment in the closed one linking to the new one. </p>\n\n<p><strong>Edit</strong>: Looks like OP has edited the original question along the lines of the above and the community voted to reopen. So, perhaps, problem solved.</p>\n" }, { "answer_id": 4699, "author": "Anonymous Physicist", "author_id": 13240, "author_profile": "https://academia.meta.stackexchange.com/users/13240", "pm_score": 1, "selected": false, "text": "<blockquote>\n <p>What factors should I consider when deciding whether to leave academia? </p>\n</blockquote>\n\n<p>This is off-topic because it is not about academia. That's implied by the word \"leave\".</p>\n\n<p>The question is also should be closed as needing clarity because it does not specify the asker's goal. No career advice is going to help if there is no goal. </p>\n\n<blockquote>\n <p>I am completely depressed</p>\n</blockquote>\n\n<p>The asker appears to need a councilor or therapist, not career advice. </p>\n" } ]

[ "https://academia.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/4697", "https://academia.meta.stackexchange.com", "https://academia.meta.stackexchange.com/users/15949/" ]

[ { "answer_id": 4703, "author": "cag51", "author_id": 79875, "author_profile": "https://academia.meta.stackexchange.com/users/79875", "pm_score": 2, "selected": false, "text": "<p>There has been considerable <a href=\"https://softwareengineering.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/6256/do-we-have-any-responsibility-to-take-any-action-if-someone-says-theyre-thinkin\">discussion</a> about how to handle suicidal users, both <a href=\"https://academia.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/4353/should-we-react-when-somebody-says-theyre-contemplating-suicide\">on academia.SE</a> and <a href=\"https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/243700/whats-the-official-se-response-to-serious-mentions-of-suicide-or-self-harm-in-p\">elsewhere on SE</a>. Your question is about a mental health crisis rather than suicide, but I think Shog9's answer from the first link applies to both:</p>\n\n<blockquote>\n <p>I hate to sound callous about this, but... This isn't a support group; y'all probably aren't trained to deal with the outpouring of grief and despair of someone you've never met [...] there's a decent chance that leaving a post like this around could end up just making things <em>worse</em>.</p>\n</blockquote>\n\n<p>Shog9 then describes a (now widely-adopted) procedure [for suicidal users], which Strongbad summarized in the second link as: </p>\n\n<blockquote>\n <p>(1) close with an appropriate message, (2) flag for mod attention, (3) mods (or users) call in CMs.</p>\n</blockquote>\n\n<p>I would suggest using essentially the same workflow here:</p>\n\n<ul>\n<li><strong>Close.</strong> If there is an on-topic, answerable question, we can answer the academia-related question while acknowledging that there are likely additional mental-health-related issues that need to be addressed but are beyond our expertise. If the mental health is the primary or only issue, we can close the question.</li>\n<li><strong>Flag</strong>. For more serious issues, or if we are concerned that the post itself will lead to harm, flag for moderator attention. Mods will review and can lock, close, or delete the question as appropriate. </li>\n<li><strong>Call in CMs</strong>. CMs are spread thin right now (and for the foreseeable future), so we would generally resort to this for only the most serious issues.</li>\n</ul>\n" }, { "answer_id": 4704, "author": "Wrzlprmft", "author_id": 7734, "author_profile": "https://academia.meta.stackexchange.com/users/7734", "pm_score": 4, "selected": true, "text": "<p>First of all, <strong>we should not relax our rules</strong> for these questions out of pity or fearing to fuel the crisis by our rejection. When we cannot reasonably answer a question, the asker being in a crisis won’t change that – it will only make the damage done by answers worse. For example, consider questions closed for depending on individual factors due to making life decisions for the asker: Answers to such questions (other than: “it depends”) are dangerous because they suggest that we (random people on the Internet) can make such a decision. This is exacerbated if the asker is in a mental crisis, because they may be particularly responsive to these suggestions and the stakes are even higher.</p>\n\n<p>However, <strong>we should not bluntly reject the asker</strong>, but acknowledge their pain, explain why we cannot answer their question (if any), and guide them to getting help, be it on our site or elsewhere. One interaction on this site that I am most proud of is turning a mess of a question by a suicidal asker into one that could be reopened and got answers that probably actually helped the asker.</p>\n\n<p>Here is a lists of points to follow with such a question:</p>\n\n<ul>\n<li><p>Always <strong>flag for moderator attention</strong>. Even if no further action is required at the moment, this makes us moderators aware of the question so we can keep an eye on it and take swift action if necessary (e.g., when somebody posts a rude comment).</p></li>\n<li><p><strong>Try to salvage the question</strong>: Is there anything in the question that we can answer? Or is there any valid question that straightforwardly arises from the asker’s situation? If yes, edit the question to focus on this and explain your edit in a comment.</p></li>\n<li><p>Otherwise, always <strong>flag or vote to close</strong> if necessary. If such questions are answered prematurely, it only makes it more difficult to sort out the mess. The earlier they are closed, the better.</p></li>\n<li><p><strong>Leave comments to help the asker:</strong></p>\n\n<ul>\n<li>Show your compassion for their situation.</li>\n<li>Explain why their question is not answerable in its current state (or explain your edits). If you voted to close as a duplicate, explain that if the duplicate does not help, they should edit their question to explain why.</li>\n<li>Encourage them to seek professional help about their mental-health issues (unless they haven’t clearly indicated that they already did this). If the asker is suicidal, you can find some ready-to-use comments <a href=\"https://meta.stackexchange.com/q/243700/255554\">here</a>.</li>\n</ul></li>\n<li><p><strong>Make an extra effort to guide the asker to salvage their question:</strong></p>\n\n<ul>\n<li>Make it very clear which information is missing.</li>\n<li>Think very hard about alternative valid questions the asker may have about their situation and suggest them.</li>\n</ul></li>\n<li><p><strong><a href=\"https://meta.stackexchange.com/q/345661/255554\">Follow the question</a></strong> so you can quickly respond to edits, potentially rude comments, etc. Remember that you can retract your close vote.</p></li>\n<li><p>If you see such a question make it to the hot network questions, raise a flag so moderators can undo this <a href=\"https://academia.meta.stackexchange.com/a/4459/7734\">according to our policy</a>.</p></li>\n</ul>\n" }, { "answer_id": 4705, "author": "Anonymous Physicist", "author_id": 13240, "author_profile": "https://academia.meta.stackexchange.com/users/13240", "pm_score": 2, "selected": false, "text": "<p>This is just one option: We could have a question</p>\n\n<blockquote>\n <p>Where can I get help if I am feeling anxious or depressed?</p>\n</blockquote>\n\n<p>This question could be used for closing questions that cannot be salvaged by marking them as duplicates.</p>\n\n<p>Ordinarily this would be an off-topic question.</p>\n" }, { "answer_id": 4717, "author": "Bryan Krause", "author_id": 63475, "author_profile": "https://academia.meta.stackexchange.com/users/63475", "pm_score": 3, "selected": false, "text": "<p>I think it can be appropriate to give <em>very generic suggestions</em> when people seem to be disturbed in a manner that suggests they might benefit from seeing a therapist/counselor/psychologist. Even many people who have no long-term mental health issues can benefit from these sources of support; I think suggesting them is fine but be <em>supportive</em> rather than <em>pushy</em>.</p>\n\n<p>What is, in my opinion, <strong>NOT APPROPRIATE</strong> is to offer your diagnoses. Don't say \"you have depression, get help\", don't diagnose someone's obsessive compulsive disorder, don't diagnose someone's personality disorder or the personality disorder of their professor or anyone else they are interacting with. It's never necessary to do so.</p>\n" } ]

[ "https://academia.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/4700", "https://academia.meta.stackexchange.com", "https://academia.meta.stackexchange.com/users/13240/" ]

[ { "answer_id": 4707, "author": "Anonymous Physicist", "author_id": 13240, "author_profile": "https://academia.meta.stackexchange.com/users/13240", "pm_score": -1, "selected": false, "text": "<p>The question is about someone's opinion, but the answer (which is no, the opinion overgeneralizes) is not opinion. So technically it is not off-topic.</p>\n\n<p>I suggest down-voting the question for trolling. It is implausible that someone experienced with PhD programs in Germany would make the claims stated in the question, that overgeneralizes that severely, unless they were trolling, immature, or excessively angry.</p>\n" }, { "answer_id": 4708, "author": "D.W.", "author_id": 705, "author_profile": "https://academia.meta.stackexchange.com/users/705", "pm_score": 0, "selected": false, "text": "<p>I lean towards thinking that the question should remain closed, though I could see it going either way.</p>\n\n<p>The question has some positives and some negatives. On the positive side, it inspired answers with excellent information. On the negative side, it is fairly broad, argumentative, and calls for opinions.</p>\n\n<p>In an ideal world, I would suggest that it remain closed (as too broad), and replaced by multiple separate questions, where each question asks about the accuracy of one factual claim.</p>\n\n<p>Currently, the question comes off to me as \"here's a long rant I read, is it really true?\". The text we're asked to respond to contains both factual claims and judgements/conclusions/opinions, without separating the two out. Because of the mix of the two, I don't know how to answer the question (\"is this really the case?\") objectively. One can respond to the factual claims objectively, but responding to the opinions and conclusions seems like it calls for opinions.</p>\n\n<p>Ideally, I think it would be more constructive to separate out the specific factual claims made in that argument, and then ask specifically about each of those in a separate question, and leave judgements and advice and opinions out of it, and then ask people who answered with concrete evidence to answer those individual questions. That's in an ideal world where doing all of that work is feasible and successfully leads to all the information being preserved in separate questions. I don't know whether that will actually happen.</p>\n\n<p>I should also share a personal bias: I tend to be wary of posts with a strongly-expressed argumentative position, that ask us to respond to that position; I'm not sure they make a great prompt for a great question. So, it's possible I might be reacting to that aspect of the question as much as anything. It probably shouldn't affect the decision of whether to close or not, but it probably does affect me.</p>\n\n<p>That's just my view. I don't see this as clear-cut. I can understand how people would come to different views. For instance, given the outstanding information contained in the answers, I could appreciate a view that the positives outweigh the negatives. I could also appreciate a view that says that Academia.SE regularly deals with calls for opinions and advice, and as long as they are supported by evidence, that is acceptable.</p>\n" }, { "answer_id": 4709, "author": "cag51", "author_id": 79875, "author_profile": "https://academia.meta.stackexchange.com/users/79875", "pm_score": 1, "selected": false, "text": "<p>I would suggest that we <strong>edit and reopen.</strong> </p>\n\n<p>I suspect some of the close votes may have been induced by the vague title and long quote. It seems almost like a \"writing prompt,\" which may have rubbed people the wrong way. Editing may address this concern.</p>\n\n<p>But it is clearly an interesting question. While there are subjective elements (and German academia is a big place), I think academics familiar with the German system could provide \"expert analysis\" of the claims. So, it seems at least as answerable as many of our questions. </p>\n\n<p><strong>Edit:</strong> I have taken a stab at editing the question.</p>\n" } ]

[ "https://academia.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/4706", "https://academia.meta.stackexchange.com", "https://academia.meta.stackexchange.com/users/7734/" ]

[ { "answer_id": 4711, "author": "Wrzlprmft", "author_id": 7734, "author_profile": "https://academia.meta.stackexchange.com/users/7734", "pm_score": 3, "selected": false, "text": "<h1>Shopping question</h1>\n\n<p><strong>Close reason:</strong>\nThis text is shown when selecting a reason while flagging or voting to close:</p>\n\n<blockquote>\n <h3>Shopping question</h3>\n \n <p>The answer to this question would be an individual university, academic program, publisher, journal, research topic, etc., <strong>or</strong> a list, an assessment, or a comparison of those. The question seeks help choosing or finding these. See <a href=\"https://academia.meta.stackexchange.com/q/3657\">this FAQ</a> for details. Note that <a href=\"https://academia.meta.stackexchange.com/q/4675\">questions for software solutions are acceptable</a>.</p>\n</blockquote>\n\n<p><strong>General post notice:</strong>\nThis text is shown under a closed question to everybody:</p>\n\n<blockquote>\n <p><strong>Closed.</strong> This question is what we call a <a href=\"https://academia.meta.stackexchange.com/q/3657\">shopping question</a>. It is currently not accepting answers.</p>\n</blockquote>\n\n<p><strong>Post-owner guidance:</strong>\nThis text is shown under the general post notice to the author of a question:</p>\n\n<blockquote>\n <p>If you can, please <strong>edit</strong> your question to ask how to make your choice in general and without naming any particular options. If you can, specify an aspect that you are concerned about. Note that simply anonymizing the choices usually does not make for a good question. Please read <a href=\"https://academia.meta.stackexchange.com/q/3657\">this FAQ</a>.</p>\n</blockquote>\n\n<p><strong>Privileged-user guidance:</strong>\nThis text is shown under the general post notice to user with the <a href=\"https://academia.stackexchange.com/help/privileges/close-questions\">close privilege</a>:</p>\n\n<blockquote>\n <p>Please consider whether you can edit the question to be about how to make the choice and without naming particular options. Otherwise please guide the asker and vote to reopen the question if appropriate.</p>\n</blockquote>\n" }, { "answer_id": 4712, "author": "Wrzlprmft", "author_id": 7734, "author_profile": "https://academia.meta.stackexchange.com/users/7734", "pm_score": 3, "selected": false, "text": "<h1>Strongly depends on individual factors</h1>\n\n<p><strong>Close reason:</strong>\nThis text is shown when selecting a reason while flagging or voting to close:</p>\n\n<blockquote>\n <h3>Strongly depends on individual factors</h3>\n \n <p>The answer to this question strongly depends on individual factors such as some person’s preferences, some institution’s policies, the exact contents of some work or the asker’s personal values. Answers to this question would be far too speculative, broad, or would <strong>primarily</strong> consist of: “It depends on X.” See <a href=\"https://academia.meta.stackexchange.com/q/3406\">this FAQ</a> for details. Note that questions on the rules of institutions that operate at national or international level are permitted.</p>\n</blockquote>\n\n<p><strong>General post notice:</strong>\nThis text is shown under a closed question to everybody:</p>\n\n<blockquote>\n <p>This question was <strong>closed</strong> for <a href=\"https://academia.meta.stackexchange.com/q/3406\">strongly depending on individual factors</a>. It is currently not accepting answers.</p>\n</blockquote>\n\n<p><strong>Post-owner guidance:</strong>\nThis text is shown under the general post notice to the author of a question:</p>\n\n<blockquote>\n <p>The answer to your question strongly depends on the policies of some institution, the exact contents of your work, some person’s preferences, your personal values, or similar. Only someone familiar with them can answer this question and it cannot be generalized to apply to others. Importantly, only somebody who knows you very well can make life decisions for you. Please read: <a href=\"https://academia.meta.stackexchange.com/q/3406\">Why was my question put on hold for depending on individual factors?</a></p>\n</blockquote>\n\n<p><strong>Privileged-user guidance:</strong>\nThis text is shown under the general post notice to user with the <a href=\"https://academia.stackexchange.com/help/privileges/close-questions\">close privilege</a>:</p>\n\n<blockquote>\n <p>Please explain to the asker why we cannot answer their question and who may be able to do so. If there is a suitable question the author can ask about their situation, guide them towards it or edit the question if you can.</p>\n</blockquote>\n" }, { "answer_id": 4713, "author": "Wrzlprmft", "author_id": 7734, "author_profile": "https://academia.meta.stackexchange.com/users/7734", "pm_score": 2, "selected": false, "text": "<h1>Not within the scope of this community</h1>\n\n<p><strong>Close reason:</strong>\nThis text is shown when selecting a reason while flagging or voting to close:</p>\n\n<blockquote>\n <h3>Not within the scope of this community</h3>\n \n <p>This question is about the content of research, education outside a university setting, or otherwise clearly outside our community’s scope. Note that questions on undergraduate education are within our scope <a href=\"https://academia.meta.stackexchange.com/q/3300\">unless about undergraduate admissions, life, and culture</a>. — If you can, leave a comment to guide the asker to an appropriate site for their question and help them to improve it before reposting.</p>\n</blockquote>\n\n<p><strong>General post notice:</strong>\nThis text is shown under a closed question to everybody:</p>\n\n<blockquote>\n <p><strong>Closed.</strong> This question is not within the scope of this community as defined in the <a href=\"https://academia.stackexchange.com/help/on-topic\">help center</a>. It does not accept answers.</p>\n</blockquote>\n\n<p><strong>Post-owner guidance:</strong>\nThis text is shown under the general post notice to the author of a question:</p>\n\n<blockquote>\n <p>If your question is about the content of academic research or teaching, there likely is <a href=\"https://stackexchange.com/sites\">a Stack Exchange site</a> dedicated to your field. Please ask it there. Questions on math or computer-science education outside an academic setting may be suited for <a href=\"https://matheducators.stackexchange.com/\">Math Educators</a> or <a href=\"https://cseducators.stackexchange.com/\">Computer Science Educators</a>. Please familiarise with the guidelines of those sites before asking there.</p>\n</blockquote>\n\n<p><strong>Privileged-user guidance:</strong>\nThis text is shown under the general post notice to user with the <a href=\"https://academia.stackexchange.com/help/privileges/close-questions\">close privilege</a>:</p>\n\n<blockquote>\n <p>If applicable, guide the asker to an appropriate Stack Exchange site for their question. If the question has other problems (such as being a homework dump), guide them to improve their question before reposting it.</p>\n</blockquote>\n" } ]

[ "https://academia.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/4710", "https://academia.meta.stackexchange.com", "https://academia.meta.stackexchange.com/users/7734/" ]

[ { "answer_id": 4719, "author": "eykanal", "author_id": 73, "author_profile": "https://academia.meta.stackexchange.com/users/73", "pm_score": 0, "selected": false, "text": "<p>Unfortunately, even though <em>you've</em> seen that question a million times, the <em>user</em> is asking for the first time. The overly brief \"don't walk, run\" style comments, while cute and good for upvotes, frequently don't give the context needed by the OP. I agree with Jon that this is probably a sign of burnout. Take some time off from those questions and focus on the meatier ones.</p>\n\n<p>This is assuming the user is posting in good faith; if they're not, all bets are off.</p>\n" }, { "answer_id": 4720, "author": "Wrzlprmft", "author_id": 7734, "author_profile": "https://academia.meta.stackexchange.com/users/7734", "pm_score": 2, "selected": false, "text": "<blockquote>\n <p>Moreover, there doesn't seem to be a really appropriate listed \"reason to close\" for many of these.</p>\n</blockquote>\n\n<p>The questions you describe are exactly what the close reason <em><a href=\"https://academia.meta.stackexchange.com/q/3406\">strongly depends on individual factors</a></em> is made for. One of the reasons we have this close reason is because we got tired of one-line answers like you describe. Another is that we do not want somebody to come along who think that they can answer this question, which may be misleading. To quote from the <a href=\"https://academia.meta.stackexchange.com/a/4712/7734\">new usage guideline</a>:</p>\n\n<blockquote>\n <p>Answers to this question […] would primarily consist of: “It depends on X.”</p>\n</blockquote>\n\n<p>I do not think that closing such questions is not at odds with helping the asker. If a question gets closed with that reason, the asker already gets guidance nudging them in the right direction, but of course this is somewhat broad. I see no harm in leaving a specific comment along the lines of:</p>\n\n<blockquote>\n <p>Sorry, but we cannot possibly answer that question. You have to ask your advisor or somebody who knows them very well.</p>\n</blockquote>\n\n<p>This was one of the cases were <a href=\"https://academia.meta.stackexchange.com/q/4600/7734\">we agreed that answers in comments are okay</a>.</p>\n\n<hr>\n\n<p>Regarding the specific example, you posted, I am somewhat undecided whether it falls into this category. We have some information to make an educated guess here (as opposed to just a guess), but then it is still a guess.</p>\n" }, { "answer_id": 4721, "author": "Anonymous Physicist", "author_id": 13240, "author_profile": "https://academia.meta.stackexchange.com/users/13240", "pm_score": -1, "selected": false, "text": "<p>If a question has a short, trivial answer, the question makes sense, and the question is on topic, then I strongly encourage you to post a short, trivial answer.</p>\n\n<p>There are a great many answers on this site which include lots of irrelevant details. Your short, trivial answer is better than those answers.</p>\n\n<p>No harm is caused by answering off-topic questions, or by answering questions that have little value. It does not matter if you post these answers as comments or answers.</p>\n" } ]

[ "https://academia.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/4718", "https://academia.meta.stackexchange.com", "https://academia.meta.stackexchange.com/users/75368/" ]

[ { "answer_id": 4727, "author": "Glorfindel", "author_id": 33097, "author_profile": "https://academia.meta.stackexchange.com/users/33097", "pm_score": 4, "selected": true, "text": "<p>I can only see it happened once, <a href=\"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/72855/solar-mike?tab=reputation\">yesterday</a>, but given the close proximity this does look like targeted voting. The script runs in the early UTC hours so it's safe to assume it didn't detect this.</p>\n<p>As mentioned in the FAQ <a href=\"https://meta.stackexchange.com/q/126829/295232\">What is serial voting and how does it affect me?</a>, you can flag one of the affected posts for ♦ moderator attention, but with only two votes there's nothing much for them to see either (source: I'm a moderator on three other sites in the network). I'd recommend doing that if the pattern continues (and is not reversed automatically).</p>\n" }, { "answer_id": 4728, "author": "Wrzlprmft", "author_id": 7734, "author_profile": "https://academia.meta.stackexchange.com/users/7734", "pm_score": 3, "selected": false, "text": "<p>The system will not automatically reverse this kind of downvoting, but it will eventually still show up and you can flag one of your posts for moderator attention and we can then investigate this.</p>\n<p>I your particular case, there are indeed some hints of somebody systematically downvoting you. I will investigate these and address them as appropriate. Since this may involve Stack Exchange staff (as only they can see and undo individual votes), this may take a while.</p>\n" } ]

[ "https://academia.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/4726", "https://academia.meta.stackexchange.com", "https://academia.meta.stackexchange.com/users/72855/" ]

[ { "answer_id": 4730, "author": "cag51", "author_id": 79875, "author_profile": "https://academia.meta.stackexchange.com/users/79875", "pm_score": 3, "selected": false, "text": "<blockquote>\n<p>What should I / can I do, seeing how I believe readers are being misinformed?</p>\n</blockquote>\n<p>You could post a competing, self-contained answer that includes your point of view and references. I realize that late answers are at a huge disadvantage in the voting, but they can still be useful.</p>\n<p>Your other option, which you mention, is to add a comment. Readers are more likely to keep reading if they know that the first answer is controversial.</p>\n<p>Beyond that:</p>\n<ul>\n<li><a href=\"https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/89453/should-moderators-delete-bad-answers\">Moderators do not delete bad answers</a>. We generally delete answers and comments for procedural reasons, not substantive reasons. And mechanically, there is no way for us to change the answers' order or score.</li>\n<li>In this case, once the debate reached a certain length, a flag was automatically triggered (this happened after you created this post). For this procedural reason, I moved the discussion to chat and added a comment summarizing the debate (and linking this post).</li>\n</ul>\n<p>My personal opinion:</p>\n<ul>\n<li>I have no problem with this answer. I appreciated the &quot;likely&quot; caveat, and it seems self-evident that there <strong>might</strong> be legal issues associated with accessing copyrighted, non-free information without paying.</li>\n<li>Indeed, there are so many jurisdictions, and things are changing so quickly, that I don't think anyone could say with any confidence that it is definitely legal or illegal generally. Perhaps it may have been better for OP to say that it &quot;may&quot; be illegal rather than &quot;likely&quot; being illegal, but this is starting to split hairs.</li>\n<li>My only quibble about the answer is that the statement about the alleged &quot;trend&quot; toward illegality is unsubstantiated.</li>\n</ul>\n" }, { "answer_id": 4732, "author": "Anonymous Physicist", "author_id": 13240, "author_profile": "https://academia.meta.stackexchange.com/users/13240", "pm_score": 2, "selected": false, "text": "<p>You should vote on the answer.</p>\n" }, { "answer_id": 4733, "author": "Allure", "author_id": 84834, "author_profile": "https://academia.meta.stackexchange.com/users/84834", "pm_score": 0, "selected": false, "text": "<p>Is this a joke or just a massive troll? einpoklum knows very well that <a href=\"https://academia.stackexchange.com/a/120356/84834\">his answer</a> has been <a href=\"https://law.stackexchange.com/a/33647/15133\">refuted</a>, yet he's trying to claim that there's a debate.</p>\n<p>Analyze einpoklum's answer for a moment. There are two points. The first says section 60 (c) allows the use of SciHub, which was explicitly treated and refuted by phoog in the Law SE question. Plus it ignores the other articles of law referenced in DPenner1's answer. Just because X doesn't break one law doesn't make it legal if it breaks other laws. The other point is an outright appeal to emotion. Wikipedia puts it very well, appeals to emotion &quot;[are] a logical fallacy characterized by the manipulation of the recipient's emotions in order to win an argument, especially in the absence of factual evidence.&quot; einpoklum knows the evidence is against him, hence he's appealing to emotion.</p>\n<p>einpoklum further goes to claim that the trend towards illegality is only &quot;alleged&quot;, when DPenner's answer explicitly cites two examples that illustrate the trend: ACI Adam and Filmspeler. ACI Adam ruled that the private copying exception must only apply to lawful sources, which SciHub is not. Filmspeler ruled that streaming copyrighted content is no more legal than downloading it, which means that even if one could view SciHub papers without downloading them, it is still illegal. Both these rulings closed loopholes that could've been used to argue that SciHub is legal.</p>\n<p>This entire affair is very much like evolution vs. intelligent design. It's well-established that evolution is a much better explanation than ID, but ID defenders try to claim that there is debate and so we should be fair and &quot;teach the controversy&quot;.</p>\n<p>I am disappointed the mods are not deleting einpoklum's attempts at misinformation. Yes, mods do not delete bad answers, but by attempting to make an illegal act seem legal, einpoklum goes beyond &quot;bad answer&quot; to being actively dangerous.</p>\n" } ]

[ "https://academia.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/4729", "https://academia.meta.stackexchange.com", "https://academia.meta.stackexchange.com/users/7319/" ]

[ { "answer_id": 4736, "author": "Wrzlprmft", "author_id": 7734, "author_profile": "https://academia.meta.stackexchange.com/users/7734", "pm_score": -1, "selected": false, "text": "<ol>\n<li><p>My first point is about taking your question (“[Are there] other examples which the publisher retracts an article because of […]”) literally.\nThis is admittedly not the best approach, but it’s one which you have to expect others to take when answering and which is easy:\nIf the literal question is already clear and without any problems, that prevents a lot of problems right from the start and we do not have to go much further (except for bewaring of the <a href=\"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/XY_problem\" rel=\"nofollow noreferrer\">XY problem</a>).\nUnfortunately, your literal question has the problems I described:\nIt asks for a list and presumably a lot of answers will be equal and going by your introduction, some answers won’t satisfy you, e.g., if we provided you with an article that has been retracted because half of the citations point to nowhere.</p>\n<p>Now, while the literal approach highlights some issues with your question, I do not think this is how you wanted your question to be understood, which brings us to the next point.</p>\n<blockquote>\n<p>So, I looked up some questions. Those are the ones I immediately found when I typed &quot;are there&quot; in the search box:<br />\n[…]</p>\n</blockquote>\n<p>Some of these questions are indeed problematic given our <a href=\"https://academia.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/3657\">current rules</a> and what we know to work well and I closed the <a href=\"https://academia.stackexchange.com/q/42090/7734\">first one</a> for that reason.\nIf my vote didn’t unilaterally close, I would also close the <a href=\"https://academia.stackexchange.com/q/28240/7734\">last one</a>; feel free to cast a close vote if you agree.\nOthers have not been answered with a list of items because they were not taken literally, which brings us again to the next point.\nIn general, there are some old questions which should be closed but aren’t.\nIf you stumble upon them, please flag or vote to close.</p>\n</li>\n<li>\n<blockquote>\n<p>Also, (2) is plain wrong, because in the very same link I have posted, there is <a href=\"https://www.journals.elsevier.com/personality-and-individual-differences/announcements/rushton-and-templer-article\" rel=\"nofollow noreferrer\">official retraction announcement</a> […]</p>\n</blockquote>\n<p>Said retraction announcement ends with:</p>\n<blockquote>\n<p>The retraction notice is currently being finalized and will appear in the journal imminently.</p>\n</blockquote>\n<p>My understanding of this is that we can expect a detailed elaboration of the retraction in the next weeks.\nAt the time I posted this answer, the <a href=\"https://doi.org/10.1016/j.paid.2012.02.015\" rel=\"nofollow noreferrer\">article in question</a> showed no sign of the retraction. Now, two weeks later, it does and this notice is clearly different from what you linked.</p>\n<p>While questions about the rationale of the journal may be appropriate on this site, we can only speculate about this rationale from the brief outline given in the announcement.\nI do not think any good can come from this kind of speculation.</p>\n</li>\n<li>\n<blockquote>\n<p>None of those questions meet the criterion &quot;the question must outline clear criteria on the answers to avoid being overrun with people sharing their opinion.&quot;</p>\n</blockquote>\n<p>Here, the topic of your question indeed is relevant as it makes it considerably more likely that it will escalate into a debate about the retraction itself, attract trolls and racists, and cause other problems.\nThe comments your question attracted so far already give a taste of this.\nThis is not primarily your fault, but good intentions do not suffice to prevent this.\nA good (but not perfect) way to avoid such problems is to be as specific as possible about the answers you want (again bewaring of the <a href=\"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/XY_problem\" rel=\"nofollow noreferrer\">XY problem</a>) and thus excluding pure opinions, etc.</p>\n<p>So: Yes, I am putting your question under higher scrutiny, but not to censor the topic but to ensure that it stays within our guidelines and to be able to have questions and answers about it without attracting trouble.</p>\n</li>\n</ol>\n<p>In general, closing a question is about avoiding answers and thus – strictly speaking – it is not about the way the question is phrased or intended but about the answers we expect it to receive.\nOften this does not make a difference, but here it does:\nI closed your question because it bears a high risk to attract a problematic collection of answers in its current state for several reasons.</p>\n<hr />\n<p>You also revealed your motivation (<a href=\"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/XY_problem\" rel=\"nofollow noreferrer\">the Y to the X</a>, if you so wish):</p>\n<blockquote>\n<p>I asked the question over a simple debate with my colleagues. They claimed that there are many papers retracted without any solid reason, I claimed that there should be at least one clear reason or the follow-up actions should be taken. By follow-up actions I mean […]</p>\n</blockquote>\n<p>There are many opinion-based aspects about this: What exactly constitutes the <em>solid reason</em> your colleagues talk about? You on the other hand talk about what should be done. We do not answer how the world should be here, we can only discuss how it is. Yes, we have <a href=\"https://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/ethics\" class=\"post-tag\" title=\"show questions tagged &#39;ethics&#39;\" rel=\"tag\">ethics</a>, but that should always be with respect to either generally accepted standards (e.g., on plagiarism), a specified authority (e.g., COPE), or at least solicit a neutral assessment of the ethical dilemmas.</p>\n" }, { "answer_id": 4737, "author": "Anonymous Physicist", "author_id": 13240, "author_profile": "https://academia.meta.stackexchange.com/users/13240", "pm_score": 2, "selected": false, "text": "<p>I voted to close the question because it did not have internal logical consistency.</p>\n<p>First you quoted:</p>\n<blockquote>\n<p>This retraction comes after a thorough review of the published article, the sources cited within the article, and critical comments from readers.</p>\n</blockquote>\n<p>Then you said:</p>\n<blockquote>\n<p>I wonder whether there are other examples which the publisher retracts an article because of the sources cited within the article, and critical comments from readers.</p>\n</blockquote>\n<p>The quote you gave did <em>not</em> include a retraction reason. The quote is only a statement of what occurred. The logical inconsistency is because you changed &quot;comes after&quot; to &quot;because.&quot;</p>\n<p>Therefore, I voted to close as unclear. In fact, the question was sufficiently unclear that I am unsure if it is opinion-based. It is also possible that it is a shopping question.</p>\n<p>People often select the wrong close reason.</p>\n" } ]

[ "https://academia.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/4735", "https://academia.meta.stackexchange.com", "https://academia.meta.stackexchange.com/users/15949/" ]

[ { "answer_id": 4739, "author": "Wrzlprmft", "author_id": 7734, "author_profile": "https://academia.meta.stackexchange.com/users/7734", "pm_score": 3, "selected": false, "text": "<p>A comment left on this answer stated:</p>\n<blockquote>\n<p>This seems to be more of a snarky comment than a good-faith answer.</p>\n</blockquote>\n<p>I agree with this:\nThis is not an honest attempt to answer the question, but instead it suggests playing a rude practical joke on the students in question.\nThis suggestion is based on taking the request in question overly literal by replacing one group with another, which mocks the request and is rude to both groups involved.\nMoreover, suggesting such a blatantly bad action is rude in itself, in particular since the asker expressed a clear desire for finding a non-risky solution.</p>\n<p>More explicitly, what happened is this:</p>\n<ul>\n<li>Group A¹ is currently experiencing a huge distress.</li>\n<li>As a result, a professor was requested to make an exam of “questions that relate to life experiences of marginalized minorities”.</li>\n<li>The question asks how a professor can tactfully decline such a request.</li>\n<li>Your answer suggest to make an exam about the experiences of Group B, which would comply with the literal request (since Group B also is a marginalised minority), but is obviously not what the request aimed for.</li>\n<li>Taking some serious request overly literal is a rude, practical joke and light years away from a tactful reaction. Doing this when dealing with an extremely painful topic is even worse.</li>\n</ul>\n<p>The last point is independent of who Group A and B exactly are, what exactly their experiences are, and how these experiences compare to each other, in particular this is not about which group had it worse.\nIt also does not matter whether the request in question is valid or not.</p>\n<hr />\n<p>^{¹ Mind that I am using placeholders here because the exact identities of the groups do not matter for the point I am making here.}</p>\n" }, { "answer_id": 4740, "author": "Anonymous Physicist", "author_id": 13240, "author_profile": "https://academia.meta.stackexchange.com/users/13240", "pm_score": 3, "selected": false, "text": "<p>I think the answer deserved to be deleted because it didn't make much sense, and could be considered spam.</p>\n<p>It's completely possible that it was a well-intentioned post. It's also possible it's based on nasty obnoxious intentions. There just is not enough information to tell, since &quot;look how that turned out&quot; is vague.</p>\n<p>The answer is also misinformed. Concentration camps still exist and people are sent to them now.</p>\n<p>Wrzlprmft said &quot;Taking some serious request overly literal is a rude&quot; but I see no way to connect this argument to the answer in question.</p>\n" }, { "answer_id": 4745, "author": "einpoklum", "author_id": 7319, "author_profile": "https://academia.meta.stackexchange.com/users/7319", "pm_score": 1, "selected": false, "text": "<p>I think your answer was removed for the wrong reason. I agree that it requires quite a stretch to claim it's offensive, but - it's true that &quot;this seems to be more of a ... comment than a ... answer&quot;.</p>\n<p>Also, what @AnonymousPhysicist said.</p>\n" } ]

[ "https://academia.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/4738", "https://academia.meta.stackexchange.com", "https://academia.meta.stackexchange.com/users/25124/" ]

[ { "answer_id": 4748, "author": "cag51", "author_id": 79875, "author_profile": "https://academia.meta.stackexchange.com/users/79875", "pm_score": 3, "selected": false, "text": "<p>As a practical matter, <strong>people can vote using whatever criteria they see fit.</strong> We do have some <a href=\"https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/130046/when-should-i-vote\">guidelines</a> for good voting practices, but votes are anonymous, and we don't usually know why people vote the way they do. The only exception that comes to mind is that we don't allow <a href=\"https://meta.stackexchange.com/a/126857/386376\">serial voting</a>, as was discussed on Academia.SE <a href=\"https://academia.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/4726/two-answers-per-day-get-downvoted-will-the-system-notice-this\">here</a>.</p>\n<p>One of the results of this, which I have <a href=\"https://academia.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/4414/case-study-first-answer-bias\">noted before</a>, is a very pronounced &quot;first answer bias.&quot; Further, I usually see a delay on my new answers; then after the overall score goes over 2 or 3, more votes pile on.</p>\n<p>I suspect what you've observed is a corollary to this bias. I doubt that people are consciously choosing to pile on; rather, I suspect it is simply easier to see the hugely negative score, skim the post, and say &quot;I agree&quot; rather than having to make an independent judgment as they would on a post without a clear score.</p>\n<blockquote>\n<p>Why does this community do this (if you are one of the people that do this, for example downvoting a post that already has a net score below -2, can you provide me with some insight as to why you do this)?</p>\n</blockquote>\n<p>Personally, <strong>I try very hard to make upvote/downvote decisions without considering the question's current score.</strong> This does sometimes result in downvoting an already-downvoted question -- in fact, heavily-downvoted questions are normally downvoted for a reason, so this happens with some regularity. But I don't condone downvoting just because the question is already downvoted. In fact, I frequently ask myself, &quot;would I have (down)voted if I hadn't seen the score, or would I have just kept scrolling?&quot;</p>\n<p>I do sometimes see answers that have &quot;exaggerated&quot; scores. For example, I think some of my best answers are buried and not all of my most-upvoted answers are my best work. I've also seen some heavily-downvoted answers that I didn't think deserved so many downvotes.</p>\n<p>But, I do not agree that there are (many) answers with hugely negative scores that would have gotten positive scores had it not been for the first few votes. I've seen people argue this before, but I rarely agree with such claims (of course, there are exceptions, I'm not commenting on any specific case).</p>\n<blockquote>\n<p>Is it because you believe the question should be deleted?</p>\n</blockquote>\n<p>No. As Massimo says in the comments, &quot;deletion is for low quality content not for bad advice.&quot; I would not (vote to) delete a good-faith answer that showed research effort, even if I disagreed with it. I've argued <a href=\"https://academia.meta.stackexchange.com/a/4730/79875\">before</a> that moderators do not delete wrong answers; I would similarly discourage the community from doing so. But, I would likely downvote and comment on a wrong answer to prevent the misinformation from spreading.</p>\n<blockquote>\n<p>If you contribute to negative-downvoting chains, I wonder what you think writing a stern comment can't do, that downvoting something which already has a very low negative score, can do successfully?</p>\n</blockquote>\n<p>It is a good practice to explain your downvote rather than just doing a drive-by. My experience, however, is that by the time someone gets a score of -10, there has already been significant discussion on the answer.</p>\n<blockquote>\n<p>why is it tolerated?</p>\n</blockquote>\n<p>You seem to be suggesting that we should crack down on those who vote on a heavily-downvoted answer without reading it. Diamond mods do not have the tools to do this. You could ask the community team to implement it, but you would have to create a post on MSE.</p>\n<p>Another option would be to cap the displayed score -- for example, scores below -5 could just display -5 rather than displaying -100. Again, we as Academia.SE do not have the tools to do this.</p>\n<p>A related issue I've observed (and, frankly, one that concerns me somewhat more) is that post scores tend to lag post edits. For example, a new user who is heavily downvoted might fix their answer after a day or two (which is exactly what we tell them to do), but they are unlikely to get the score they deserve (which affects new users far more than high-rep users).</p>\n" }, { "answer_id": 4749, "author": "Anonymous Physicist", "author_id": 13240, "author_profile": "https://academia.meta.stackexchange.com/users/13240", "pm_score": 3, "selected": false, "text": "<blockquote>\n<p>If you are one of the people that pushes such posts further into the ground, is it because you believe the question should be deleted</p>\n</blockquote>\n<p>Honestly, I didn't realize I could vote to delete. But in any case, having a bad answer and a clear indication that it is flawed can sometimes be helpful. It certainly discourages reposting of the answer.</p>\n<blockquote>\n<p>Or do you usually do this because the post angers you so badly that you feel you need to stab it further?</p>\n</blockquote>\n<p>I do not think my vote should depend on the current score of the answer. In fact, I scrutinize my voting to avoid being biased by the current score.</p>\n<blockquote>\n<p>If you contribute to negative-downvoting chains, I wonder what you think writing a stern comment can't do, that downvoting something which already has a very low negative score, can do successfully?</p>\n</blockquote>\n<p>This is a false dichotomy.</p>\n<blockquote>\n<p>Or do you usually do this because the post angers you so badly</p>\n</blockquote>\n<p>I've never seen anything on this site worth getting angry about. That includes being downvoted.</p>\n" } ]

[ "https://academia.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/4747", "https://academia.meta.stackexchange.com", "https://academia.meta.stackexchange.com/users/93303/" ]

[ { "answer_id": 4752, "author": "Bryan Krause", "author_id": 63475, "author_profile": "https://academia.meta.stackexchange.com/users/63475", "pm_score": 6, "selected": true, "text": "<p>I think the best you can do is <em>write an answer that shares your perspective</em>. I'd read the existing answers, though, and check to see that they don't already do this.</p>\n<p>For example, the most upvoted answer here: <a href=\"https://academia.stackexchange.com/a/151639/63475\">https://academia.stackexchange.com/a/151639/63475</a> as of right now starts with:</p>\n<blockquote>\n<p>First of all, I know many PhD students (also myself) who did exactly that and finished their phd: They worked 40 hours a week (or less)</p>\n</blockquote>\n<p>The most upvoted answer here: <a href=\"https://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/64440/is-it-true-that-phd-students-need-to-work-10-12-hours-a-day-every-day-to-be-prod\">Is it true that PhD students need to work 10-12 hours a day every day to be productive?</a> says</p>\n<blockquote>\n<p>The answer is no.</p>\n</blockquote>\n<p>This question: <a href=\"https://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/151585/is-it-typical-to-work-60-hours-per-week-as-a-phd-student\">Is it typical to work 60 hours per week as a PhD student?</a> includes at least one counter-example, and the first answer agrees with you that it is a <em>problem</em> though it also argues that it's still a <em>reality</em>:</p>\n<blockquote>\n<p>The experience of working long hours, for little pay and little power is, unfortunately, an almost universal experience for science PhD students ... However 60 hours a week is not normal for the simple reason that very few people can be productive for 60 hours a week on a long term basis</p>\n</blockquote>\n<p>I think the number of votes those answers get is indicative that others also see it as a reality.</p>\n<p>Overall, the consensus I get from the community is that working long hours in academia is <em>common</em> but not <em>necessary</em>. It is clear that some people are working long hours and see others around them doing the same.</p>\n<p>If you view things differently, you can offer answers that fit your views. I think you'll find the community responds positively if you say long hours are not necessary; I think you will find less of a positive reaction if you say they don't happen, and I think that claim might actually be covering up a problem you intend to surface.</p>\n<p>Echoing @AzorAhai's comment, I did not notice this sentiment:</p>\n<blockquote>\n<p>&quot;Yeah, welcome to the world of superstars, you need to work 60h/w or you will never get your PhD&quot;</p>\n</blockquote>\n<p>in any of the answers receiving a lot of up votes on those questions. If you want to point some out, I'd be happy to take a look and probably downvote them if indeed that is what they say, because I disagree and am myself one of those people who got a PhD while working fairly relaxed hours.</p>\n" }, { "answer_id": 4753, "author": "Anonymous Physicist", "author_id": 13240, "author_profile": "https://academia.meta.stackexchange.com/users/13240", "pm_score": 3, "selected": false, "text": "<p>The problem is that this myth has nothing to do with PhD students or academia. Most people who have unstructured jobs overestimate how much time they spend working productively.</p>\n" }, { "answer_id": 4756, "author": "Oleg Lobachev", "author_id": 46265, "author_profile": "https://academia.meta.stackexchange.com/users/46265", "pm_score": 3, "selected": false, "text": "<p>I think, this has something to do with the <a href=\"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Survivorship_bias\" rel=\"nofollow noreferrer\">survivors' dilemma</a>. It's a sampling bias.</p>\n<p>Basically, most people here are still interested in an academic career, have mastered it, or are somehow related to academia. Now, most PhD students leave the academia the one or the other way.</p>\n<p>So, although those questions rather state &quot;workload as a PhD student&quot;, the subliminal understanding of the most, including myself, is &quot;how I nearly worked myself to death, but got tenure&quot;.</p>\n" } ]

[ "https://academia.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/4751", "https://academia.meta.stackexchange.com", "https://academia.meta.stackexchange.com/users/16023/" ]

[ { "answer_id": 4765, "author": "Anonymous Physicist", "author_id": 13240, "author_profile": "https://academia.meta.stackexchange.com/users/13240", "pm_score": -1, "selected": false, "text": "<p>I suggest removing &quot;Unprofessional&quot; from the criteria as it is very broad and subjective.</p>\n" }, { "answer_id": 4766, "author": "Anonymous Physicist", "author_id": 13240, "author_profile": "https://academia.meta.stackexchange.com/users/13240", "pm_score": 2, "selected": false, "text": "<p>I suggest explicitly excluding from deletion questions where the asker makes allegations about their own conduct. &quot;Did I do something wrong, and what should I do about it?&quot; is a helpful thing to ask, if sometimes embarrassing.</p>\n<p>I admit that this might be problematic if the asker is impersonating someone else; presumably impersonation is already forbidden.</p>\n" }, { "answer_id": 4767, "author": "Wrzlprmft", "author_id": 7734, "author_profile": "https://academia.meta.stackexchange.com/users/7734", "pm_score": 4, "selected": false, "text": "<p><em>As <a href=\"https://academia.meta.stackexchange.com/a/4766/63475\">Anonymous Physicist pointed out</a>, it is not clear whether the proposed policy applies to self-allegations. Let’s decide this:</em></p>\n<h3>Suggested amendment</h3>\n<p>This policy shall also apply to questions making <strong>self</strong>-allegations, i.e., where the target and the asker are identical.\nAll the other criteria must still apply, in particular the self-allegations must be severe and not anonymous for the question to be deleted.</p>\n<h3>Rationale</h3>\n<p>There is nothing wrong with questions where people ask about dealing with their own mistakes (like there is nothing wrong with questions about how to proceed after being the victim of misconduct).</p>\n<p>However, in the rare event that somebody asks such a question non-anonymously, this leads to a subset of the same problems listed in the question: They regret this, self-vandalise, request redaction or disassociations, or actually harmed themselves by asking. Additionally, applying the policy to self-allegations covers possible cases of impersonation and prevents any cumbersome need to verify identity. Therefore it is a good idea to expand the policy to capture self-allegations.</p>\n<h3>How to decide</h3>\n<p>Upvote this answer if you agree with including self-allegations; downvote if you disagree.</p>\n" }, { "answer_id": 4771, "author": "Anyon", "author_id": 17254, "author_profile": "https://academia.meta.stackexchange.com/users/17254", "pm_score": 2, "selected": false, "text": "<p>I have a concern with the use of &quot;defamatory&quot; in &quot;The allegations are defamatory, i.e., the reported behaviour is misconduct, criminal, or highly unethical or highly unprofessional.&quot; Going by <a href=\"https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/defamation\" rel=\"nofollow noreferrer\">Meriam-Webster</a> or <a href=\"http://www.dmlp.org/legal-guide/what-defamatory-statement\" rel=\"nofollow noreferrer\">typical use in US law</a>, a defamatory statement is a <strong>false</strong> statement of fact (i.e. opinion does not count).</p>\n<p>It'd be nice if we could avoid having the site be a venue for defamation, but determining whether a statement is false or not is often impractical, so having the rest of the clause resting on this meaning of the word is tricky. On the other hand, many will likely interpret &quot;defamatory&quot; as just &quot;harmful to someone's reputation&quot;, which I assume is the intended meaning in the policy. Now, this is a clunky phrase, and I can't think of a precise synonym. However, in connection with &quot;allegations&quot;, the word &quot;serious&quot; seems to have the right implications.</p>\n<p>Hence, I suggest using &quot;The allegations are serious, ...&quot; instead of &quot;The allegations are defamatory, ...&quot;. If there's a desire to keep &quot;defamatory&quot; in there somewhere, then &quot;The allegations are serious or defamatory, ...&quot; would work.</p>\n" }, { "answer_id": 4777, "author": "avid", "author_id": 15798, "author_profile": "https://academia.meta.stackexchange.com/users/15798", "pm_score": 2, "selected": false, "text": "<p>Perhaps this passage</p>\n<blockquote>\n<p>The information in the question (including the asker’s username) allows others to identify the target or allows the target to identify the asker beyond any reasonable doubt without intensive research.</p>\n</blockquote>\n<p>ought to be modified to something like &quot;<strong>appears</strong> to allow others to identify...&quot;. Presumably the mods will be applying this policy based on an assessment of whether usernames, etc, look like they're the names of real people, even if they're actually pseudonyms.</p>\n" } ]

[ "https://academia.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/4762", "https://academia.meta.stackexchange.com", "https://academia.meta.stackexchange.com/users/7734/" ]

[ { "answer_id": 4772, "author": "cag51", "author_id": 79875, "author_profile": "https://academia.meta.stackexchange.com/users/79875", "pm_score": 2, "selected": false, "text": "<blockquote>\n<p>Can we create a question &quot;What are the criteria for degree revocation?&quot; and close all questions with the theme &quot;Will my degree be revoked if...?&quot; as duplicates?</p>\n</blockquote>\n<p><strong>This seems like a good idea to me.</strong> As I said in the comments, there are <a href=\"https://www.google.com/search?q=degree+revocation+site:academia.stackexchange.com\" rel=\"nofollow noreferrer\">a lot</a> of mostly-identical questions about degree revocation. There was <a href=\"https://academia.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/4420/should-we-have-a-canonical-question-about-degree-revocations\">a discussion</a> some time ago about doing this, but nothing came of it. Having a wiki page that covers all the caveats is probably better than covering the basics over and over again in many different posts.</p>\n<p>Before moving forward, I am hoping others will comment about the best way to do this (mechanically). One option is to merge several posts so that we retain many of the existing answers. Another option is to create a new wiki with blank subject headings, and ask the community to fill it in (either with new content or by copying content from existing answers).</p>\n<p><strong>Update 8 August 2020: This is <a href=\"https://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/153661/what-are-the-criteria-for-degree-revocation/\">done</a>.</strong></p>\n" }, { "answer_id": 4776, "author": "Daniel R. Collins", "author_id": 43544, "author_profile": "https://academia.meta.stackexchange.com/users/43544", "pm_score": 0, "selected": false, "text": "<p>I do <em>not</em> think this is a good idea. The new community wiki emphasizes this in its question text:</p>\n<blockquote>\n<p><em>Each answer here relates to a different criterion which may (or may\nnot) lead to degree revocation.</em></p>\n</blockquote>\n<p>As I put in a comment on the new community wiki -- I'm actually really concerned that the structure of this community wiki will be misinforming people who ask these sorts of questions. Mostly on these questions the top answer has been &quot;no/we can't say/depends on institution&quot;. If people read these answers with an AND conjunction instead of an OR conjunction; or, take them as absolutely-enforced-at-all-institutions, then that will be misinformation. It also doesn't seem able to account for the vast differences in academic cultures around the world (<a href=\"https://academia.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/4471/academia-varies-more-than-you-think-it-does-the-movie\">link</a>). There's no room in this wiki structure for the very best answer, &quot;we can't say because it's very locale dependent&quot;.</p>\n<p>Furthermore: The majority of the questions this is seeking to short-circuit are in the negative direction, i.e., usually about things you pretty much <em>can't</em> have a degree revoked for. Regarding the <a href=\"https://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/153498/can-public-political-criticism-of-my-alma-mater-result-in-my-ba-being-revoked-35\">current question in this vein</a>, the two highest-voted answers currently have kernels of:</p>\n<blockquote>\n<p>Revocations on grounds of expression of (political) disagreement with\nthe issuing institution are unheard of in rule-of-law democracies.\nI've never heard of such a case, although it would certainly have\nbecome very well-known.</p>\n</blockquote>\n<p>And:</p>\n<blockquote>\n<p>I sit on our university's Senate which is the body that would have to\ndeliberate a degree revocation. Even a straight-forward case of\nplagiarism in a degree requires a long, drawn-out and surprisingly\ncontentious decision, and it might happen once or twice a decade. This\nis the last step of a very, very long and drawn-out process.</p>\n</blockquote>\n<p>These negative best-answers will be lost in the wiki structure looking for positive criteria for degree revocation. People still won't see an answer to the specific questions they're asking, and will continue to ask them.</p>\n<p><strong>I would suggest that a better &quot;canonical&quot; question for this purpose would be of the form, &quot;How likely is it to get a degree revoked?&quot;, which can then deal with the central issue of it being extremely rare, in fact, a non-issue in almost all cases.</strong></p>\n" } ]

[ "https://academia.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/4764", "https://academia.meta.stackexchange.com", "https://academia.meta.stackexchange.com/users/13240/" ]

[ { "answer_id": 4769, "author": "Anyon", "author_id": 17254, "author_profile": "https://academia.meta.stackexchange.com/users/17254", "pm_score": 5, "selected": true, "text": "<p>The edit matches, word for word, what the OP of the question posted as an answer. A moderator (Massimo Ortolano) deleted that &quot;answer&quot; (presumably since it does nothing to answer the question) and incorporated it into the question itself. That seems appropriate, and better than leaving the non-answer as-is or deleting it outright.</p>\n" }, { "answer_id": 4770, "author": "Massimo Ortolano", "author_id": 20058, "author_profile": "https://academia.meta.stackexchange.com/users/20058", "pm_score": 4, "selected": false, "text": "<p>The OP mistakenly posted that additional text as an answer. Moderators can directly convert such non-answers to a comment or an edit to the question. The edit is automatically attributed to the moderator who performed the action (me in this case).</p>\n<p>This action can be seen from the question's <a href=\"https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/126447/add-a-link-to-the-timeline-of-a-post/342316#342316\">timeline</a>, accessible by clicking on the clock icon below the question's score:</p>\n<p><a href=\"https://i.stack.imgur.com/tJLWE.png\" rel=\"nofollow noreferrer\"><img src=\"https://i.stack.imgur.com/tJLWE.png\" alt=\"enter image description here\" /></a></p>\n<p>The action is represented by two rows in the timeline: first the deletion and then the edit (users with less than 10k reputation will only see the edit event).</p>\n" } ]

[ "https://academia.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/4768", "https://academia.meta.stackexchange.com", "https://academia.meta.stackexchange.com/users/86872/" ]

[ { "answer_id": 4784, "author": "Wrzlprmft", "author_id": 7734, "author_profile": "https://academia.meta.stackexchange.com/users/7734", "pm_score": 3, "selected": false, "text": "<p>While I do see the problem here, I think that having two separate tags does not really solve it while creating more problems:</p>\n<ul>\n<li><p>By the nature of our site, we almost exclusively focus on the social aspect anyway. For the questions we get, it mostly does not matter whether something is a disability or a health issue (wherever one draws the line between the two). To give a somewhat unrealistic, but illustrative example, whether somebody cannot access a lecture hall because of a broken leg or a permanent paralysis hardly affects our approach to the problem. Indeed, sometimes the answer to a question is that some health issue qualifies as a disability and thus grants certain rights.</p>\n</li>\n<li><p>The line between a permanent disability and temporary health issue is indisputably blurry, or one might say that one thing can be a disability or a health issue depending whether you view it from a social or medical point of view (which is not so different from your outline).</p>\n</li>\n<li><p>Again by the nature of our site, most questions in <a href=\"https://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/health-issues\" class=\"post-tag\" title=\"show questions tagged &#39;health-issues&#39;\" rel=\"tag\">health-issues</a> are about disabilities or something that may be one. In fact, in a brief search I couldn’t even find a single question which I would consider correctly tagged <a href=\"https://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/health-issues\" class=\"post-tag\" title=\"show questions tagged &#39;health-issues&#39;\" rel=\"tag\">health-issues</a>, but which was clearly not about disabilities.</p>\n</li>\n</ul>\n<p>As a consequence, I expect that splitting the tag as proposed would lead to users being confused as to which tag they should use and users not finding existing questions that help them. If we ignore everything related to the name of the tag for a second, what do we gain from splitting?</p>\n<p>Instead, I suggest that we think about a better name for the main tag (i.e., the synonym target). This is obviously not an easy choice as one has to consider amongst others:</p>\n<ul>\n<li><p>Some choices may cause people refraining from using the tag altogether due to social stigma, e.g., <a href=\"https://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/disabilities\" class=\"post-tag\" title=\"show questions tagged &#39;disabilities&#39;\" rel=\"tag\">disabilities</a>.</p>\n</li>\n<li><p>Some choices may cause the undesirable associations you describe, e.g., <a href=\"https://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/health-issues\" class=\"post-tag\" title=\"show questions tagged &#39;health-issues&#39;\" rel=\"tag\">health-issues</a>. (Though I am somewhat surprised by that since at least to me <em>health issue</em> does not imply that something requires cure or similar – not that I dispute that others have this association.)</p>\n</li>\n</ul>\n<p>Here, I would like to play the ball back to you, the expert. But even if there should be no good and concise name for this, I would refrain from splitting the tag. In that case, I would consider even a super-clunky name like <a href=\"https://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/accomodating-and-handling-health-issues-and-disabilities\" class=\"post-tag\" title=\"show questions tagged &#39;accomodating-and-handling-health-issues-and-disabilities&#39;\" rel=\"tag\">accomodating-and-handling-health-issues-and-disabilities</a> the lesser evil.</p>\n" }, { "answer_id": 4785, "author": "Tsundoku", "author_id": 62311, "author_profile": "https://academia.meta.stackexchange.com/users/62311", "pm_score": 2, "selected": false, "text": "<p>Since <code>Azor Ahai -- he him</code> <a href=\"https://academia.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/4783/please-undo-the-synonymisation-of-the-tag-disability-with-health-issues#comment14730_4783\">suggested</a> that I should post an alternative tag as an answer, here is a suggestion: introduce the tag <a href=\"https://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/disability-inclusion\" class=\"post-tag\" title=\"show questions tagged &#39;disability-inclusion&#39;\" rel=\"tag\">disability-inclusion</a> for (suggested tag wiki excerpt)</p>\n<blockquote>\n<p>Questions about the inclusion of people with disabilities in higher education. These questions can cover both social practices and technological challenges, and can apply to either students or teaching staff.</p>\n</blockquote>\n<p>This should be broad enough to cover all the examples listed in my question above.</p>\n" }, { "answer_id": 4786, "author": "Wrzlprmft", "author_id": 7734, "author_profile": "https://academia.meta.stackexchange.com/users/7734", "pm_score": 3, "selected": false, "text": "<p>To have some data to help deciding, I went through a bunch of questions in the current that <a href=\"https://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/heath-issues\" class=\"post-tag\" title=\"show questions tagged &#39;heath-issues&#39;\" rel=\"tag\">heath-issues</a>. I excluded only closed questions. I categorised the questions along three axes:</p>\n<ul>\n<li><p>Mental (depression, ADHD, etc.) vs. physical (broken leg, cancer, blindness, etc.):</p>\n<ul>\n<li>28 questions were about mental issues.</li>\n<li>6 questions were about physical issues.</li>\n<li>4 questions did not specify anything.</li>\n</ul>\n<p>I want to mention that I think the distinction does not affect the answer for many of these questions, even when accounting for the stigma of mental issues. (Though I did not do a statistics on that.)</p>\n</li>\n<li><p>Disabilities and chronic diseases vs. short-term issues. I went for the former when in doubt, which mostly applied to mental-health issues.</p>\n<ul>\n<li>28 questions were about disabilities or chronic diseases.</li>\n<li>3 questions were clearly not about disabilities.</li>\n<li>5 questions were about preventing health problems, mostly psychohygiene.</li>\n<li>For 2 questions it was completely unclear.</li>\n</ul>\n</li>\n<li><p>Accommodation and handling bad performances vs. other issues.</p>\n<ul>\n<li>21 questions were about accommodation and handling bad performance.</li>\n<li>12 questions were clearly about something else (including the 5 questions about preventing health problems).</li>\n<li>5 questions were not clear about this on account of broadness (“How do you handle …?”).</li>\n</ul>\n</li>\n</ul>\n" } ]

[ "https://academia.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/4783", "https://academia.meta.stackexchange.com", "https://academia.meta.stackexchange.com/users/62311/" ]

[ { "answer_id": 4788, "author": "Massimo Ortolano", "author_id": 20058, "author_profile": "https://academia.meta.stackexchange.com/users/20058", "pm_score": 4, "selected": false, "text": "<blockquote>\n<p>It was a complex issue; thus, it's not something that can be fully\naddressed in one post.</p>\n</blockquote>\n<p>Stack Exchange sites are repositories of <em>well-defined</em> and <em>virtually independent</em> questions and answers. They are not a good place to ask a long series of questions connected by a thread, and with little or vague differences from question to question.</p>\n<p>Users cannot follow such a long thread, can hardly see the differences between the questions and vote to close, even more so if the questioner doesn't seem to follow the advice given in previous answers and comments.</p>\n<blockquote>\n<p>I don't feel one can be prohibited from posting about a topic unless that topic is offensive and/or unrelated to the stack exchange.</p>\n</blockquote>\n<p>We're sorry for what you're going through, but you have to understand that Academia Stack Exchange is simply not suitable for all types of questions related to the academic world. It's really not meant to be so: there are academic questions we can answer and others we can not. In particular, see also <a href=\"https://academia.meta.stackexchange.com/q/3406/20058\">Why was my question put on hold for depending on individual factors?</a>.</p>\n" }, { "answer_id": 4789, "author": "cag51", "author_id": 79875, "author_profile": "https://academia.meta.stackexchange.com/users/79875", "pm_score": 5, "selected": false, "text": "<p>Yours is a rather unique case.</p>\n<ul>\n<li>Of your 26 questions, more than 15 reference the same conflict, and 14 had a negative total score.</li>\n<li>You have a received a cease-and-desist letter from the institution in question, and the professor in question has replied to your overtures through counsel only.</li>\n<li>You have received very clear, unambiguous advice from this forum: leave her alone and move on with your life. You have explicitly stated that you will not take our advice (in which case, why ask for more advice?).</li>\n<li>Indeed, your later actions (meeting new professors and asking them to relay messages to her) present a very worrying trend -- both in terms of your mental health and in terms of your legal exposure (neither of which are within our area of expertise).</li>\n</ul>\n<p>As for &quot;not breaking any stack exchange rule&quot; -- this forum does not allow duplicate questions. Several users have suggested that many of your questions could be rewritten so as to avoid any reference to the above situation; this would be perfectly allowed. In fact, I explicitly suggested that you do this on one question <a href=\"https://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/151900/can-suing-one-university-hurt-your-admission-chances-at-another\">two months ago</a>, but you chose not to so until a week had passed and the question had been closed and heavily downvoted (perhaps the question could be reopened now, but that is up to the community).</p>\n" } ]

[ "https://academia.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/4787", "https://academia.meta.stackexchange.com", "https://academia.meta.stackexchange.com/users/-1/" ]

[ { "answer_id": 4791, "author": "Massimo Ortolano", "author_id": 20058, "author_profile": "https://academia.meta.stackexchange.com/users/20058", "pm_score": 3, "selected": false, "text": "<p>The post in its original form contained the following question:</p>\n<blockquote>\n<p>Moreover, PRResearch is rather new and does not have an impact factor yet. Do you expect the impact factor would be comparable to the PRA/B/C/D/E journals, or to PRL/PRX?</p>\n</blockquote>\n<p>Such a question asks thus for an assessment of a journal, and can be thus considered a <a href=\"https://academia.meta.stackexchange.com/a/3658/20058\">shopping question</a>, but since it asks about our expectations on the future impact factor of a journal it can also be considered as <em>opinion based</em>. In both cases, it's not a question we can answer and should be closed as off-topic according to our current policies.</p>\n<p>However, the post contains another question that can be answered and the edit from Wrzlprmft removed the unanswarable part, keeping and fixing the answerable one. In this way, the question can be salvaged and kept open.</p>\n<p>So, you can essentially choose to have a <em>closed</em> question in its original form or an <em>open</em> question in the edited form.</p>\n" }, { "answer_id": 4792, "author": "sintetico", "author_id": 37620, "author_profile": "https://academia.meta.stackexchange.com/users/37620", "pm_score": -1, "selected": false, "text": "<p>First of all, a little foreword. I do not think that people who closed my answer have secret agendas, or malicious intentions. But I think that it is enforcing a policy in an extreme strict way, beyond the scope of the rules. I decided to answer my question because all other answers are pinpointing some issues, but not offering a solution. The point is, rules are here for a reason, but they should allow a genuine question to be asked. One should not forget that the first reason of existence this website is <em>to ask questions</em>. If (man-made) laws prevent any meaningful question to be asked, what is the whole point?\nSo, as everybody seem to agree, the original (non meta) question is legitimate, but there is discussion about whether the part about the IF is legitimate or not.</p>\n<p>My answer is: The question about the new journal future IF can be formulated in a more general way. It is totally legit to ask about, what are the reasons why an established publishing company is starting a new journal? Does this publishing company have the power to predict, or to manipulate the future importance, impact, broad diffusion (eg., number of readers), reputation, and acceptance in the scientific community?</p>\n<p>As a side note: I do not understand why this meta question is downvoted. The meta question is a totally legitimate question and does not violate any of the rules of Acedemia Meta stack exchange, even if there is a debate about whether the original (non meta) question is legitimate.</p>\n<p>As a final word. Please be reasonable. Offering or suggesting a way of asking a similar but closely related question in a legitimate way is more welcome than just saying that a question and not legitimate and to close it.</p>\n" } ]

[ "https://academia.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/4790", "https://academia.meta.stackexchange.com", "https://academia.meta.stackexchange.com/users/37620/" ]

[ { "answer_id": 4794, "author": "Anonymous Physicist", "author_id": 13240, "author_profile": "https://academia.meta.stackexchange.com/users/13240", "pm_score": -1, "selected": false, "text": "<p>Victim-blaming is often a manifestation of prejudice. It's a manifestation of prejudice that is seen from time to time on this site. We are not defense attorneys, so there is no need for us to investigate the victim.</p>\n" }, { "answer_id": 4795, "author": "Anonymous Physicist", "author_id": 13240, "author_profile": "https://academia.meta.stackexchange.com/users/13240", "pm_score": 5, "selected": false, "text": "<p><em>Upvote this answer if you agree we should close (for any reason); downvote if you strongly disagree.</em></p>\n<p><strong>Close the question.</strong> This &quot;depends on individual factors&quot;: if all these details are really needed to understand the question, the question does not belong on this site.</p>\n" }, { "answer_id": 4796, "author": "cag51", "author_id": 79875, "author_profile": "https://academia.meta.stackexchange.com/users/79875", "pm_score": -1, "selected": false, "text": "<p><em>Upvote this answer if you agree we should leave open in its present state (for any reason); downvote if you strongly disagree.</em></p>\n<p><strong>Leave the question open in its present state</strong>.</p>\n" }, { "answer_id": 4797, "author": "cag51", "author_id": 79875, "author_profile": "https://academia.meta.stackexchange.com/users/79875", "pm_score": -1, "selected": false, "text": "<p><em>Upvote this answer if you agree we should heavily edit the question and leave open (for any reason); downvote if you strongly disagree.</em></p>\n<p><strong>Heavily edit the question, then leave open.</strong> We can edit to (1) generalize the question, and (2) remove some of the troubling comments cited above. This will allow us to keep the existing answers intact.</p>\n" }, { "answer_id": 4798, "author": "Arno", "author_id": 12047, "author_profile": "https://academia.meta.stackexchange.com/users/12047", "pm_score": 3, "selected": false, "text": "<p><em>Upvote this answer if you agree we should delete (for any reason); downvote if you strongly disagree.</em></p>\n<p><strong>Delete the question</strong> (in addition to closing). The situation seems enough of a mess that suggestions based on an incomplete understanding of it can easily do harm.</p>\n" } ]

[ "https://academia.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/4793", "https://academia.meta.stackexchange.com", "https://academia.meta.stackexchange.com/users/57314/" ]

[ { "answer_id": 4809, "author": "eykanal", "author_id": 73, "author_profile": "https://academia.meta.stackexchange.com/users/73", "pm_score": 5, "selected": false, "text": "<p>Thanks so much for sharing! Glad that we're helpful. I can see two ways you can help out, and I'm sure there are more:</p>\n<ul>\n<li><p>There are many questions stemming from a teacher's point of view, or a lab advisor, or a colleague. Your perspective is quite valuable on these posts. You'd be surprised how quickly the student experience is forgotten. Share your thoughts, especially when you notice that they're not being expressed in other answers.</p>\n</li>\n<li><p>Play the long game! I've been on this site for ... <em>*checks watch*</em> ... more years than I care to admit to myself, and the type of contribution I've been able to provide has shifted dramatically. &quot;Pay it forward,&quot; as the saying goes, whenever you have the opportunity.</p>\n</li>\n</ul>\n<p>On a related note, please take to heart that your asking questions and participating is an <em>incredibly</em> valuable contribution to the community. You have over 35k views on questions you've asked... using the time-honored tradition of guesstimating, that's probably over 15k people who have benefitted from your contributions. That's incredible! Well done!</p>\n" }, { "answer_id": 4810, "author": "cag51", "author_id": 79875, "author_profile": "https://academia.meta.stackexchange.com/users/79875", "pm_score": 4, "selected": false, "text": "<blockquote>\n<p>Academia SE is the best SE!</p>\n</blockquote>\n<p>Hard to argue with that!</p>\n<blockquote>\n<p>However, as a student, I have very very little experience to offer back to the community. In addition, I don't want to misguide others with my inaccurate information and my immaturity.</p>\n</blockquote>\n<p>It is admirable that you recognize this! Unlike some other SEs that are based on technical &quot;facts&quot; or verifiable references, we rely heavily on &quot;personal expertise&quot; from those with experience in academia. We are lucky that our user base represents a wide cross-section of students, lecturers, post-docs, professors, industry researchers, and former academicians. But we must all recognize our limits, and avoid the temptation to overgeneralize from our experience or knowledge. I am sometimes reminded of this &quot;the hard way&quot; when I answer a question I shouldn't, and end up saying something stupid about law or theoretical math. :-)</p>\n<blockquote>\n<p>I feel guilty if I don't give back in return. How can I effectively contribute?</p>\n</blockquote>\n<p>Eykanal gave some good suggestions, but let me underline three in particular.</p>\n<ul>\n<li><strong>Ask questions.</strong> As discussed <a href=\"https://stackoverflow.blog/2019/11/13/were-rewarding-the-question-askers/\">here</a>, crafting a well-received question is difficult. Long-time users are familiar with our site's norms, and can be a good source of interesting questions.</li>\n<li><strong>Edit</strong>. This is definitely something that not everyone can do: it can be a tricky balance to make (sometimes major) revisions while still respecting the asker's intent. But if you have good writing skills (which you seem to) and are familiar with our norms, this can be really impactful: I have seen edits turn a soon-to-be-closed or largely-ignored question into an HNQ. And it is largely thankless work.</li>\n<li><strong>Vote and flag</strong>. If you've been around for a while and are familiar with our norms, your votes (including close/reopen votes) are very helpful. And as for &quot;there is no fight, no politics, no troubles&quot;...well, the view as a mod is a bit different, but flags are a very helpful way to bring (potential) issues to our attention before they turn into trouble.</li>\n</ul>\n" }, { "answer_id": 4811, "author": "Anonymous Physicist", "author_id": 13240, "author_profile": "https://academia.meta.stackexchange.com/users/13240", "pm_score": 3, "selected": false, "text": "<blockquote>\n<p>I don't want to misguide others... How can I effectively contribute?</p>\n</blockquote>\n<p>Vote on questions. You do not need to know the answer to a question to determine if the question is useful.</p>\n" }, { "answer_id": 4819, "author": "Wrzlprmft", "author_id": 7734, "author_profile": "https://academia.meta.stackexchange.com/users/7734", "pm_score": 3, "selected": false, "text": "<p>Because it hasn’t been mentioned yet:</p>\n<p><strong>Review,</strong> in particular first posts. I would argue that this is the most important review queue, because if done properly, a good <em>first posts</em> review can make a new user feel welcome, fix problems with a question before bad answers or closure happen, and so on. Just make sure that you edit the post as well as you can, leave comments helping the author to improve their post (or explain what is the problem with an unsalvageable post), and vote and flag as appropriate.</p>\n<p>In my experience, a secondary advantage of reviewing is that you automatically engage with posts, and learn something in the process or find questions that you can answer.</p>\n" }, { "answer_id": 4838, "author": "Ben", "author_id": 87026, "author_profile": "https://academia.meta.stackexchange.com/users/87026", "pm_score": 2, "selected": false, "text": "<blockquote>\n<p>I feel guilty if I don't give back in return. How can I effectively contribute?</p>\n</blockquote>\n<p>Even just upvoting questions and answers you like is a valuable service, and it is a nice little show of appreciation for those of us who contribute questions and answers.</p>\n" } ]

[ "https://academia.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/4808", "https://academia.meta.stackexchange.com", "https://academia.meta.stackexchange.com/users/69151/" ]

[ { "answer_id": 4809, "author": "eykanal", "author_id": 73, "author_profile": "https://academia.meta.stackexchange.com/users/73", "pm_score": 5, "selected": false, "text": "<p>Thanks so much for sharing! Glad that we're helpful. I can see two ways you can help out, and I'm sure there are more:</p>\n<ul>\n<li><p>There are many questions stemming from a teacher's point of view, or a lab advisor, or a colleague. Your perspective is quite valuable on these posts. You'd be surprised how quickly the student experience is forgotten. Share your thoughts, especially when you notice that they're not being expressed in other answers.</p>\n</li>\n<li><p>Play the long game! I've been on this site for ... <em>*checks watch*</em> ... more years than I care to admit to myself, and the type of contribution I've been able to provide has shifted dramatically. &quot;Pay it forward,&quot; as the saying goes, whenever you have the opportunity.</p>\n</li>\n</ul>\n<p>On a related note, please take to heart that your asking questions and participating is an <em>incredibly</em> valuable contribution to the community. You have over 35k views on questions you've asked... using the time-honored tradition of guesstimating, that's probably over 15k people who have benefitted from your contributions. That's incredible! Well done!</p>\n" }, { "answer_id": 4810, "author": "cag51", "author_id": 79875, "author_profile": "https://academia.meta.stackexchange.com/users/79875", "pm_score": 4, "selected": false, "text": "<blockquote>\n<p>Academia SE is the best SE!</p>\n</blockquote>\n<p>Hard to argue with that!</p>\n<blockquote>\n<p>However, as a student, I have very very little experience to offer back to the community. In addition, I don't want to misguide others with my inaccurate information and my immaturity.</p>\n</blockquote>\n<p>It is admirable that you recognize this! Unlike some other SEs that are based on technical &quot;facts&quot; or verifiable references, we rely heavily on &quot;personal expertise&quot; from those with experience in academia. We are lucky that our user base represents a wide cross-section of students, lecturers, post-docs, professors, industry researchers, and former academicians. But we must all recognize our limits, and avoid the temptation to overgeneralize from our experience or knowledge. I am sometimes reminded of this &quot;the hard way&quot; when I answer a question I shouldn't, and end up saying something stupid about law or theoretical math. :-)</p>\n<blockquote>\n<p>I feel guilty if I don't give back in return. How can I effectively contribute?</p>\n</blockquote>\n<p>Eykanal gave some good suggestions, but let me underline three in particular.</p>\n<ul>\n<li><strong>Ask questions.</strong> As discussed <a href=\"https://stackoverflow.blog/2019/11/13/were-rewarding-the-question-askers/\">here</a>, crafting a well-received question is difficult. Long-time users are familiar with our site's norms, and can be a good source of interesting questions.</li>\n<li><strong>Edit</strong>. This is definitely something that not everyone can do: it can be a tricky balance to make (sometimes major) revisions while still respecting the asker's intent. But if you have good writing skills (which you seem to) and are familiar with our norms, this can be really impactful: I have seen edits turn a soon-to-be-closed or largely-ignored question into an HNQ. And it is largely thankless work.</li>\n<li><strong>Vote and flag</strong>. If you've been around for a while and are familiar with our norms, your votes (including close/reopen votes) are very helpful. And as for &quot;there is no fight, no politics, no troubles&quot;...well, the view as a mod is a bit different, but flags are a very helpful way to bring (potential) issues to our attention before they turn into trouble.</li>\n</ul>\n" }, { "answer_id": 4811, "author": "Anonymous Physicist", "author_id": 13240, "author_profile": "https://academia.meta.stackexchange.com/users/13240", "pm_score": 3, "selected": false, "text": "<blockquote>\n<p>I don't want to misguide others... How can I effectively contribute?</p>\n</blockquote>\n<p>Vote on questions. You do not need to know the answer to a question to determine if the question is useful.</p>\n" }, { "answer_id": 4819, "author": "Wrzlprmft", "author_id": 7734, "author_profile": "https://academia.meta.stackexchange.com/users/7734", "pm_score": 3, "selected": false, "text": "<p>Because it hasn’t been mentioned yet:</p>\n<p><strong>Review,</strong> in particular first posts. I would argue that this is the most important review queue, because if done properly, a good <em>first posts</em> review can make a new user feel welcome, fix problems with a question before bad answers or closure happen, and so on. Just make sure that you edit the post as well as you can, leave comments helping the author to improve their post (or explain what is the problem with an unsalvageable post), and vote and flag as appropriate.</p>\n<p>In my experience, a secondary advantage of reviewing is that you automatically engage with posts, and learn something in the process or find questions that you can answer.</p>\n" }, { "answer_id": 4838, "author": "Ben", "author_id": 87026, "author_profile": "https://academia.meta.stackexchange.com/users/87026", "pm_score": 2, "selected": false, "text": "<blockquote>\n<p>I feel guilty if I don't give back in return. How can I effectively contribute?</p>\n</blockquote>\n<p>Even just upvoting questions and answers you like is a valuable service, and it is a nice little show of appreciation for those of us who contribute questions and answers.</p>\n" } ]

[ "https://academia.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/4814", "https://academia.meta.stackexchange.com", "https://academia.meta.stackexchange.com/users/108615/" ]

[ { "answer_id": 4818, "author": "cag51", "author_id": 79875, "author_profile": "https://academia.meta.stackexchange.com/users/79875", "pm_score": 4, "selected": true, "text": "<blockquote>\n<p>(1) Why people use comments to answer the questions?</p>\n</blockquote>\n<p><strong>They shouldn't.</strong> This bypasses the voting mechanism; further, popular comments are often more visible than answers. The photography stack has a <a href=\"https://photo.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/4655/please-put-your-answers-in-the-answers-section-even-if-theyre-short\">nice write up</a> of why answers-in-comments are discouraged.</p>\n<p>I can't quite follow the rest of your post, but I'll try to break this down.</p>\n<blockquote>\n<p>(2) How do moderators handle answers in comments?</p>\n</blockquote>\n<p>This is tricky. Some of the possible ways we can deal with answers-in-comments include:</p>\n<ul>\n<li>Encouraging authors to turn answers-in-comments into proper answers (everyone can do this, not just mods!)</li>\n<li>Move answers-in-comments and other <a href=\"https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/19756/how-do-comments-work\">off-topic comments</a> to chat (the system only allows us move comments to chat once per post)</li>\n<li>Linking <a href=\"https://academia.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/4230/why-do-the-moderators-move-comments-to-chat-and-how-should-i-behave-afterwards/4231\">this FAQ</a> which warns people that future answers-in-comments may be deleted</li>\n<li>Deleting answers-in-comments</li>\n<li>Declining to take any action</li>\n</ul>\n<p>Determining which of these to use in a given case is a tricky business: comment-writers get angry when we delete their comments, but answer-writers get angry when we don't! We had some discussion of this <a href=\"https://academia.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/4600/which-kinds-of-answers-in-comments-if-any-do-we-want-to-keep\">a year ago</a>, and while we did arrive at some general guidelines, we generally tailor our approach to each situation.</p>\n<p>That said, there is no automatic answer-in-comment detector: if no one raises a flag, and we mods don't happen across it ourselves, then no action will be taken. This is one reason why it might appear that answers-in-comments are allowed.</p>\n<blockquote>\n<p>(3) How do moderators handle comments in answers?</p>\n</blockquote>\n<p>In my experience, most are extremely low-quality and are just deleted. In rare cases, we can convert answers to comments (but not the other way around)</p>\n<blockquote>\n<p>(4) What I mean is: Instead of using a comment, I used the answer to try to contribute a question. I advised a site with academic research tools (it was a tool to discover the network of existing connections with a specific academic text), but my answer was quickly denounced and my contribution was seen as website marketing!</p>\n</blockquote>\n<p>So in fact, this example really has nothing to do with the distinction between answers and comments!</p>\n<p>I believe you are referring to <a href=\"https://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/156194/how-to-enhance-my-use-of-google-scholar/156208#156208\">this</a> deleted answer (link for users with &gt;10K reputation). In this case, the user had asked some specific questions about Google Scholar. You ignored these questions and wrote:</p>\n<blockquote>\n<p>Although Sorry if my answer isn't such precise. However, I think everyone needs to know this website. That is a wonderful tool to follow and do the net of bibliography that apparently you want with Google Scholar features. [url redacted]</p>\n</blockquote>\n<p>This does look a lot like spam. You didn't address any of OP's specific questions, instead recommending a totally different tool with no justification. I believe you when you say that you are not spamming, and I'm sorry you had this negative experience. However, if you are going to recommend a tool, you need to be very specific about why the tool solves OP's <em>specific</em> problem. We get a lot of spam here (often for predatory tools, journals, or conferences) and so it is natural to question the motivation of those who recommend a particular tool (and even moreso when the author is a new user).</p>\n" }, { "answer_id": 4832, "author": "Louic", "author_id": 64075, "author_profile": "https://academia.meta.stackexchange.com/users/64075", "pm_score": 2, "selected": false, "text": "<p>Possible reasons to place answers in comments (as far as I have encountered them):</p>\n<ul>\n<li><p>On stack overflow people use comments to post answers because they do not want to &quot;pollute&quot; their credibility: they do not wish to get reputation points for the easier answers: potential employers watch their account, so this is understandable there. This is probably less relevant for academia, but the behaviour may exist.</p>\n</li>\n<li><p>People may answer in comments because they wish to help OP, despite the question being off-topic, a duplicate, or a shopping question.</p>\n</li>\n<li><p>The answer is incomplete: it includes one suggestion that could be seen as an answer by some, but the actual answer is more complex. The person who answers realizes this, but does not have the knowledge, time or motivation to post a full, detailed answer. If he still wishes to contribute or post a hint for the one who will write the full answer, comments are used.</p>\n</li>\n</ul>\n<p>Even though these may not be the intended use of comments, in many cases it helps OP and the website so I see no reason to forbid or prevent it, but that is a matter of opinion of course.</p>\n" } ]

[ "https://academia.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/4817", "https://academia.meta.stackexchange.com", "https://academia.meta.stackexchange.com/users/129419/" ]

[ { "answer_id": 4834, "author": "eykanal", "author_id": 73, "author_profile": "https://academia.meta.stackexchange.com/users/73", "pm_score": 3, "selected": false, "text": "<p>This is quite a borderline question to me. Its definitely more of a software reference question, and honestly should just go on the <a href=\"https://readcubesupport.freshdesk.com/support/home\" rel=\"nofollow noreferrer\">Papers 2 support site</a>. That said, this is clearly an academic issue, relevant to other academics. I'm in favor of reopening.</p>\n" }, { "answer_id": 4835, "author": "Buffy", "author_id": 75368, "author_profile": "https://academia.meta.stackexchange.com/users/75368", "pm_score": 2, "selected": false, "text": "<p>Sorry, but the question is a purely technical one. I'd vote to close (again) but the system won't let me. There are other places for this sort of question.</p>\n<p>The application isn't the heart of the question. It is about syncing devices.</p>\n" } ]

[ "https://academia.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/4833", "https://academia.meta.stackexchange.com", "https://academia.meta.stackexchange.com/users/17928/" ]

[ { "answer_id": 4839, "author": "cag51", "author_id": 79875, "author_profile": "https://academia.meta.stackexchange.com/users/79875", "pm_score": -1, "selected": false, "text": "<p><em>Upvote this post if you agree that we should adopt this canonical question; downvote if you strongly disagree.</em></p>\n<p>Yes, we should adopt this canonical question. As Ben says, the purpose of this forum is the academic process, which we can explain in a single, well-written canonical question -- we should not wade into the forensic or legal matters of individual cases.</p>\n<p>Note, this referendum is on the question only; the answer Ben proposed can be revised or a competing answer can be posted.</p>\n" }, { "answer_id": 4840, "author": "cag51", "author_id": 79875, "author_profile": "https://academia.meta.stackexchange.com/users/79875", "pm_score": 3, "selected": false, "text": "<p><em>Upvote this post if you agree that we should not adopt this canonical question; downvote if you strongly disagree.</em></p>\n<p>No, we should not adopt this canonical question. There are too many variables: technical issues with an online system are substantively different than a good-faith misinterpretation of the rules which is different than being caught texting during an exam. Further, things are different in different locations. Lumping research or sexual misconduct into this makes it even broader. While some misconduct questions are essentially duplicates of each other, we should continue to mark as duplicates of an existing, similar question rather than creating a giant, one-size-fits-all canonical answer.</p>\n" } ]

[ "https://academia.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/4837", "https://academia.meta.stackexchange.com", "https://academia.meta.stackexchange.com/users/87026/" ]

[ { "answer_id": 4846, "author": "WoJ", "author_id": 15446, "author_profile": "https://academia.meta.stackexchange.com/users/15446", "pm_score": 6, "selected": true, "text": "<p>A French perspective on this predominantly US site, but also used by non-US users.</p>\n<p>Our perspective on profanity and pornography is wildly different than in the US. We commonly use words such as &quot;oh putain&quot; (~&quot;oh shit&quot;) in professional situations. Context matters very much - I just told my 14 years old son who was on a game chat that this is not acceptable.</p>\n<p>Same goes for pornography. Watch the end of this gymnastics TV show of the 80's (NSFW and for puritan eyes outside of France I guess) that was broadcasted in the morning (around 10 am) on the second TV channel (out of the three we had): <a href=\"https://www.dailymotion.com/video/x7ezxsx\" rel=\"nofollow noreferrer\">https://www.dailymotion.com/video/x7ezxsx</a>. What you see is from the archives of the official French institution that preserves TV programs (<a href=\"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Institut_national_de_l%27audiovisuel\" rel=\"nofollow noreferrer\">INA</a>).</p>\n<p>I was a teenager at the time and we got extremely interested in fitness, that we watched till the very end. Now, 40 years later, we enjoy the fact that we had such freedom (I am not even starting with what was at 19:45, right before the main news program of the day)</p>\n<p>Academia is a site for grown-ups. Grown-ups know that words such as fuck exist and that people sometimes use them. When I quote General Cambronne who replied to the English &quot;Merde!&quot;, I will not change it to &quot;Selles!&quot; (the medical word for excrements), or &quot;M***e!&quot; because everyone would laugh instead of understanding that it was a courageous act.</p>\n<p>I am offended by some words (such as &quot;homeopathy&quot;). Does that mean that they should be either explained in an allegoric way (&quot;medicine for idiots&quot;), or shortened to &quot;hom***&quot; (and then be mistaken with &quot;homophobia&quot;)?</p>\n<p>There is a moment where an adult sees things that they do not like and the world will not bend to them. Including homeopathy.</p>\n<p><strong>My proposal: be strict on ad-hominem attacks, leave alone words because different people see them differently.</strong> If the words are really added for the sake of being vulgar that is something else. A comment like the one in the code was funny - there was no malice from the desperate developer who had to anal this and that.</p>\n<p>You do not realize how the nipple-gate was seen here: as a sandbox fight between toddlers. It was not even funny, it was quite frightening that a breast seen on TV by accident raised to national issue and warranted a time shift in such broadcasts so that someone can press a button to avoid that in the future.</p>\n<p>EDIT: I do not think that changing the rules will change much in reality.<br />\nPeople will still flag posts with &quot;homeopathy&quot; as vulgar (see, I am trying to decrease the tension here), and then what is left to the mods? To decide whether this is a really vulgar word, or a less vulgar one? Whether in that context it is acceptable? If I was a mod I would have a hard time deciding (I moderated plenty of wild places back in the 90's and was part of the Angel Team that fought with early pedo-pornography - so I have seen my fair share of dark and vulgarity). Especially on a site like Academia where real, intended vulgarity is not common.</p>\n" }, { "answer_id": 4847, "author": "cag51", "author_id": 79875, "author_profile": "https://academia.meta.stackexchange.com/users/79875", "pm_score": 4, "selected": false, "text": "<p>A slightly stricter option.</p>\n<p><strong>Proposal: Profanity should generally be edited out of posts; however, it may be retained as needed to facilitate unredacted quotes (actual or hypothetical), or discussions about language.</strong></p>\n<p>Rationale:</p>\n<ul>\n<li>The code-of-conduct requires that language be respectful and professional. Profanity is rarely necessary, and is often perceived as unprofessional or disrespectful (even if this is not the intent). Further, new users who see profanity may assume that &quot;anything goes.&quot; So, answers like &quot;hell no...&quot; should be edited to &quot;no...&quot;; answers that cannot be edited should be deleted. This is largely the policy now.</li>\n<li>But, there is no reason to avoid using profanity when it is germane to the discussion and used in a reasonable manner. On this site, that includes quotes (actual or hypothetical), and discussions about academic language. So, profanity in these cases will generally no longer be removed.</li>\n<li>The other key change is the word &quot;generally&quot;: individual cases may be judged individually. This does not mean that exceptions will be granted to anyone who complains; rather, we will consider each post's overall tone and the degree to which removing the profanity would weaken or obfuscate the post.</li>\n</ul>\n" }, { "answer_id": 4848, "author": "DavidH", "author_id": 128740, "author_profile": "https://academia.meta.stackexchange.com/users/128740", "pm_score": 2, "selected": false, "text": "<p>A subtly different suggestion from the previous proposals:</p>\n<p>A similar take to cag51's suggestion, where profanity is permitted when it adds to the discussion, such as in a direct quote or if using a substitute would obscure the discussion significantly. However, profanity that does not contribute significantly to the question is edited out, as in general it is not helpful and breaks a good rule of thumb for clarity: not to use more words than is necessary to get the point across.</p>\n<p>I would suggest, however, that the existing policy continue to be enforced in the case where the word in question has a history of being used to oppress and dehumanise a minority group. Examples include racial slurs such as &quot;the N-word&quot;. This reflects policies that exist elsewhere in academia such as <a href=\"https://www.english.cam.ac.uk/equality/?page_id=130\" rel=\"nofollow noreferrer\">this policy</a> from Cambridge University English department. Quoting from the linked page:</p>\n<blockquote>\n<p>Offensive and highly charged terms (such as the n-word) can have a detrimental impact on the ability of BAME [Black, Asian and Minority Ethnic] students to learn.</p>\n</blockquote>\n<p>Though this site is not primarily for students, I think the sentiment can be transferred that the use of racial slurs, even in quotations, can have a significant negative impact on the ability of minority groups to have a pleasant and benificial experience on academia.stackexchange. For this reason, I don't think that the small added benefit of clarity is justified in the case of racial slurs and other charged language.</p>\n<p>This is in line with the <a href=\"https://meta.stackexchange.com/conduct\">StackExchange code of conduct</a> that states</p>\n<blockquote>\n<p>When in doubt, don't use language that might offend or alienate.</p>\n</blockquote>\n" }, { "answer_id": 4849, "author": "Bryan Krause", "author_id": 63475, "author_profile": "https://academia.meta.stackexchange.com/users/63475", "pm_score": 3, "selected": false, "text": "<p>Not necessarily equal to my personal view, but this has been addressed on MSE before:</p>\n<p><a href=\"https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/22232/are-expletives-cursing-swear-words-or-vulgar-language-allowed-on-se-sites\">Are expletives (cursing, swear words or vulgar language) allowed on SE sites?</a></p>\n<p>Quoting from Jeff's answer:</p>\n<blockquote>\n<p>Using expletives is not acceptable behavior on any Stack Exchange site and is a violation of the Code of Conduct, even on Meta. There are a very small handful of exceptions (such as if you were talking about the word itself on a language site), but in general you should not use expletives anywhere, under any circumstances. If you can't effectively communicate what you need to say without resorting to lowest common denominator cursing, then keep it to yourself.</p>\n</blockquote>\n<p>I think it's fine for Academia.SE to decide how we interpret the &quot;exceptions&quot; and that this interpretation could be quite broad, but we should also consider the broader SE policy for context. Yes, there is almost certainly a &quot;industry/corporate US culture&quot; assumption built in to this policy when that culture does not describe many of the users here, but also we are on a website principally operated by a US company.</p>\n" }, { "answer_id": 4850, "author": "Buffy", "author_id": 75368, "author_profile": "https://academia.meta.stackexchange.com/users/75368", "pm_score": 1, "selected": false, "text": "<p>It is hard to state this in &quot;policy language&quot;, but I think that such things should only be removed (other than when some abuse is involved), if they are unrelated to the &quot;meaning and sense&quot; of the post. If an expletive or other possibly hurtful language contributes nothing to the meaning, then it can be removed without changing the intent of the writer.</p>\n<p>But English is, since its creation, a rather profane language. Even Shakespeare used some rather, for the day, harsh language.</p>\n<p>But I'll also note that it doesn't have to be profane or abusive to offend people. Even a seeming innocuous phrase like &quot;...thank God...&quot; will be deeply offensive to possibly millions of people.</p>\n" } ]

[ "https://academia.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/4845", "https://academia.meta.stackexchange.com", "https://academia.meta.stackexchange.com/users/79875/" ]

[ { "answer_id": 4852, "author": "Massimo Ortolano", "author_id": 20058, "author_profile": "https://academia.meta.stackexchange.com/users/20058", "pm_score": 4, "selected": false, "text": "<p>It's true that that edit may be a seen as too invasive and deviating from the original intent of the post (to use the words of an edit reject reason), especially without a specific explanation for the user (a new user might not notice the edit comment in the revision history).</p>\n<p>It's also true, though, that that part is really irrelevant to the question. I also think that this does not depend on its religious content, which I wouldn't consider controversial. Reverting the edit is thus possible, but it wouldn't add anything to the answer.</p>\n<p>Therefore, I haven't reverted the edit, but I've added a comment hoping to better explain the reason to the author (suggestion for refinements are welcome):</p>\n<blockquote>\n<p>Hi and welcome to Academia SE. Your answer contained a long part which was totally unrelated to the question. Please recall that, unlike forums, Stack Exchange sites are not built for general discussions, but as repositories of answers to well-defined questions. It's thus important to keep the answers focussed, and for this reason the irrelevant part has been removed. I kindly invite you to have a look at the Tour and at the Help center to see how this site works.</p>\n</blockquote>\n" }, { "answer_id": 4853, "author": "DailyReader", "author_id": 133244, "author_profile": "https://academia.meta.stackexchange.com/users/133244", "pm_score": -1, "selected": false, "text": "<p>I have read your comments and here is my explanation for my answer. BTW I have already posted this in the comments section but just to make it clear. All what I was to do is to actually give the OP a hand both by affirming what other people said and by advising what approach I take to solve the issue myself.</p>\n<p>To us Muslims, and I think should be to everyone else, an academic setting, a medical setting, an emotional setting, or whatever setting you can think of is a part of a human's life and counts towards the decisions he makes in his life. Allah says in the Quran, which I really advice myself first and everyone else to take a look at often, in 75:36 &quot; Does man think that he will be left neglected (without being punished or rewarded for the obligatory duties enjoined by his Lord Allâh on him)?&quot; in other interpretation: left without purpose? in another interpretation &quot;alone, unquestioned?. This means that the everything in the life of the human being revolves around his relationship with Allah, his creator, because he will stand in front of him on the day of judgment. And if you look with an objective eye you can see that what humans believe in, good or bad, true or false, affects every move they make in life whether that is publishing a paper, performing a medical operation, dealing with other people or even using the toilet! FYI the main reason why muslims use water after using the toilet is because Allah commanded us through his messenger Muhammed peace be upon him to do so. Of course such daily actions have an affect on human life in all aspects because we believe they are from the creator and giver of life so who else can give you better advice. ِAllah says in 67:14 How could He not know His Own creation? For He ˹alone˺ is the Most Subtle, All-Aware. So this is actually pretty academic work!</p>\n<p>**note: After I wrote the answer below I realized how long it is and hence thank you for reading it in advance. Looking forward to your questions or concerns.</p>\n<p>Just a quick question to all participating as admins specially those in such an academic context: why is religion out of question when it comes to science although religion brings forth science based evidence to a matter? Is it because religion, due to the media, immediately raises all the flags to some people? I mean the only reason why science exists is due to the observations of what is out there done by the creator right? If you think no creator exists, well you still do not have a good argument yet to not believe that and base science on it. As far as I understand science is based on observation, so what you see is what you note down right? But hold on, if the creator &quot;out there&quot; decided to hide himself from observation does this mean he is not there? No it means we just can see him or we maybe not using the right tool. A very small example is the invention of the telescope and microscope, people did not know what was out there until we had the right tool at hand. Well we have perhaps the greatest tools to find out. Allah says in 16:78 And Allah brought you out of the wombs of your mothers while you knew nothing, and gave you hearing, sight, and intellect so perhaps you would be thankful. and in 2:164 Indeed, in the creation of the heavens and the earth; the alternation of the day and the night; the ships that sail the sea for the benefit of humanity; the rain sent down by Allah from the skies, reviving the earth after its death; the scattering of all kinds of creatures throughout; the shifting of the winds; and the clouds drifting between the heavens and the earth—˹in all of this˺ are surely signs for people of understanding. But also Allah says in 50:37 Surely in this is a reminder for whoever has a ˹mindful˺ heart and lends an attentive ear.</p>\n<p>Thank you for reading this far.</p>\n" }, { "answer_id": 4855, "author": "Buffy", "author_id": 75368, "author_profile": "https://academia.meta.stackexchange.com/users/75368", "pm_score": -1, "selected": false, "text": "<p>My preference, actually, is to leave such things in place. The only reason I can see for removing them is that they were attracting such a negative response. But that is the &quot;fault&quot; of those with down votes and negative comments. That part makes me sad.</p>\n<p>In some ways, an answer appealing to &quot;higher powers,&quot; as it were, might be soothing to someone like the OP of the question who sounds a bit depressed. So the answer was, in some way, a personal response, not a technical one.</p>\n<p>But it was sad to see all the down votes there and here.</p>\n" } ]

[ "https://academia.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/4851", "https://academia.meta.stackexchange.com", "https://academia.meta.stackexchange.com/users/15446/" ]

[ { "answer_id": 4856, "author": "cag51", "author_id": 79875, "author_profile": "https://academia.meta.stackexchange.com/users/79875", "pm_score": 5, "selected": false, "text": "<p>I think you have been told several times what the problem was.</p>\n<p>In the now-deleted comments, Terri Loring wrote:</p>\n<blockquote>\n<p>The trouble with this question is that it is location specific. In some countries the postoc will pay higher taxes and get health coverage. In a few countries, the university needs to cover the cost of health insurance and that is generally passed on to the PI. There will be variation between universities in the same country. The current question is very broad and probably will gather misleading answers.</p>\n</blockquote>\n<p>Lighthouse keeper wrote:</p>\n<blockquote>\n<p>It's usually a good idea to give a reason [why you are asking the question] because many questions on this site come from flawed premises, and the most helpful response is to correct the premise rather than to literally answer the question.</p>\n</blockquote>\n<p>Finally, I wrote:</p>\n<blockquote>\n<p>Most open/close decisions here are made by community vote, not by moderator fiat. If you edit your question, it will be placed in a queue for a reopening vote. The hard part of question-asking is the amount of detail: it should be specific enough that there is a correct answer rather than an open-ended discussion, but general enough that future readers might find the question useful. In your case, a good starting place would be to specify your country (or part of the world) and field.</p>\n</blockquote>\n<p>Now I see that you have added a location, which is good, but still no field (even a general field, like laboratory science vs. history) and no hint of why you want to know the answer. You may feel that we can provide a good answer without knowing these variables, but the community apparently disagrees.</p>\n<blockquote>\n<p>I replied appropriately to these condescending, patronizing comments</p>\n</blockquote>\n<p>Let us be honest about what happened. You told one of our most respected members &quot;haha oh lord, how can people be so anal?&quot; You also wrote &quot;Due to bullying and peer pressure, I have unnecessarily reduced the scope of the question. Hope you are happy now? Or should we waste our time making it more precise?...&quot; Even in this meta post, you call us condescending, patronizing, spiteful, and childish.</p>\n<p>This is against our <a href=\"https://academia.stackexchange.com/conduct\">code of conduct</a> (which a moderator pointed you to). We do not allow &quot;subtle put-downs or unfriendly language.&quot; If you feel that other members were unfriendly toward you, you should flag for moderator attention rather than responding in kind.</p>\n<p>I will also point out that some of our members have been here for years, helping thousands of people with no reward. In contrast, you have been here for two days and have already unleashed a barrage of personal attacks. As in &quot;real life,&quot; you will seldom be able to advance your agenda when you make others defensive and hostile.</p>\n<blockquote>\n<p>[How to move forward?]</p>\n</blockquote>\n<p>You did the right thing in posting to meta. Setting aside the above issues, I actually agree with you that this was a straightforward question that got &quot;massacred.&quot; It is true that things will vary school-to-school, but I think your request for a &quot;ballpark&quot; for a particular country and field is very reasonable.</p>\n<p>So, my suggestion would be that you edit your post to specify a particular field (e.g., history or experimental chemistry) and then we reopen. Explaining why you want to know would probably lead to better answers, but I wouldn't consider that mandatory. But this is just my suggestion, not an &quot;official decision&quot; -- we will see if any other community members respond to your post with other suggestions.</p>\n" }, { "answer_id": 4862, "author": "Anonymous Physicist", "author_id": 13240, "author_profile": "https://academia.meta.stackexchange.com/users/13240", "pm_score": 2, "selected": false, "text": "<p>The question was correctly closed for strongly depending on individual factors. Pay, benefits, and overheads vary a lot in the US.</p>\n<p>Some countries have pay and benefit standards set by government or union contracts. If you asked such a question about one of those countries, it might be on topic.</p>\n" } ]

[ "https://academia.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/4854", "https://academia.meta.stackexchange.com", "https://academia.meta.stackexchange.com/users/133396/" ]

[ { "answer_id": 4858, "author": "Wrzlprmft", "author_id": 7734, "author_profile": "https://academia.meta.stackexchange.com/users/7734", "pm_score": 2, "selected": false, "text": "<p>I don’t see how your question would be on-topic on Academia SE, as this is not a concept relevant to academic processes or culture. Specific academics may care about this kind of thing, namely anthropologists, but that would make this about the contents of research and teaching, which are explicitly off-topic here.</p>\n<p>As there is no Anthropology SE, there is no spot-on site for this. I would guess that <a href=\"https://history.stackexchange.com/help/on-topic\">History SE</a> is best suited, at least it does have an <em>anthropology</em> tag. If you ask there, it may help to put your question in a historic context.</p>\n<p>General questions looking for a term can also be suited for <a href=\"https://english.stackexchange.com/help/on-topic\">English Language &amp; Usage</a>, but given the specificity of your request, I would consider your odds for a good answer to be worse there.</p>\n" }, { "answer_id": 4859, "author": "Brian Tompsett - 汤莱恩", "author_id": 26708, "author_profile": "https://academia.meta.stackexchange.com/users/26708", "pm_score": 2, "selected": false, "text": "<p>I agree it is off-topic for Academia. However, I think it is suitable for <a href=\"https://hsm.stackexchange.com/\">History of Science and Mathematics</a>, but you should read <a href=\"https://hsm.stackexchange.com/help/on-topic\">their question guidance</a> first.</p>\n<p>However, you are not the first to be interested in these interlinking threads of technology. You may be interested in the work of James Burke: <a href=\"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Connections_(TV_series)\" rel=\"nofollow noreferrer\">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Connections_(TV_series)</a></p>\n<p>You should also look at the terms Praxeology, Mesology, Teleology etc which relate to the philosophy of human knowledge.</p>\n" } ]

[ "https://academia.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/4857", "https://academia.meta.stackexchange.com", "https://academia.meta.stackexchange.com/users/80304/" ]

[ { "answer_id": 4872, "author": "Bryan Krause", "author_id": 63475, "author_profile": "https://academia.meta.stackexchange.com/users/63475", "pm_score": 3, "selected": false, "text": "<p>I don't think I would vote the question to be closed, but I suspect those that have consider this effectively a <a href=\"https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/14470/what-is-the-boat-programming-meme-about\">boat programming</a> question, a phrase used to refer to questions that are off-topic on Stack Overflow because they take a more generic question and frame it as &quot;for programmers&quot; when that generic qualification isn't really relevant and only serves to make a non-programming question into one.</p>\n<p>Since the Google Knowledge Panel isn't specific to academics (it applies to any people of note, organizations, etc.), you could consider a question &quot;How to manage my own Google Knowledge Panel as an academic?&quot; to be the boat programming version of &quot;How to manage my own Google Knowledge Panel?&quot;</p>\n" }, { "answer_id": 4873, "author": "Anonymous Physicist", "author_id": 13240, "author_profile": "https://academia.meta.stackexchange.com/users/13240", "pm_score": 0, "selected": false, "text": "<p>The question should be closed as off-topic for the reason Bryan Krause gave:</p>\n<blockquote>\n<p>Since the Google Knowledge Panel isn't specific to academics (it applies to any people of note, organizations, etc.), you could consider a question &quot;How to manage my own Google Knowledge Panel as an academic?&quot; to be the boat programming version of &quot;How to manage my own Google Knowledge Panel?&quot;</p>\n</blockquote>\n<p>We get a lot of questions about the way Google products work on this site, and they are often unhelpful questions because only Google knows the answer, and they are not telling. Further, many of the tech support questions we get do not fit with the <a href=\"https://academia.stackexchange.com/help/on-topic\">topical themes of the site.</a></p>\n" }, { "answer_id": 4874, "author": "Community", "author_id": -1, "author_profile": "https://academia.meta.stackexchange.com/users/-1", "pm_score": 4, "selected": true, "text": "<p>Several things about the original form of the question may have been less than helpful.</p>\n<p>The title for the question is &quot;How to avoid the misrepresentation of one's research work in Google Knowledge Panel?&quot;, but this question is answered in the body of the question, where you describe how you need to go through an identity verification procedure where you hit upon a snag and then quote the answer you got from Google: &quot;acceptable web profiles on SRP are Facebook, LinkedIn, Soundcloud, Instagram, YouTube, Twitter, Official website.&quot;. You then state that you are not willing to make social media profiles. You are well within your rights to make that choice, but on my side it looks like you're asking a question to which you know the answer but you're not willing to accept the answer.</p>\n<p>Then you finish off with &quot;Did anyone manage to successfully claim their panel?&quot;, which is a different question altogether, and rather opinion-based to boot. Which question are you actually interested in, the title question or the final question?</p>\n<p>To me, these read like reasons to vote for closure because the question needs more clarity, and because the question is opinion-based, respectively. You ask here, however, why the question was closed as off-topic. I can only guess. You're asking after the company policy of Google's identity verification process, for editing a knowledge panel. This is the policy of a company, regarding one of their products, and how users* of that product can interact meaningfully with the company. I don't see how that is on-topic for academia.SE.</p>\n<p>*this may not be the right word here; you have been volunteered by Google to become one of their users, and now want to correct what their automated system screws up. I sympathize with your situation.</p>\n" }, { "answer_id": 4875, "author": "Arno", "author_id": 12047, "author_profile": "https://academia.meta.stackexchange.com/users/12047", "pm_score": 3, "selected": false, "text": "<p>I think the question should be on-topic, because the OP being an academic is central to the situation and to potential approaches. The knowledge panel of them exists because of their research profile. The specifics of the OPs webpresence (university website, Google scholar profile; no social media) apply only to academics, and to a large fraction of them. Ideas such as &quot;try to get your university adminstration sort this out&quot; could make sense for OP, but do not apply in general.</p>\n<p>Thus, the question is NOT boat-programming (where the boatyness of the boat doesn't really matter).</p>\n" } ]

[ "https://academia.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/4871", "https://academia.meta.stackexchange.com", "https://academia.meta.stackexchange.com/users/93566/" ]

[ { "answer_id": 4877, "author": "eykanal", "author_id": 73, "author_profile": "https://academia.meta.stackexchange.com/users/73", "pm_score": 3, "selected": false, "text": "<p>Thanks for asking! I would move to close such a question as &quot;too specific to individual circumstances&quot;. Asking that question would not benefit others in a similar situation, as they wouldn't ever find themselves in that specific a similar situation.</p>\n<p>Putting aside appropriateness for this forum, though, I would also suggest that posting here wouldn't be useful, as we have no control over that site. Consider the scenario where everyone here agrees that, yes, the question is unfair. Now what? You're no closer to getting the situation fixed, and having agreement about unfairness in an online forum doesn't really do much to help your case. I'd suggest that you take your complaint/recommendation to the owners of the site/exam directly.</p>\n" }, { "answer_id": 4878, "author": "cag51", "author_id": 79875, "author_profile": "https://academia.meta.stackexchange.com/users/79875", "pm_score": 5, "selected": true, "text": "<blockquote>\n<p>and ask whether [the test questions] are problematic or whether I am misunderstanding something on my end?</p>\n</blockquote>\n<p>A question requesting as assessment of your exam will indeed be off-topic, as answers will only apply to the exam in question.</p>\n<blockquote>\n<p>the instructions and questions were clearly flawed (to the point of being logically incoherent)</p>\n</blockquote>\n<p>I suspect there are several variations of your question that would be on-topic (though these variations may or may not be what you want to know). For example:</p>\n<ul>\n<li>A question that assumes that the test is flawed and asks for advice moving forward.</li>\n<li>A question asking whether a specific question type (which might appear on different exams) is misleading or sub-optimal</li>\n<li>Technical questions about the course content, while off-topic here, might be on topic in the relevant stacks (in this case, <a href=\"https://datascience.stackexchange.com/questions\">data science</a> or <a href=\"https://stats.stackexchange.com/\">statistics</a>)</li>\n</ul>\n<p>In any of these cases, giving some brief examples and linking to the full exam should be fine.</p>\n" } ]

[ "https://academia.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/4876", "https://academia.meta.stackexchange.com", "https://academia.meta.stackexchange.com/users/115107/" ]

[ { "answer_id": 4880, "author": "Arno", "author_id": 12047, "author_profile": "https://academia.meta.stackexchange.com/users/12047", "pm_score": 4, "selected": false, "text": "<p>I agree that MDPI is a special case which is not properly covered by the generic question. A typical predatory publisher it is very easy to spot as such, and there is a broad consensus on their status. I suspect that there is no consensus on how to categorize MDPI, and having some high-quality answers there could be very useful.</p>\n<p>It less clear to me whether reopening the old question or having a new question would be the way to go. As things have changed in the past three years, maybe a new question makes more sense?</p>\n<p>Finally, we usually avoid discussing specific institutions - but if MDPI is the fifth biggest publisher, that would be reason enough for me to make an exception here.</p>\n" }, { "answer_id": 4881, "author": "Anonymous Physicist", "author_id": 13240, "author_profile": "https://academia.meta.stackexchange.com/users/13240", "pm_score": -1, "selected": false, "text": "<p>Even if this question were on topic, I do not want it reopened because the current answers are obsolete. The top answers are not well founded.</p>\n<p>In recent years I have peer reviewed several times for MDPI and had wildly inconsistent experiences regarding the editors' reaction to my peer reviews. It may be that, like Elsivier, their journals vary greatly in quality, in which case the question has no answer.</p>\n" }, { "answer_id": 4882, "author": "Massimo Ortolano", "author_id": 20058, "author_profile": "https://academia.meta.stackexchange.com/users/20058", "pm_score": 1, "selected": false, "text": "<p>I don't have a clear idea about this, but I'm inclined towards keeping it close.</p>\n<p>On one side, I think it would be reasonable to have that question reopened to allow anyone to write an answer better representing the current situation.</p>\n<p>On the other side, having had to read and moderate some recent comments about that publisher, I suspect we would end up having two large and strongly biased factions insulting each other with no possibility of finding a common ground. I'm thus not sure whether any good would come from such a reopening. Moreover, where do we set the closing line then?</p>\n" } ]

[ "https://academia.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/4879", "https://academia.meta.stackexchange.com", "https://academia.meta.stackexchange.com/users/84834/" ]

[ { "answer_id": 4887, "author": "Massimo Ortolano", "author_id": 20058, "author_profile": "https://academia.meta.stackexchange.com/users/20058", "pm_score": 3, "selected": false, "text": "<p>I'd consider that specific kind of question highly opinion based. After all, your answer boils down to &quot;Chegg is a bad guy, so don't interact with it&quot;. That is, it seems more an attempt to attack a specific service, rather than a genuine evaluation of the offered option.</p>\n<p>So, I think that it should be kept closed, either as opinion based or as a shopping question (depending on how one looks at it).</p>\n" }, { "answer_id": 4888, "author": "Wrzlprmft", "author_id": 7734, "author_profile": "https://academia.meta.stackexchange.com/users/7734", "pm_score": 3, "selected": false, "text": "<p>There are some crucial differences between your question and other examples you cite:</p>\n<ul>\n<li><p>Your question (and answer) hinge on the integrity of the company in question. This is partially due to the nature of the service in question, but that doesn’t solve the problem. Questions about evaluating whether a journal is trustworthy¹ have the same issue. Your answer spends the first two (non-summary) paragraphs on evaluating the company. At the end of the day, the main reason why we close questions is the answers they attract, and your question inevitably attracts answers that evaluate the company.</p>\n</li>\n<li><p>Your question (and answer) is not about how or when to use a tool but whether to use it at all, with the conclusion that nobody should ever use this.</p>\n</li>\n<li><p>Your question is not about evaluating a type of tool, but a specific tool. You are not using this tool as an example for similar tools (which is even possible if such do not exist), but your question is about this tool in specific.</p>\n</li>\n</ul>\n<hr />\n^{\n¹ which is after all usually only one product by one publisher and while your typical predatory journal belongs to a predatory publisher, there have been cases of single journals of a reputable publisher being wrecked by an editor.\n}\n<blockquote>\n<p>Compare also to several questions specifically about the Turnitin service (on the same theme, another specific online tool to support academic integrity checks) that have been left open on SE Academia over the years, e.g., <a href=\"https://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/38385/potential-issues-with-uploading-copyrighted-material-to-turnitin\">here</a>, <a href=\"https://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/81802/does-turnitin-match-my-paper-against-sources-found-after-i-submitted-by-paper\">here</a>, and <a href=\"https://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/115327/invitation-to-anti-plagiarism-service-turnitin\">here</a>.</p>\n</blockquote>\n<p>The first two questions (and many other typical questions on plagiarism-detection services) illustrate the difference quite well: The integrity and quality of Turnitin are not the subject of these questions and the answers do not address this. If we answer somebody that it is a waste of time and money to have their own thesis checked for plagiarism by such a service, this doesn’t mean that the service is bad or nobody should ever use such service. It’s about when and how to use such tools. The third question is asking many things at once and some of them are shopping (“I would like to know whether the free tier is totally worthless”), but nobody answered that (and I now removed it).</p>\n<blockquote>\n<p>It is putting up a specific online software tool […] to vote and find a consensus response by the community here.</p>\n</blockquote>\n<p>That’s exactly the kind of popularity contest that we want to avoid by banning shopping questions. We are not the <em>Board of Deciding which Academic Tool is Proper.</em> Votes decide whether an answer is useful to the asker and future visitors – which usually means weighing the pros and cons, being generally applicable, etc. Votes do not decide whether an answer arrives at the correct™ yes-or-no conclusion.</p>\n<blockquote>\n<p>In that case, the top-voted answer observes that specialized software tools are intrinsic to the work of many academics, and summarizes that, &quot;I think that this is the right site for this kind of questions, and that we should amend the definition of 'shopping question' to make them on-topic if they are not on topic already.&quot; I think that meta question is much more relevant than the one linked by the question closer.</p>\n</blockquote>\n<p>Mind that the focus of that question is recommendation questions, which does not translate well here: You do not choose one tool to solve your problem, but even if everything works as advertised, you would have to use all of them. The entire angle of <a href=\"https://academia.meta.stackexchange.com/a/4678/7734\">my answer to that question</a>, namely to focus on how to solve a given problem (be it with or without specific software) does not apply.</p>\n<blockquote>\n<p>Is a narrowly-focused question about a particular online software tool, which relates to an issue of academic integrity, truly a shopping question? Should all questions of this nature now be closed, or left open?</p>\n</blockquote>\n<p>There is no simple yes or no answer. Such questions should be closed if they focus on evaluating the tool, company, or similar instead of solving a particular problem or when or how to apply a tool.</p>\n" }, { "answer_id": 4893, "author": "Anonymous Physicist", "author_id": 13240, "author_profile": "https://academia.meta.stackexchange.com/users/13240", "pm_score": 1, "selected": false, "text": "<p>I think you should make a new question that does not request an assessment of a particular company or product. Wrzlprmft claims that &quot;Your question ... hinge[s] on the integrity of the company in question.&quot; This is not true. If the question were &quot;Should I rely on a third party to enforce academic integrity?&quot; then the answer would be no. The question is about a specific case of that situation.</p>\n" }, { "answer_id": 4901, "author": "EJoshuaS - Stand with Ukraine", "author_id": 70217, "author_profile": "https://academia.meta.stackexchange.com/users/70217", "pm_score": 2, "selected": false, "text": "<p>There are several problems with shopping questions: first, they tend to attract spam. Secondly, they invite opinions. Third, they encourage answers that become obsolete very quickly. An answer claiming that OP should buy a computer with one of the Pentium Pro processors would be completely useless at this point, for example.</p>\n<p>On the one hand, this is asking only about a single product, so it's not an unconstrained request for a list of things. That being said, it's unlikely to attract spam.</p>\n<p>A more debatable question is whether or not this is likely to attract opinionated answers. The term &quot;should&quot; invites opinions rather than answers because there isn't an agreed-upon standard about what things you should even consider in answering it. This question would be improved by editing it to specify what factors you would like people to consider in writing answers. Something like &quot;can we trust Chegg to handle our data correctly?&quot; or &quot;does this product actually accurately identify cheating?&quot; <em>are</em> answerable questions.</p>\n" }, { "answer_id": 4912, "author": "Scott Seidman", "author_id": 20457, "author_profile": "https://academia.meta.stackexchange.com/users/20457", "pm_score": -1, "selected": false, "text": "<p>I've voted to reopen. This is not a shopping question.</p>\n" } ]

[ "https://academia.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/4886", "https://academia.meta.stackexchange.com", "https://academia.meta.stackexchange.com/users/43544/" ]

[ { "answer_id": 4895, "author": "cag51", "author_id": 79875, "author_profile": "https://academia.meta.stackexchange.com/users/79875", "pm_score": 4, "selected": false, "text": "<p><strong>We should make it clear that the scope is &quot;academia&quot; rather rather than &quot;academics.&quot;</strong> It's hard to concisely define academia, perhaps something like: &quot;academic careers, research, teaching, and publishing.&quot;</p>\n<p>Based on the number of homework help questions we get, the existing wording still gives the impression that questions related to an academic subject would be on-topic here.</p>\n" }, { "answer_id": 4896, "author": "cag51", "author_id": 79875, "author_profile": "https://academia.meta.stackexchange.com/users/79875", "pm_score": 3, "selected": false, "text": "<p><strong>Encourage askers to put a question mark in the top-level question.</strong> Beyond grammar, this will discourage questions of the form &quot;here is a 20 page description of my problem; what do I do?&quot;</p>\n" }, { "answer_id": 4897, "author": "Massimo Ortolano", "author_id": 20058, "author_profile": "https://academia.meta.stackexchange.com/users/20058", "pm_score": 3, "selected": false, "text": "<p><strong>Let’s remove the initial sentence “You’re ready to ask your first question [...]”.</strong> Even though it’s welcoming, the shorter the text the likelier that it gets read.</p>\n" }, { "answer_id": 4898, "author": "Massimo Ortolano", "author_id": 20058, "author_profile": "https://academia.meta.stackexchange.com/users/20058", "pm_score": 0, "selected": false, "text": "<p>A format that we could take as inspiration is that of <a href=\"https://english.stackexchange.com/\">EL&amp;U</a>:</p>\n<p><a href=\"https://i.stack.imgur.com/Rskcrm.png\" rel=\"nofollow noreferrer\"><img src=\"https://i.stack.imgur.com/Rskcrm.png\" alt=\"EL&amp;U welcome modal\" /></a></p>\n<p>We can list sites for which we frequently receive questions, e.g. <a href=\"https://stats.stackexchange.com/\">Cross Validated</a>, <a href=\"https://stackoverflow.com/\">Stack Overflow</a> and <a href=\"https://physics.stackexchange.com/\">Physics</a> (comment below if you have other suggestions).</p>\n" }, { "answer_id": 4899, "author": "Anonymous Physicist", "author_id": 13240, "author_profile": "https://academia.meta.stackexchange.com/users/13240", "pm_score": 0, "selected": false, "text": "<p>Please include a link to <a href=\"https://academia.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/3824/what-potential-duplicate-targets-should-i-know-about-as-a-reviewer\">What potential duplicate targets should I know about as a reviewer?</a> near the prompt to use the search. It's an easier way to find the asker's answer than using the search.</p>\n" } ]

[ "https://academia.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/4894", "https://academia.meta.stackexchange.com", "https://academia.meta.stackexchange.com/users/958/" ]

[ { "answer_id": 4905, "author": "cag51", "author_id": 79875, "author_profile": "https://academia.meta.stackexchange.com/users/79875", "pm_score": 4, "selected": true, "text": "<h3>Usually, no.</h3>\n<p>The &quot;ethos&quot; of SE, as you mention, is that questions are either not a good fit here (and should be closed <em>precisely because</em> we can't provide good answers, and we want to prevent people from adding bad answers), or they are good questions that we should leave open and answer properly. In the abstract, at least, it is not logically consistent to say that a question should be closed because we cannot provide good answers, and then to also provide an answer. In fact, I recently was surprised to learn that other stacks have resorted to suspending users who refuse to stop answering questions that should manifestly be closed.</p>\n<p>More concretely, the challenge with answering closed/closable questions is that our quality control measures do not work as well. If I add a bad answer and then close it, then my bad advice is the only advice that OP will see. Leaving open or closing-without-answering avoids these issues.</p>\n<p>Finally, note that closed questions with no answers are automatically deleted after a period of time. Questions with upvoted answers cannot be automatically deleted, and will usually remain on the site forever. So particularly for very low quality questions, adding answers is a bad practice because it prevents deletion.</p>\n<h3>But there may be exceptional cases.</h3>\n<p>As I wrote <a href=\"https://academia.meta.stackexchange.com/a/4456/79875\">here</a>, we should first remember that <em>there may be a real opportunity to help someone here.</em> We should not become so obsessed by our rules that we lose the human element or close interesting questions. Still, the rules are there for a reason and we make exceptions at our peril.</p>\n<p><strong>Ideally, questions should be edited and left open.</strong> But for questions that cannot be salvaged, we must weigh the cost of making exceptions and having reduced quality control against the cost of remaining silent and giving a bad experience to an (often) new user. My experience moderating Academia.SE is that we give users wide latitude; we do not typically remove answers (or even answers-in-comments) on closed questions with few views.</p>\n" }, { "answer_id": 4909, "author": "Anonymous Physicist", "author_id": 13240, "author_profile": "https://academia.meta.stackexchange.com/users/13240", "pm_score": 2, "selected": false, "text": "<p>Please do not post answers that are the same as a close reason. For example, please do not &quot;answer&quot; with a statement that the answer strongly depends on individual factors.</p>\n" } ]

[ "https://academia.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/4904", "https://academia.meta.stackexchange.com", "https://academia.meta.stackexchange.com/users/49043/" ]

[ { "answer_id": 4907, "author": "Jon Custer", "author_id": 15477, "author_profile": "https://academia.meta.stackexchange.com/users/15477", "pm_score": 2, "selected": false, "text": "<p>I do not think that question falls under our scope. Those CDC pages are advice for broad public consumption - they are not journal articles that would use citations. Further, how a US Federal agency chooses to write on their web site is not in scope for Academia SE.</p>\n" }, { "answer_id": 4910, "author": "Anonymous Physicist", "author_id": 13240, "author_profile": "https://academia.meta.stackexchange.com/users/13240", "pm_score": 3, "selected": true, "text": "<p>CDC says</p>\n<blockquote>\n<p>As the nation’s health protection agency, CDC saves lives and protects people from health threats. To accomplish our mission, CDC conducts critical science and provides health information that protects our nation against expensive and dangerous health threats, and responds when these arise.</p>\n</blockquote>\n<p>I think only questions about the &quot;science&quot; part of the operations would be considered academic and potentially on topic. Other aspects of CDC operations are not academic. Your question is about the &quot;health information&quot; and not the &quot;science.&quot;</p>\n<p>Many other organizations also have both academic and nonacademic operations.</p>\n" } ]

[ "https://academia.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/4906", "https://academia.meta.stackexchange.com", "https://academia.meta.stackexchange.com/users/84330/" ]

[ { "answer_id": 4911, "author": "Azor Ahai -him-", "author_id": 37441, "author_profile": "https://academia.meta.stackexchange.com/users/37441", "pm_score": 2, "selected": false, "text": "<p>It seems like <a href=\"https://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/coursework\" class=\"post-tag\" title=\"show questions tagged &#39;coursework&#39;\" rel=\"tag\">coursework</a> would be used by students, but <a href=\"https://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/courses\" class=\"post-tag\" title=\"show questions tagged &#39;courses&#39;\" rel=\"tag\">courses</a> could be plausibly used by both instructors and students, like <a href=\"https://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/151978/why-lab-sessions-are-handled-by-tas\">here</a> and <a href=\"https://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/155187/what-is-a-good-ice-breaker-question-on-the-first-day-of-the-classes\">here</a> maybe.</p>\n<p>&quot;Coursework&quot; is also a bit more specific (that first question, &quot;Why do TA teach sections?&quot;) isn't really about course<em>work</em>.</p>\n<p>I support the synonymization, but just some points to think about.</p>\n" }, { "answer_id": 4913, "author": "Brian Tompsett - 汤莱恩", "author_id": 26708, "author_profile": "https://academia.meta.stackexchange.com/users/26708", "pm_score": 3, "selected": false, "text": "<p>In most of my teaching the term <a href=\"https://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/coursework\" class=\"post-tag\" title=\"show questions tagged &#39;coursework&#39;\" rel=\"tag\">coursework</a> refers to what would be called &quot;homework&quot; at grade school. It is a specific assignment created by the teacher that when completed contributes to the assignment of grades based on the judged quality and content. The grade is usually the result of the <a href=\"https://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/course\" class=\"post-tag\" title=\"show questions tagged &#39;course&#39;\" rel=\"tag\">course</a>. There may be several items of <a href=\"https://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/coursework\" class=\"post-tag\" title=\"show questions tagged &#39;coursework&#39;\" rel=\"tag\">coursework</a> within a course. <a href=\"https://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/coursework\" class=\"post-tag\" title=\"show questions tagged &#39;coursework&#39;\" rel=\"tag\">coursework</a> differs from an examination in that it is done in the student's own time over a specified period.</p>\n<p>However <a href=\"https://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/courses\" class=\"post-tag\" title=\"show questions tagged &#39;courses&#39;\" rel=\"tag\">courses</a> is completely different. This relates to a component of a degree programme (often worth a specific number of credits) that contains several elements of assessment, some of which may be <a href=\"https://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/coursework\" class=\"post-tag\" title=\"show questions tagged &#39;coursework&#39;\" rel=\"tag\">coursework</a>. The term <a href=\"https://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/courses\" class=\"post-tag\" title=\"show questions tagged &#39;courses&#39;\" rel=\"tag\">courses</a> can, in some places, be synonymous with a programme and elsewhere be a specific component of a programme (e.g degree programme).</p>\n<p>There should be no synonym or blacklist action.</p>\n<p>I also refer you to the meta question: <a href=\"https://academia.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/4471/academia-varies-more-than-you-think-it-does-the-movie\">Academia varies more than you think it does – The Movie</a></p>\n" }, { "answer_id": 4914, "author": "Massimo Ortolano", "author_id": 20058, "author_profile": "https://academia.meta.stackexchange.com/users/20058", "pm_score": 4, "selected": true, "text": "<p>Looking at the twelve questions tagged <a href=\"https://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/courses\" class=\"post-tag\" title=\"show questions tagged &#39;courses&#39;\" rel=\"tag\">courses</a>, I don't see the usage of this tag as necessary (the key points are already covered by other tags, and the tag <a href=\"https://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/courses\" class=\"post-tag\" title=\"show questions tagged &#39;courses&#39;\" rel=\"tag\">courses</a> seems redundant in those questions).</p>\n<p>I think we can safely remove tag <a href=\"https://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/courses\" class=\"post-tag\" title=\"show questions tagged &#39;courses&#39;\" rel=\"tag\">courses</a> from those few questions, without the need of creating an (imperfect) synonym, and then let the system clean up the abandoned tag.</p>\n" }, { "answer_id": 4990, "author": "Catija", "author_id": 37330, "author_profile": "https://academia.meta.stackexchange.com/users/37330", "pm_score": 2, "selected": false, "text": "<p>I've removed the status tag here. I think y'all have done a good job of responding to the issues of this tag and it's currently been removed from all questions. In general, we only outright block tags if they come back more than once, so I've let the mods here know to watch out for the tag and, should it come back, let us know and we'll get it blocked.</p>\n<p>Thanks so much for your work to manage the tags here - I know that tags can get out of control from time to time and cleaning them up is an important part of that process.</p>\n" } ]

[ "https://academia.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/4908", "https://academia.meta.stackexchange.com", "https://academia.meta.stackexchange.com/users/68109/" ]

[ { "answer_id": 4916, "author": "Massimo Ortolano", "author_id": 20058, "author_profile": "https://academia.meta.stackexchange.com/users/20058", "pm_score": 3, "selected": true, "text": "<p>First, thank you for asking this! I think we should avoid as much as possible tag wikis describing titles and professions on the basis of accomplishments and recognitions. Actually, looking at the <a href=\"https://academia.stackexchange.com/tags/professors/info\">full tag wiki</a> reported below, I would say that there is room for a few more adjustments (to be fair, the tag wiki was created in 2012, in the early days of this community, and a lot has probably changed here since then):</p>\n<blockquote>\n<p>A professor is a scholarly teacher; the precise meaning of the term varies by country. Literally, professor derives from Latin as a &quot;person who professes&quot; being usually an expert in arts or sciences, a teacher of high rank.</p>\n<p>A professor is a highly accomplished and recognized academic, and the\ntitle is awarded only after decades of scholarly work. In the United\nStates and Canada the title of professor is granted to all scholars\nwith Doctorate degrees (typically Ph.D.s) who teach in two- and\nfour-year colleges and universities, and is used in the titles\nassistant professor and associate professor, which are not considered\nprofessor-level positions elsewhere, as well as for full professors.</p>\n<p>Note : This tag wiki has content adapted from Wikipedia, used under\nthe CC-BY-SA 3.0 license.</p>\n</blockquote>\n<p>Additional remarks:</p>\n<ol>\n<li>We can probably try to write down a tag wiki for the term professor without reference to Wikipedia. Your proposal seems fine to me, and we probably don't need a long wiki such the one above.</li>\n<li>&quot;the title is awarded only after decades of scholarly work&quot;: <em>decades</em> to become full professor, maybe, but I would not consider such a strong statement for all levels of professorship.</li>\n<li>Given the internationality of this community, I would avoid any reference to specific countries.</li>\n</ol>\n" }, { "answer_id": 4918, "author": "Arno", "author_id": 12047, "author_profile": "https://academia.meta.stackexchange.com/users/12047", "pm_score": 2, "selected": false, "text": "<p>The description of the tag should be targeted to our community, not to some person who has zero knowledge of higher education. As such, the important part is to clarify what kind of academic positions (in an international context) are meant to be covered by the tag and which ones are not.</p>\n<p>The original description sounds a bit like it is describing a UK professorship. My hunch would be that we're best off starting with US (assistant/associate/full) professors as all being included, which then leads us to include UK (senior) lectures/readers/professor, French maitre de conferences and professors, etc. On the other hand, I'd exclude US lecturers/adjuncts.</p>\n" } ]

[ "https://academia.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/4915", "https://academia.meta.stackexchange.com", "https://academia.meta.stackexchange.com/users/269/" ]

[ { "answer_id": 4919, "author": "cag51", "author_id": 79875, "author_profile": "https://academia.meta.stackexchange.com/users/79875", "pm_score": 3, "selected": false, "text": "<p><strong>TL;DR.</strong> It is true that we want to continue to build up a large and diverse community rather than relying only on a small number of power users. At the same time, our priority is in producing good answers; if the power users provide timely, high-quality answers, I would certainly not want to tell them to stop. So, it is really for individual members to decide how they can best leverage their valuable, limited time. ​</p>\n<p><strong>More thoughts....</strong></p>\n<ul>\n<li>I'm not sure I agree with &quot;some questions require only one answer and subsequent users will not want to post an identical one.&quot; It's true that we disallow essentially-identical answers, but most questions can still benefit from multiple answers. Even answers that essentially agree might differ in their justification, presentation, or emphasis.</li>\n<li>High-rep here is only loosely correlated with high academic rank. High rep users are not necessarily qualified to answer difficult questions. Further, if we disallow/discourage veterans from answering easy questions, there is no guarantee they will start answering harder questions.</li>\n<li>This is a network-wide issue; there is nothing really unique to Academia.SE about this. As such, perhaps this discussion belongs on the main SE.</li>\n<li>Enforcement could be pretty much impossible. Even if we as Academia.SE thought of a brilliant metric and everyone agreed to it, we could not technically implement it, and I don't think we could enforce it with sanctions or by deleting answers either. And it only takes a few veterans to flaunt the best practice before all the others (rationally) decide there is no point in them following it, either.</li>\n</ul>\n<p><strong>Suggestions for new(er) users who feel as you do:</strong></p>\n<ul>\n<li>Go to the home page rather than relying on hot network questions. The newest questions tend to have no highly-upvoted answers, so there is still time to get an answer that is noticed.</li>\n<li>Consider formatting your answer. This answer, for example, has bold text and bullets. Such answers are a lot more readable than a wall of text, and will get more attention even if they are not the first answer.</li>\n<li>Consider the backlog -- we have over 1000 questions with no upvoted answers at all! Many of these are asking for specialized information that most users will not have, but there may be some that you can answer. The SE network explicitly encourages answering old questions; I would love to see us clear our backlog.</li>\n<li>Think more broadly about what you can contribute to answered questions. While we don't want duplicates, we are very happy to see additional answers with a different point of view, even if the key points and conclusion are the same.</li>\n</ul>\n" }, { "answer_id": 4920, "author": "Anonymous Physicist", "author_id": 13240, "author_profile": "https://academia.meta.stackexchange.com/users/13240", "pm_score": -1, "selected": false, "text": "<blockquote>\n<p>to give newer users the chance to answer first and in turn earn reputation</p>\n</blockquote>\n<p>You only need one reputation point to post questions and answers. The other &quot;privileges&quot; you can earn are really not worth seeking out. I just checked the list and most of the privileges I have are ones I did not know I had and will never use.</p>\n<p>A substantial portion of the &quot;easy to answer&quot; questions are really duplicates. Another substantial portion attract a few terrible answers.</p>\n<p>If, for some reason, you really want to earn reputation, I suggest asking high quality questions. This also gives you the first shot at <a href=\"https://stackoverflow.com/help/self-answer\">answering your own question</a> if you check the &quot;answer your own question&quot; checkbox.</p>\n" }, { "answer_id": 4921, "author": "Buffy", "author_id": 75368, "author_profile": "https://academia.meta.stackexchange.com/users/75368", "pm_score": 4, "selected": false, "text": "<p>Being one of the chief &quot;offenders&quot; here, let me comment. I'm grateful to the OP for not singling me out, but, yes, I answer a lot of questions and do so fairly quickly, but that is just a consequence of how I use the computer generally, as well as how I used the net to teach my classes before I retired.</p>\n<p>But I see the purpose of this site as providing help to those who ask questions, not building up rep for those who answer. Some of the questions reveal desperate needs of the writers and I want to provide help when I can. In those situations, at least, waiting seems like the wrong result.</p>\n<p>Being very old and having held a wide variety of positions I have a lot of experience in some things. Thus, there are a few &quot;lanes&quot; that I occupy on this site. I'm happy, of course, when I get positive feedback for some of my answers and also happy when some of them cause controversy.</p>\n<p>I also suffered some of the same setbacks that people ask about here as my career wasn't always especially smooth, requiring compromises.</p>\n<p>However, I rarely answer questions to repeat what others have said unless there is a still-missing point that I think should be made. Nor will I down vote a post simply because I disagree with what is said - unless I think dangerous advice is given.</p>\n" } ]

[ "https://academia.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/4917", "https://academia.meta.stackexchange.com", "https://academia.meta.stackexchange.com/users/133549/" ]

[ { "answer_id": 4925, "author": "Wrzlprmft", "author_id": 7734, "author_profile": "https://academia.meta.stackexchange.com/users/7734", "pm_score": 4, "selected": false, "text": "<p>I don’t think we can be much more objective <strong>in answers</strong> than we currently are.</p>\n<p>Many of our questions are about problems that are far beyond the reach of studies or are far too individual for somebody to have relevant personal experience. Hence, we are only left with basing our answers on good arguments, which is what we often do. Often “as data- and experience-backed as it would be possible” is “not at all”.</p>\n<p>Why arguments are not listed as possible ways to back up an answer in <a href=\"https://stackoverflow.blog/2010/09/29/good-subjective-bad-subjective\"><em>Good Subjective, Bad Subjective</em></a> always eluded me and I don’t think we can ask the author now.\nMaybe he simply didn’t think of questions that can be answered by argument as subjective at all.</p>\n<p>What I consider the key to avoiding being overly subjective is to close or edit questions that can only attract too opinionated answers and guide askers to ask better questions in the first place.</p>\n<p>Some specific replies to the cited post:</p>\n<blockquote>\n<p>The paradigm of SE is that the questions are well-defined enough to have a correct answer, and the answers, well, attempt to provide it.</p>\n</blockquote>\n<p>This does not even apply to the original Stack Overflow or Math Overflow. There are many questions which have multiple solutions. And Math Overflow appears to welcome questions such as <a href=\"https://mathoverflow.net/q/394271/38453\">this</a>. Stack Exchange has a successful history of exploring what topics can work in its format under reasonable constraints. And our site is one of the results.</p>\n<blockquote>\n<p>it is telling that the answers almost never have any references/citations.</p>\n</blockquote>\n<p>See above: There is nothing reasonable to cite in most cases.</p>\n<blockquote>\n<p>Often, the highest upvoted answer is quite short and simply states an opinion.</p>\n</blockquote>\n<p>While concur that the opinion should be backed up by some argument, opinions are all we have. The importance is to distinguish between well-founded opinions and others.</p>\n" }, { "answer_id": 4949, "author": "Anonymous Physicist", "author_id": 13240, "author_profile": "https://academia.meta.stackexchange.com/users/13240", "pm_score": 1, "selected": false, "text": "<ul>\n<li>If a question can only be answered with opinions, you can vote to close it. I often do. Example: &quot;What is the best basket weaving department?&quot;</li>\n<li>If an answer is unambiguously an opinion (Example: &quot;University A is better than University B.&quot;), you can downvote and leave a comment asking for the answer to be made more objective (Example: &quot;If you are looking for a university that employs many professors of basket weaving, University A will suit your needs better than University B.&quot;). If you do this, keep in mind that answerers are not obligated to do your literature search or homework for you. If you want referenced answers, use <a href=\"https://skeptics.stackexchange.com/help/deleted-answers\">Skeptics</a>. Answerers are also not obligated to try and earn your upvote.</li>\n</ul>\n" } ]

[ "https://academia.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/4924", "https://academia.meta.stackexchange.com", "https://academia.meta.stackexchange.com/users/958/" ]

[ { "answer_id": 4938, "author": "user1271772", "author_id": 93303, "author_profile": "https://academia.meta.stackexchange.com/users/93303", "pm_score": 0, "selected": false, "text": "<p><a href=\"https://mattermodeling.stackexchange.com/\"><img src=\"https://i.stack.imgur.com/GVzhj.png\" alt=\"Common topics on Matter Modeling SE\" /></a></p>\n" }, { "answer_id": 4944, "author": "nic", "author_id": 307, "author_profile": "https://academia.meta.stackexchange.com/users/307", "pm_score": 3, "selected": false, "text": "<p><a href=\"https://opendata.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/data-request\"><img src=\"https://i.stack.imgur.com/qmo8t.png\" alt=\"Need datasets? Request anything at Open Data Stack Exchange\" /></a></p>\n" } ]

[ "https://academia.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/4934", "https://academia.meta.stackexchange.com", "https://academia.meta.stackexchange.com/users/32458/" ]

[ { "answer_id": 4936, "author": "Bryan Krause", "author_id": 63475, "author_profile": "https://academia.meta.stackexchange.com/users/63475", "pm_score": 2, "selected": false, "text": "<p>You can request dissociation through the Contact link at the bottom of the page, but see <a href=\"https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/96732/how-do-i-remove-my-name-from-a-post-in-accordance-with-cc-by-sa\">How do I remove my name from a post, in accordance with CC BY-SA?</a> for some of the limits and things to consider first.</p>\n" }, { "answer_id": 4937, "author": "cag51", "author_id": 79875, "author_profile": "https://academia.meta.stackexchange.com/users/79875", "pm_score": 2, "selected": false, "text": "<p>Yes, just flag your own post as &quot;in need of moderator intervention,&quot; make your request in the text box, and we'll take a look.</p>\n<p>Note, we do try to discourage this because the moderators actually have to forward the request to the SE employees, and we want to be respectful of their time (among other downsides as described in the post that Bryan linked). But we do approve these as appropriate.</p>\n" } ]

[ "https://academia.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/4935", "https://academia.meta.stackexchange.com", "https://academia.meta.stackexchange.com/users/141880/" ]

[ { "answer_id": 4940, "author": "einpoklum", "author_id": 7319, "author_profile": "https://academia.meta.stackexchange.com/users/7319", "pm_score": 1, "selected": false, "text": "<p>I believe the answer is on-topic. Questioning the premise of a question, with additional context information, is an accepted on-topic answer in many academia.SE questions. It's true that OP did not provide super-exact information - but maybe OP doesn't want to identify themselves; and it's not necessary to make the linked answer pertinent, or at least conditionally pertinent.</p>\n<p>So, I don't think that it needs salvaging and can be left as-is - especially since it servers to temper advice in other answers which accept some implicit assumptions of the OP (the OP of academia, not the OP here on meta).</p>\n" }, { "answer_id": 4941, "author": "Ben", "author_id": 87026, "author_profile": "https://academia.meta.stackexchange.com/users/87026", "pm_score": -1, "selected": false, "text": "<h3>It is not off-topic --- it should be left alone</h3>\n<p>I am the author of the answer, so I will explain why the material is <strong>not off-topic</strong>. The original question refers to COVID vaccine sceptics as &quot;anti-vaxxers&quot; and so my answer spends its first paragraph putting forward an argument for why the OP should avoid using that term in the context of misgivings about the COVID vaccines. That is a legitimate &quot;frame challenge&quot; to an aspect of the original question. It is also an important (and on-topic) aspect of “how to respond” because it advises the OP that he is wrong to use a particular term to refer to his opponents in this matter. It is long-standing policy on Academia.SE that answers may challenge and critique premises of a question, and this is on-topic.</p>\n<p>My argument for why the &quot;anti-vaxxer&quot; term should not apply necessarily delves into the differences between the process for the COVID vaccines, relative to the standard approval process for long-standing vaccines. The thrust of the argument is that there are substantial differences between the regulatory process and evidence level for the COVID vaccines compared to long-standing vaccines that have been the targets of people who could reasonably be called &quot;anti-vaxxers&quot;, and so the term ought not be applied to people who show misgivings about the COVID vaccines but no broader misgivings about vaccination <em>per se</em>. The reasoning for this argument cannot be made clearly without referring to the differences between the two cases, and this necessarily entails giving at least some broad exposition on evidentiary/regulatory differences.</p>\n<p>Now, the “controversy” of this answer is clearly rooted in substantive disagreements about the evidence and regulatory process pertaining to effectiveness/safety of the COVID vaccines, and not in any issue relating to SE site rules. The present complaint is a <em>post hoc</em> complaint that does not accord with the real reason for the controversy in the answer (and is flawed in any case). Indeed, one of the main reasons this answer generated “controversy” is that another user came on to the comment thread and asserted (in big bold lettering) that the relevant paragraph of the answer was &quot;categorically false&quot; and was &quot;misinformation&quot;. I then patiently engaged with this user showing evidence of the fact that COVID vaccines have been distributed under &quot;emergency use authorisation&quot; (EUA) instead of the normal FDA vaccine approval process, and expert peer-reviewed medical literature saying that the EUA process is less stringent than the regular vaccine approval process. Readers can review the comment thread for the post and see the argument on this matter if they wish; it confirms that the assertions made in my original post are factually correct and backed by expert evidence, including FDA guidelines and releases, medical literature, and regulatory commentary.</p>\n<p>Whilst vote tallies of the answer are not a valid basis for assessment of whether an answer complies with site rules (e.g., whether it is on-topic), at the time of this answer the vote tally is at +20 - 28 = -8 --- i.e., about 42% of voters on the answer have upvoted and about 58% have downvoted; hardly a sign of an inherently low-quality answer. The heavy downvoting is clearly motivated by <em>substantive disagreement</em> with the position (or in my view, with the “feel” of the position) rather than an assessment that the opinion is off-topic or breaches site rules.</p>\n<p>Mere controversy of the answer is not grounds for removal, and I believe that I have shown that the answer is on-topic (responding specifically to an aspect of the framing of the original question) and is a legitimate &quot;frame challenge&quot;. The alleged precedent for altering or deleting the answer here is not a precedent at all, since it involved assent by the author, which is lacking here. Removal would effectively establish the precedent that an on-topic answer (with +20 upvotes) can be deleted by moderators merely due to substantive disagreement by noisy users. The answer should not be removed.</p>\n<hr />\n<p><strong>Re the attempted edit (and any other suggested edits):</strong> As I noted when I reverted the edit by @cag51, I think he had good intent in that edit, and his substitute paragraph did not misrepresent my views, but it did strip out the reasoning for why I oppose the use of the term &quot;anti-vaxxers&quot; in this case. I sincerely appreciate his genuine attempt to deal with the matter without misrepresenting my views, and I have nothing but positive things to say about his actions here. While I am open to looking at other proposed edits, the &quot;ship has sailed&quot; on the downvotes/controversy, so I would not be inclined to support edits that remove the reasoning for the position against use of the term &quot;anti-vaxxers&quot;. Obviously my position here is likely to lead to a stalemate, since any proposed edit is probably going to want to get rid of this part, and I think it is important that it stay, to show the reasoning for my critique of the premise of the OP. As I have noted above, the reasoning here is directly relevant to a premise challenge to the question that forms part of the advice of “how to respond”.</p>\n" }, { "answer_id": 4942, "author": "cag51", "author_id": 79875, "author_profile": "https://academia.meta.stackexchange.com/users/79875", "pm_score": 3, "selected": false, "text": "<p>This is a tricky case; thanks for bringing it to meta. The existing answers seem to support option 3, so I'll make a case for options 1/2.</p>\n<p>While questioning the premise of the question is often the right thing to do, there are two differentiating factors in this case:</p>\n<ol>\n<li><p>The question is deliberately vague on technical details, so it is difficult to see how the indicated paragraphs respond to the question. It is as if someone asked &quot;my physics teacher took points off for no reason&quot; and the answer was &quot;Is it really no reason? Physics is a complicated subject, let me explain why Newton's Laws are incorrect.&quot; Such a broad view of &quot;on-topic&quot; is inconsistent with our Q&amp;A model.</p>\n</li>\n<li><p>This premise is entirely technical. If the premise is related to academia, then it makes sense for us to have a big debate about it (in the chat, preferably). But if the premise is off-topic, then we should avoid having an answer devoted to discussing this premise. Among other reasons, only a few of us have informed opinions on any given field, and so the risk of propagating misinformation is quite high.</p>\n</li>\n</ol>\n<p>I think this is the case for either forced editing or deleting. Among these, my concern with &quot;forced editing&quot; is that we may force someone to have an answer that they do not endorse associated with the account. So, I think the preferred resolution would be to provisionally delete and allow the post author to edit and request un-deletion if they so choose.</p>\n" }, { "answer_id": 4943, "author": "Anonymous Physicist", "author_id": 13240, "author_profile": "https://academia.meta.stackexchange.com/users/13240", "pm_score": 1, "selected": false, "text": "<p>The best way to address this answer, and similar ones, is to vote.</p>\n<p>If you think an answer is not helpful, downvote. If you think it is helpful, upvote.</p>\n<p>Remember that &quot;helpful&quot; needs to be defined by the question, not your personal desires. Content which does not address the question is not helpful.</p>\n" }, { "answer_id": 4946, "author": "Catija", "author_id": 37330, "author_profile": "https://academia.meta.stackexchange.com/users/37330", "pm_score": 3, "selected": false, "text": "<p>In occasions like this it can be really easy to get distracted from the question and end up discussing the setup and that's often problematic for a variety of reasons - in fact, it happened in some of the answers to this question, too.</p>\n<p>Many questions on sites like Academia are in the format of</p>\n<ol>\n<li>Explain specific example that happened as a way of illustrating the problem.</li>\n<li>Ask general question about what to do in this sort of situation (for future reference).</li>\n</ol>\n<p>When people ask questions like this, it's important to focus on the second item and less on the first. So, when determining if an answer is actually answering the question, focus on whether the general case is addressed rather than the specific case. Answering the latter is important as the former doesn't help a broad audience - it only helps the specific asker.</p>\n<p>So, to use the example provided, if the question is</p>\n<blockquote>\n<p>What, if anything, should I do? I have not had any interactions with these people so far, but I'm concerned about my work being associated with them.</p>\n</blockquote>\n<p>At the heart of this question is a simple problem - &quot;my work is being misquoted and misused and it may impact my future in this field as people may associate my work with them.&quot; In reality, what that work is, is less relevant for the purpose of answering this question. As such, the bulk of the answer should focus on the question itself.</p>\n<p>That doesn't mean that the specific example can't factor in to the answer. For example, if there is a specific solution that only applies in the case of COVID research, that can and should be included in the solution set but that shouldn't open the doors for someone to question the asker's description of the problem.</p>\n<p>Could the question be edited to remove some of the shorthand phrasing that seems to have caused an answer to focus on that rather than the question at hand - absolutely. Does that mean that the answer's author should have free licence to argue about the terminology chosen in the question before actually answering it - absolutely not.</p>\n<p>So, my recommendation here is two-fold:</p>\n<ol>\n<li>(Optional, depends on the question) Edit the question to remove any judgement-centric terms that are causing the answer/s to focus too much on the specific example - this applies in cases where it may be an issue.\n<ul>\n<li>in this case, that means editing out &quot;anti-vaxxers&quot; and &quot;conspiracy theory&quot;.</li>\n</ul>\n</li>\n<li>Edit the answer to remove the commentary that doesn't address the core question itself. If there's nothing remaining, delete the answer.\n<ul>\n<li>in this case, that means removing most of the first huge paragraph and the last section.</li>\n</ul>\n</li>\n</ol>\n<p>If the person answering doesn't like the edits, they have the option of removing the answer entirely should they wish. But I'd strongly recommend that y'all avoid allowing this platform to be used to argue about these sorts of issues that are tangential to the actual questions - y'all aren't (as general academia experts) experts in COVID or racism or religion -as a group. You may be as individuals but that's not what y'all are here to judge. You're here to be a resource for people asking about Academia, not these other subjects.</p>\n" } ]

[ "https://academia.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/4939", "https://academia.meta.stackexchange.com", "https://academia.meta.stackexchange.com/users/22733/" ]