id
stringlengths 1
7
⌀ | text
stringlengths 1
10.4M
| source
stringclasses 1
value | added
stringdate 2025-03-12 15:57:16
2025-03-21 13:24:26
⌀ | created
timestamp[s]date 2008-09-06 22:17:14
2024-12-31 23:58:17
⌀ | metadata
dict |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
null | 20935 | null | null | null | null |
null | 10551 | null | null | null | null |
null | 3123 | null | null | null | null |
null | 23365 | null | null | null | null |
null | 11564 | null | null | null | null |
null | 14909 | null | null | null | null |
null | 11989 | null | null | null | null |
null | 12081 | null | null | null | null |
null | 6432 | null | null | null | null |
null | 16320 | null | null | null | null |
null | 6524 | null | null | null | null |
null | 3053 | null | null | null | null |
null | 92 | null | null | null | null |
null | 12229 | null | null | null | null |
null | 13360 | null | null | null | null |
null | 15457 | null | null | null | null |
null | 10045 | null | null | null | null |
null | 20507 | null | null | null | null |
null | 6298 | null | null | null | null |
null | 1072 | null | null | null | null |
null | 21515 | null | null | null | null |
null | 2943 | null | null | null | null |
null | 15495 | null | null | null | null |
null | 16639 | null | null | null | null |
null | 1497 | null | null | null | null |
null | 21198 | null | null | null | null |
null | 4551 | null | null | null | null |
null | 12043 | null | null | null | null |
null | 15888 | null | null | null | null |
null | 5927 | null | null | null | null |
null | 21768 | null | null | null | null |
null | 4907 | null | null | null | null |
null | 18786 | null | null | null | null |
null | 8473 | null | null | null | null |
null | 10785 | null | null | null | null |
null | 12046 | null | null | null | null |
null | 4694 | null | null | null | null |
null | 10871 | null | null | null | null |
null | 20381 | null | null | null | null |
null | 6293 | null | null | null | null |
null | 4368 | null | null | null | null |
null | 13344 | null | null | null | null |
null | 3068 | null | null | null | null |
null | 14147 | null | null | null | null |
null | 14182 | null | null | null | null |
null | 6027 | null | null | null | null |
null | 12134 | null | null | null | null |
null | 3696 | null | null | null | null |
null | 8477 | null | null | null | null |
null | 9876 | null | null | null | null |
null | 7557 | null | null | null | null |
null | 21216 | null | null | null | null |
null | 14002 | null | null | null | null |
null | 15467 | null | null | null | null |
null | 18821 | null | null | null | null |
null | 168 | null | null | null | null |
null | 20406 | null | null | null | null |
null | 17995 | null | null | null | null |
null | 18769 | null | null | null | null |
null | 6326 | null | null | null | null |
null | 5117 | null | null | null | null |
null | 15007 | null | null | null | null |
null | 18399 | null | null | null | null |
null | 14048 | null | null | null | null |
null | 20647 | null | null | null | null |
null | 23352 | null | null | null | null |
null | 4411 | null | null | null | null |
null | 16326 | null | null | null | null |
null | 14415 | null | null | null | null |
null | 11747 | null | null | null | null |
null | 10633 | null | null | null | null |
null | 19855 | null | null | null | null |
null | 9884 | null | null | null | null |
null | 6629 | null | null | null | null |
null | 18936 | null | null | null | null |
null | 14818 | null | null | null | null |
4024 | 2018 Community Moderator Election
The 2018 Community Moderator Election is now underway!
Community moderator elections have three phases:
Nomination phase
Primary phase
Election phase
Most elections take between two and three weeks, but this depends on how many candidates there are.
Please visit the official election page at
https://academia.stackexchange.com/election
for more detail, and to participate!
If you have general questions about the election process, or questions for moderator candidates, feel free to ask them here on meta -- just make sure your questions are tagged election.
| Stack Exchange | 2025-03-21T12:54:48.543137 | 2018-03-05T20:00:01 | {
"license": "Creative Commons - Attribution Share-Alike - https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/",
"site": "academia.meta.stackexchange.com",
"url": "https://academia.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/4024",
"authors": [
"https://academia.meta.stackexchange.com/users/12757",
"user12757"
],
"all_licenses": [
"Creative Commons - Attribution Share-Alike - https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/"
],
"sort": "votes",
"include_comments": true
} |
70 | Keeping up with our progress on Area 51. Keep the good questions coming!
The Area 51 site has various metrics by which the stack overflow teams assesses the viability and growth of our community (our site profile can be found here).
After the flurry of initial questions asked by several key members of the community, it appears the rate of questions asked has decreased some. So this question is just a guise to prompt the community to ask good questions, which will allow the site to continue to grow.
So get out there and contribute with both answers and good questions!
Most of those initial questions were mine, so it was kind of artificially inflated... we're probably settling down to steady state now.
However, this question is a great time to bring back up the topic of promoting the site. We haven't made an official poster, but please post links to the site anywhere and everywhere!
Good point about promotion. And thank you for all of the work that went into your questions. It very effectively set the tone and helped define the scope of the site.
Agreed. As far as I can tell, the number of questions is borderline worrying, but our traffic is downright bad. Solving the latter issue will certainly lead to increasing the number of (hopefully good) questions.
| Stack Exchange | 2025-03-21T12:54:48.543540 | 2012-03-01T17:25:18 | {
"license": "Creative Commons - Attribution Share-Alike - https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/",
"site": "academia.meta.stackexchange.com",
"url": "https://academia.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/70",
"authors": [
"Anand",
"Andy W",
"Anthony Labarre",
"Speldosa",
"https://academia.meta.stackexchange.com/users/141",
"https://academia.meta.stackexchange.com/users/142",
"https://academia.meta.stackexchange.com/users/26",
"https://academia.meta.stackexchange.com/users/3"
],
"all_licenses": [
"Creative Commons - Attribution Share-Alike - https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/"
],
"sort": "votes",
"include_comments": true
} |
1035 | Launched? Launched!
I started up this SE just because it crossed my mind that it might be useful and with little hope to see it succeed. Apparently, it's now fully decorated and with a great and established community.
I just want to congratulate all of you for the great building you assembled on top of that pebble I threw.
Thank you for proposing this site!
| Stack Exchange | 2025-03-21T12:54:48.543789 | 2014-05-21T10:37:06 | {
"license": "Creative Commons - Attribution Share-Alike - https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/",
"site": "academia.meta.stackexchange.com",
"url": "https://academia.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/1035",
"authors": [
"Anonymous Mathematician",
"https://academia.meta.stackexchange.com/users/612"
],
"all_licenses": [
"Creative Commons - Attribution Share-Alike - https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/"
],
"sort": "votes",
"include_comments": true
} |
17 | Just how high is "higher education"?
By looking at the site today, it seems that "higher education" is an euphemism for "doctorate". The definition stage however doesn't imply that (1 2 3...)
Is Academia only about PhD, postdoc and teaching positions? Are questions about Master's, Bachelor's, High School etc. off-topic?
Most questions, even in the definition stage, seem to be from people who are (or aspire to be) employed in academia (as instructors or researchers), rather than people who are only enrolled in academia (as students). There are some exceptions, though.
I often wish the website was cut into three websites: teaching, research and careers/applications.
i think it makes sense because "academia" is not a term used often by people who aren't pursuing a master's or phd (or equivalent). sure, you could call undergrad academia and be technically correct, but that's just not the way the word is used. "academia", by and large, means postgrad or teaching/researching at a university.
I would not define "higher education" as including high school. The usual definition includes college and above (in other words, after having completed the equivalent of a high school degree). In practice, though, I would expect a SE devoted to academia to have most of its participants at the level of a graduate student (or at least "rising" graduate student).
How about "rising bachelor's" questions, e.g. about the super complicated UK admission system.
@badp: the administrative mechanisms of a specific institution are definitely on-topic imho. Details about courses and professors are not. Curriculum decisions may or may not be on-topic, depending if they are of general interest.
Actually, I'd argue that the administrative mechanisms of a specific institution are too localized for SE. Framed as more general questions about administrative mechanisms, though, would be OK. I suppose questions about admissions to college would technically fall under the group's purview, but I don't think that most HS students would look at "Academia" and think "board to ask about university admissions"; the term implicitly suggests something higher up the educational food chain.
Is Academia only about PhD, postdoc and teaching positions? Are questions about Master's, Bachelor's, High School etc. off-topic?
This SE is about academics and Academia. Questions about Master and Bachelor degree are on-topic, unless they are specific to a given university course. That is, if your question is about required documentation to apply to university X, in my opinion it is on-topic. If it's about a course or a professor at a given university, it is off-topic.
High school is off-topic.
I would tend to disagree. Admissions questions specific to a single school are generally solvable with a single link (to a web page for the university's admissions office), and therefore are really just like questions about professors or courses.
@Jason: Sometimes yes, but in some cases there are "cheat codes" that are not told, remembered, or allowed, and can simplify your life. One for all: the order of operations and offices to visit in order to settle in a new country. First the contract? first the visa? first the bank account ? Believe me, every country and academic institution has different regulations on this regard.
I really like @JeffE's comment:
Most questions, even in the definition stage, seem to be from people who are (or aspire to be) employed in academia (as instructors or researchers), rather than people who are only enrolled in academia (as students).
And I think that is the guideline we should use for higher education means. Basically, education that leads towards academic life.
So a question like
I am a highschool senior aspiring to be a scientist. What should I focus on in undergrad?
Would be more about higher education than
I have a bachelor's degree in accounting. Will a master's program increase my employability in finance?
Even though the second question is about a 'higher level' (Masters usually comes after Bachelors) of education, it is not higher in the sense of not really leading to academic life.
That being said, I think we should be cautious about admission questions and advice for people applying to undergrad.
| Stack Exchange | 2025-03-21T12:54:48.543899 | 2012-02-15T22:49:15 | {
"license": "Creative Commons - Attribution Share-Alike - https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/",
"site": "academia.meta.stackexchange.com",
"url": "https://academia.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/17",
"authors": [
"Franck Dernoncourt",
"Hal",
"JeffE",
"Matt Gregory",
"Phonon",
"Stefano Borini",
"aeismail",
"badp",
"canadian_scholar",
"https://academia.meta.stackexchange.com/users/156",
"https://academia.meta.stackexchange.com/users/24",
"https://academia.meta.stackexchange.com/users/26834",
"https://academia.meta.stackexchange.com/users/33",
"https://academia.meta.stackexchange.com/users/34",
"https://academia.meta.stackexchange.com/users/36",
"https://academia.meta.stackexchange.com/users/452",
"https://academia.meta.stackexchange.com/users/5",
"https://academia.meta.stackexchange.com/users/53",
"https://academia.meta.stackexchange.com/users/65",
"user428517"
],
"all_licenses": [
"Creative Commons - Attribution Share-Alike - https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/"
],
"sort": "votes",
"include_comments": true
} |
3772 | What happened to my comment?
I left a highly upvoted comment on Henning's answer to this question agreeing with the second part of the answer and emphasizing that there's essentially no practical downside to using the initial requested by the author. (I don't have the exact comment because authors can't see their own deleted comment). This comment appears to have been deleted with no moderator message and as far as I can tell was not moved to chat. At the same time a similarly highly upvoted comment taking the opposite point of view is left there. What happened here?
This is what happened:
There was a long thread of comments (before yours) that was flagged and subsequently moved to chat by a moderator. An automatically-generated comment was left behind, saying "Comments are not for extended discussion; this conversation has been moved to chat."
You posted a comment immediately below the one that said "Comments are not for extended discussion; this conversation has been moved to chat". Others followed, posting another long thread of comments. These were flagged, too. Moderators cannot move comment threads to chat more than once; a different moderator deleted the comment thread (including the comment that was automatically generated by 1, that said "Comments have been moved to chat" with a link to the chat room. My guess is that this comment was deleted in error.)
Other people came along and left more comments. No new flags were raised after the mod cleaned up the thread in 2.
I just went back and un-deleted the comment with the link to the chat room, and deleted the others. Please go ahead and leave your comment in that linked chat room; for convenience, here's the content:
The update gets this right. Using the new name is a really big deal to one person, and in all likelihood will not matter at all to anyone else ever (papers are rarely read, let alone a particular reference followed, and probably the first initial won't cause a problem anyway if the last name and title are right). The worst case of using the new name is maybe one person loses 5 minutes of time.
Thanks for the explanation.
@NoahSnyder I deleted your comment (and many others) for exactly the reasons given above. Dealing with long comment threads is difficult in that we have to delete them all manually and then undelete the one(s) we want to keep. In this case, I forgot to undelete the helpful comment about further discussion should happen in chat.
Moderators cannot move comment threads to chat more than once aaand here is the real problem. Broken functionality from the Stack Exchange side.
@FedericoPoloni There's a feature request here.
@FedericoPoloni it's not broken, what is broken is people cannot read and continue to post comments after moderator messages explicitly saying to take that conversation to chat.
| Stack Exchange | 2025-03-21T12:54:48.544194 | 2017-07-17T19:54:34 | {
"license": "Creative Commons - Attribution Share-Alike - https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/",
"site": "academia.meta.stackexchange.com",
"url": "https://academia.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/3772",
"authors": [
"Federico Poloni",
"KharoBangdo",
"Noah Snyder",
"Patrick Collins",
"StrongBad",
"enderland",
"ff524",
"https://academia.meta.stackexchange.com/users/11365",
"https://academia.meta.stackexchange.com/users/12063",
"https://academia.meta.stackexchange.com/users/12064",
"https://academia.meta.stackexchange.com/users/25",
"https://academia.meta.stackexchange.com/users/5845",
"https://academia.meta.stackexchange.com/users/929",
"https://academia.meta.stackexchange.com/users/958"
],
"all_licenses": [
"Creative Commons - Attribution Share-Alike - https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/"
],
"sort": "votes",
"include_comments": true
} |
2 | How should we behave for the "reference" questions?
Suppose user X comes in and ask "How is the group with professor Y at university Z ?". How should we treat this kind of questions ? One thing may be to answer with pure citation metrics, that is: they publish a lot, or they don't seem to. More personal experiences and opinions about Professor Y may trigger complaint from the professor him/herself.
| Stack Exchange | 2025-03-21T12:54:48.544435 | 2012-02-14T20:41:04 | {
"license": "Creative Commons - Attribution Share-Alike - https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/",
"site": "academia.meta.stackexchange.com",
"url": "https://academia.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/2",
"authors": [
"Brian Ballsun-Stanton",
"Stefano Borini",
"https://academia.meta.stackexchange.com/users/5",
"https://academia.meta.stackexchange.com/users/6"
],
"all_licenses": [
"Creative Commons - Attribution Share-Alike - https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/"
],
"sort": "votes",
"include_comments": true
} |
4 | Is community wiki not available during beta?
I think several questions are doing to be found that are more appropriate to the wiki concept than a definitive question/answer concept. Are the options for marking something as wiki not available during beta?
Community wiki questions are a moderator-only feature. Anyone can make a community wiki answer, however.
Keep in mind that you might not really need community wiki at all. It shines when answers require collaborative editing, but with suggested edits in place even that is possible without CW.
I don't know which questions you had in mind as CW candidates when you asked this, but check out this blog post about community wiki, its uses, and its purpose.
I would say this question is a typical candidate for community wiki: http://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/36/suitable-citation-management-softaware
| Stack Exchange | 2025-03-21T12:54:48.544528 | 2012-02-14T21:37:15 | {
"license": "Creative Commons - Attribution Share-Alike - https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/",
"site": "academia.meta.stackexchange.com",
"url": "https://academia.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/4",
"authors": [
"Henry",
"Lev Reyzin",
"https://academia.meta.stackexchange.com/users/10",
"https://academia.meta.stackexchange.com/users/4187",
"https://academia.meta.stackexchange.com/users/8",
"matth"
],
"all_licenses": [
"Creative Commons - Attribution Share-Alike - https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/"
],
"sort": "votes",
"include_comments": true
} |
58 | Including country/region and discipline in Q&A for which it is relevant
Some issues are likely to be different for different countries and different disciplines, e.g.:
funding,
career path and opportunities,
academic degrees,
compulsory exams.
I think it is worth to encourage people to state is explicitly, both in their questions and their answers.
This general theme has been covered in a bunch of different topics on meta at this point, but I think this one is worth an upvote. Much of the focus has been on avoiding localization in the question, or at least specifying what field/geography you're asking from.
It think there's an equal burden on the answering poster to make where they're coming from explicit. Our answers, even at their most biased, are colored by experience.
| Stack Exchange | 2025-03-21T12:54:48.544666 | 2012-02-25T00:50:55 | {
"license": "Creative Commons - Attribution Share-Alike - https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/",
"site": "academia.meta.stackexchange.com",
"url": "https://academia.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/58",
"authors": [
"Fomite",
"Greg S",
"https://academia.meta.stackexchange.com/users/116",
"https://academia.meta.stackexchange.com/users/117",
"https://academia.meta.stackexchange.com/users/118",
"jb."
],
"all_licenses": [
"Creative Commons - Attribution Share-Alike - https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/"
],
"sort": "votes",
"include_comments": true
} |
270 | Accepting answers from soft-questions
What all we know, we (i.e. academia.SE) are hacking the system for objective verifiable Q&A for the purpose of advise questions. (And, IMHO, we have hacked it successfully).
However, I have some doubts when it comes to accepting answers. On StackOverflow it's obvious if an answer solves your problem. Then, out of such, you can choose the approach you actually took.
For soft-questions you don't have "I copied and pasted your code, it works, thanks". Usually there are piece of advice and wisdom in many "answers". And none of it "solves" the problem (actually differences in opinions are often fruitful and show academic landscape).
Of course sometimes there is an answer which is worth to be singled out among other. But in other cases, when there are more compelling answers - what to do?
What were you looking for? When you ask a soft question, you're definitely not looking for a unique actionable “that solved it thanks” solution, as you say. You are usually looking for ideas, advice, viewpoints different from your own, etc. So, I would suggest to:
Mark as accepted the answer that provided you with the most useful advice. It may not be easy to decide, but probably one of them has a point of view that you wouldn't have considered by yourself, or an answer backed by quotes or statistics.
If you can't make up your mind, choose a good answer amongst the later ones: late answers tend to receive less exposure, and thus less votes.
Possibly write a comment below it, explaining how you found it useful, and that you really appreciated insight given by the others.
An alternative would be not to accept any answer. I think it's not very satisfactory, because it sends the message that “none of this helped me” (of course, if that's true, then don't accept any answer) and, less importantly, it lets a good +15 rep go to waste.
Additionally to F'x answer, I would like to mention another point of view. The point of view of a person who will look at the Academia site for some answers and will read your question in the future.
If the person is very interested, he or she will read all the posts and think about their value by himself (herself), not just the accepted one. In this case it does not matter which answer you will mark.
Most of the people will probably read just few top rated answers. In this case, you can proceed according to the point 2. of F'x answer. Give the privilege to an answer which is bellow but you find it valuable and help others to learn more in this way.
(if the person will read just the accepted answer or the first one, he or she is probably not that interested in that matter and again it does not matter what you will mark out.)
So, If you have doubts which answer to mark, you can think about which answer will be the most beneficial for other possible readers in the future.
If there is no clear right answer possible, then the question doesn't belong on the site. It should be closed as "not a real question" or "off-topic", and then possibly deleted.
If a clear right answer is possible, but it is split across several existing answers, then the thing to do is to write a synthesis of all the right things into a single answer.
Writing a synthesis has some downsides: in particular, if other answers are added later, the synthesis become outdated. I would argue that the whole page (question + upvoted answers) is accessible anyway for people to read and make their own mind.
@EnergyNumbers With all due respect, if you were right, then academia.SE wouldn't exist. It's good to be aware of the fact that most of questions here would be closed on other scientific Q&A sites as subjective. And even there the questions are less objective than on StackOverflow itself.
| Stack Exchange | 2025-03-21T12:54:48.544814 | 2012-11-10T01:34:14 | {
"license": "Creative Commons - Attribution Share-Alike - https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/",
"site": "academia.meta.stackexchange.com",
"url": "https://academia.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/270",
"authors": [
"F'x",
"Piotr Migdal",
"balpha",
"https://academia.meta.stackexchange.com/users/2700",
"https://academia.meta.stackexchange.com/users/49",
"https://academia.meta.stackexchange.com/users/549"
],
"all_licenses": [
"Creative Commons - Attribution Share-Alike - https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/"
],
"sort": "votes",
"include_comments": true
} |
336 | A place for open-ended discussions about academia
(I don't know if it fits better to meta or nor meta.)
As we see very often, many problems in/about academia are not suitable for close-ended questions. Also, some important things involve polling questions, like software, university, scholarship, conference or journal recommendations.
(For example, I'm involved in projects about creating new software for new ways for collaboration and discovery sharing, https://gist.github.com/4540942, and I have a lot of related questions, but all of them are open-ended.)
So:
do we have a good place to redirect people asking such open-ended question?
or: should we start one?
or: maybe we should start a blog on Academia.SE?
I think this question fits better here on meta rather than main: on main, it would (for me) definitely be a candidate for closure & deletion
It's called a "campus" and they're all closed this year.
Have you considered this place called Reddit? (https://www.reddit.com/r/academia/)
Very good question. In fact I feel that this forum can work more or less what you are asking about but sadly the rules are over-enforced. The rules are good in themselves but like any society, when they are over-done they become burdensome and destructive to higher-potential. New contributors also are discouraged once they walk into the wall of rules and the peculiar culture thereby creating a top-heavy organization. Which is why we run into heavy resistance when suggesting this very change--which is a valid suggestion.
Quora accept open-ended questions about academia. You could redirect there.
Whenever I go to Quora, the site seems kind of silly to me.
@user111388 definitely a lot of low-quality content and other issues on Quora. Another option with a fair amount of crap content is Reddit.
While Reddit has a lot of crap, my impression is that there are good and crap forums (unlike in Quora, where the crap is all over the place).
@user111388 Good point, there is some content quality variability between different subreddits. Which sub would you say is a good sub? Just curious as on my side I can't think of any sub that I find decent. But I don't go there often. Perhaps small specialized subs may attract a more useful crowd.
I like the subs on beekeeping, Ultimate and mostly Academia. Also Data Science and Geocaching.
Chat is as close as we've got to a place for open-ended discussion. But it sounds like wht you're after is a forum. We don't do that round here (and I've hugely scaled down my contribution to forums since getting active here: they just seem so archaic and pointless now, and suffer from Eternal September syndrome much more than we do here)
For me chat(s) rarely work - as there is no structure at all; maybe except for trivial questions. When it comes to forums - implicitly, I referred to such; but for some reason there are not as active as they used to be + maybe something in between (blog + discussions in comments) may look more appropriate.
Unfortunately, chat is the appropriate forum for that sort of thing, and our chat—like most beta chats—is too slow to be useful. SE does allow sites to have a blog, but it's a lot of effort, and we have to demonstrate that we are committed to maintaining the blog in the long-term. If you're interested, though, start a post and we can see whether there's interest.
I think chat is the way to go. Not the general chat room, but a "private" room with an appropriate title.
I would recommend thefora.org, which is an offshoot of the forums formerly hosted by the Chronicle of Higher Education.
(But - warning - it is fairly snarky, and it is (just because of the participants and maybe the origin) US and humanities oriented.)
| Stack Exchange | 2025-03-21T12:54:48.545203 | 2013-01-20T15:22:48 | {
"license": "Creative Commons - Attribution Share-Alike - https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/",
"site": "academia.meta.stackexchange.com",
"url": "https://academia.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/336",
"authors": [
"410 gone",
"Anonymous Physicist",
"BarocliniCplusplus",
"Franck Dernoncourt",
"Ootagu",
"Piotr Migdal",
"StrongBad",
"eykanal",
"https://academia.meta.stackexchange.com/users/111388",
"https://academia.meta.stackexchange.com/users/13240",
"https://academia.meta.stackexchange.com/users/452",
"https://academia.meta.stackexchange.com/users/49",
"https://academia.meta.stackexchange.com/users/67964",
"https://academia.meta.stackexchange.com/users/69969",
"https://academia.meta.stackexchange.com/users/73",
"https://academia.meta.stackexchange.com/users/929",
"https://academia.meta.stackexchange.com/users/96",
"user111388"
],
"all_licenses": [
"Creative Commons - Attribution Share-Alike - https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/",
"Creative Commons - Attribution Share-Alike - https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/"
],
"sort": "votes",
"include_comments": true
} |
513 | Are we a "life/arts" community?
The new display at the bottom is not very good, in my opinion: I would expect to see "Academia" under "Professional," but that's not even in one of the categories shown in the display below—you have to click through to get to a site where you then have to hunt around to find it. That's not a very good system in my opinion.
But, at the very least, we should list Academia where it makes more sense. But is that "Professional" rather than "Life/Arts?"
If it's listed in "Life/Arts", I would at least cross-list it in "Science" as well.
I don't think we get to pick multiple options. Otherwise it should already be there! But I guess we can find out. I'll look into this.
With respect to Daniel E Shub's answer, I think of being an academic as my profession. I spend my working hours in academia and I continue to improve myself, professionally, as an academic. Life/arts seems more appropriate to hobbies. I would not put this site under 'science' since academia (and this site) is not limited to science. I hope we will have many more members from many more branches than just the sciences.
Our Academia community is still listed under life/arts... Professional or Science are the most suitable categories. Why no request is posted on the main site's meta to change the website's category?
I have to say that I feel that Professional is a better fit. The reason I say so is that research is our job, and academia is the enveloping name for the network we operate in.
Whether or not being an academic is a lifestyle is an abstract discussion in my opinion. Anyone might feel that their job describes their lifestyle; a banker might feel that banking is not a job but a lifestyle, likewise a construction worker might feel that pouring concrete is way beyond a 9-to-5 job. What is an indisputable fact is that a majority of us are in research as a permanent, or temporary, career path. That alone makes my perspective to Academia.SE a site where professional questions/opinions/experiences are voiced.
That's only my opinion of course.
It looks like the full list of categories are:
Technology
Culture/Recreation
Life/Arts
Science
Business
Professional
I think Technology, Culture, and Business would be really bad categories for us. While Science might be a reasonable category for us now, I would hope in the future academia.se will cover more than just the sciences. This leaves, as aeismail points out life/arts and professional. I think life/arts is much better than professional. I do not think of being an academic as my profession as much as my life style.
I'm surprised you don't think of being an academic as your profession. From the high quality of your answers, I would assume you were a full-time academic.
@earthling I am a full time academic. My point was that I think of being an academic as being an all encompassing lifestyle.
| Stack Exchange | 2025-03-21T12:54:48.545654 | 2013-05-12T18:36:49 | {
"license": "Creative Commons - Attribution Share-Alike - https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/",
"site": "academia.meta.stackexchange.com",
"url": "https://academia.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/513",
"authors": [
"StrongBad",
"aeismail",
"earthling",
"enthu",
"eykanal",
"https://academia.meta.stackexchange.com/users/15723",
"https://academia.meta.stackexchange.com/users/2692",
"https://academia.meta.stackexchange.com/users/53",
"https://academia.meta.stackexchange.com/users/73",
"https://academia.meta.stackexchange.com/users/929"
],
"all_licenses": [
"Creative Commons - Attribution Share-Alike - https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/"
],
"sort": "votes",
"include_comments": true
} |
83 | Is it time to start adding moderators?
Since we're about two weeks into the public beta now, I would think that it would be time to start considering adding more moderators (right now, I believe Anna is the only moderator, and she's with SE, as opposed to being a member-moderator.
Is it time to begin the process of adding pro tempore moderators? I think it would help improve board "flow", and keep things moving in a more productive direction.
I think we could stand to start adding mods, yes
No, graduated sites require elections. However, this post was written, as stated, when the site was still in public beta.
Yes. This community, while still small, has had it's share of low-quality questions and trolls, and internal moderators could handle that sort of stuff much quicker than outside.
Also, people here so far have been very forthcoming with discussions, and if a moderator acted in a way which upset the community, I have faith that the community would discuss it in meta in a healthy way, and if necessary the mod would reverse the action. We've got a good crowd here :)
| Stack Exchange | 2025-03-21T12:54:48.546015 | 2012-03-07T21:38:42 | {
"license": "Creative Commons - Attribution Share-Alike - https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/",
"site": "academia.meta.stackexchange.com",
"url": "https://academia.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/83",
"authors": [
"Fomite",
"Karol J. Piczak",
"Kaveh",
"aeismail",
"https://academia.meta.stackexchange.com/users/118",
"https://academia.meta.stackexchange.com/users/163",
"https://academia.meta.stackexchange.com/users/164",
"https://academia.meta.stackexchange.com/users/53"
],
"all_licenses": [
"Creative Commons - Attribution Share-Alike - https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/"
],
"sort": "votes",
"include_comments": true
} |
1736 | Revisiting custom close reasons
It's been a while since these have been looked at, but I think that it's appropriate to revisit the issue.
Right now, we have two custom close reasons that are very similar to one another in scope:
Questions that cannot be generalized to apply to others in similar situations are off-topic. For assistance in writing questions that can apply to multiple people facing similar situations, see: What kinds of questions are too localized?
and
This question appears to be off-topic because it seems to seek specific advice for a very specific situation, and it's likely that only someone with a good understanding of your situation will be able to provide an objectively correct answer.
I can't see any situation in which one of these could apply, but the other couldn't.
[The other close reason is the often overused "Undergraduate" reason.]
Personally, I find myself using a variant on the "shopping question" tag a lot more frequently. I would recommend replacing one of the tags above with something such as:
We cannot offer recommendations or rankings of specific programs, courses, universities, or other similar requests, as these are primarily opinion-based.
Can we, once the dust on this discussion has settled (has it by now?) include a link to this discussion as in "For more information, click here" in the new close reason(s)?
The new "shopping questions" close reason has been live for a little over two weeks, and it seems to be quite well used: of 97 question closed in the last 14 days, 15 have been "shopping questions."
Given how often I was manually typing in variants of the "shopping" excuse, such a result does not surprise me at all.
Now that I've had the status to vote on closing questions for a while, I felt I had to follow this link for the explanation of why shopping questions are disallowed. To be honest, I don't find it satisfactory. I agree that someone saying "please tell me all the departments that do X" would be bad. But someone saying "please recommend a book that will help me with X" seems like a perfectly fine question to raise here, and it's inevitably shut down.
@FredDouglis: If X is something related to academic practice, then it makes to consider it. However, if it’s a request specific to someone’s research, then it’s still off-topic. Resource questions about grant writing should be OK, but resource questions asking for data sets aren’t.
I guess it depends on how broadly you interpret academic practice....
I second that there is no need to distinguish between cannot be generalized and very specific advice and would like to suggest the following new wording for the close reason to compise them both:
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 somebody familiar with these can answer this question and it cannot be generalised to apply to others.
I chose to phrase it like this as many cases it should give the asker a strong hint where they can find an answer to their question, namely:
a certain person’s preferences → ask that person (in most cases: the advisor) or or somebody who knows them.
a given institution’s regulations → ask that university.
the exact contents of your work → ask somebody who is familiar with your work, namely your supervisor, colleagues or yourself.
your personal values → ask yourself, e.g., as to how much risk you are willing to take.
I also second the demand for a shopping question and suggest the following wording:
Shopping questions, i.e., questions that seek individual universities, academic programs, publishers, journals, research topics or similar as an answer or seek an assessment or comparison of such, are off-topic.
I chose this wording to slightly expand the scope (in comparison to the existing suggestions) and explicitly include such cases, where the asker is not explicitly asking for a recommendation but only for the existence of a program (but implicitly wishes recommendation). This should reduce certain complaints made by the asker (“I wasn’t asking for a recomendation, I just wanted to know if …”) I have witnessed quite often.
Also, at the end of the day, many close reasons (such as this) exist due to problem arising from the answers. Defining the problem via the answers directly addresses the problem and makes the close reason specific to what it needs to be specfic about.
I like your phrasing better than mine.
I think your first close reason does a nice job of combining the two close reasons. It just seems to me that the shopping question close reason is covered by your new close reason since shopping depends on personal preference and is therefore an individual factor.
@StrongBad: While this is true in some cases, there are shopping questions that can be generalised and are asking for somewhat objective criteria and are in particular not covered by the first close reason (see also Jakebeal’s answer), for example: “Which has a higher reputation? Castrop-Rauxel University or the Buxtehude Institute of Technology?”; “Is there a university in Liechtenstein which offers a degree in llama wrangling?”; “Which is the most-cited journal that covers llama wrangling?”.
@StrongBad: Moreover, when we close shopping reasons with the first reason, askers will go and somewhat objectify them. Then the first close reason does not apply anymore, but the question is still off-topic. This is bound to lead to some confusion and disappointment.
@Wrzlprmft sounds reasonable.
It’s nice to see my suggestions implemented, but the first reason reads “Thus only someone familiar can answer this question …” thus lacking with these. While this does not make a big difference in most cases, it does in cases regarding a certain institution’s regulations or similar.
I absolutely concur with the assessment that "cannot be generalized" and "very specific advice" are largely redundant.
If we are to do away with one of the two, I would suggest removing "cannot be generalized" because I find myself using the other very often for "Hi, here's my situation, help?" questions.
I also like the idea of a "no shopping questions" close reason, which I would suggest to tweak to:
Suggestions or recommendations or comparison of specific universities, journal, research topics, etc (i.e., "shopping questions") are off-topic.
Mainly, I am suggesting we drop the 'primarily opinion-based' wording from your original suggestion for the "no shopping questions" reason because that is setting us up for argument that some distinctions are not just matters of opinion. Instead, I think it is OK to simply say that we do not do this as a matter of policy, since there are many good reasons to do so (opinion, "taking sides," unprofessionalism, tendency to gossip, overly broad libel laws, etc.)
We can't drop "opinion-based," as that is a systemwide default reason. The only three custom reasons are the ones mentioned above (can't be generalized, specific situation, undergraduates).
@aeismail Sorry if my text was unclear: i didn't mean the close reason, I meant the bit where you said we don't do shopping questions because they are opinion-based.
| Stack Exchange | 2025-03-21T12:54:48.546221 | 2015-05-15T16:18:23 | {
"license": "Creative Commons - Attribution Share-Alike - https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/",
"site": "academia.meta.stackexchange.com",
"url": "https://academia.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/1736",
"authors": [
"Fred Douglis",
"Robert Cardona",
"Stephan Kolassa",
"StrongBad",
"T. Webster",
"Wrzlprmft",
"aeismail",
"che_kid",
"https://academia.meta.stackexchange.com/users/22733",
"https://academia.meta.stackexchange.com/users/4140",
"https://academia.meta.stackexchange.com/users/4246",
"https://academia.meta.stackexchange.com/users/53",
"https://academia.meta.stackexchange.com/users/6089",
"https://academia.meta.stackexchange.com/users/6093",
"https://academia.meta.stackexchange.com/users/6098",
"https://academia.meta.stackexchange.com/users/7734",
"https://academia.meta.stackexchange.com/users/929",
"jakebeal"
],
"all_licenses": [
"Creative Commons - Attribution Share-Alike - https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/"
],
"sort": "votes",
"include_comments": true
} |
4121 | How can we be more welcoming to new users?
In light of the recent Stack Overflow post on being more welcoming to newcomers, I believe it is worthwhile for us to explore what we can do to help new visitors ease into the site.
While I do not believe we should relax standards for what is considered an acceptable question, nor should we answer repeat questions "just to be nice."
However, it does seem appropriate that we do a better job explaining why we have issues with questions that are posted in a way that helps users try to improve their question if possible, or be a clear explanation of what's wrong.
Are there any other suggestions for how we can implement this initiative here on Academia.SE?
Something that was pointed out in a recent answer on another question here on meta:
Often a newcomer will ask a question which turns out to be a duplicate. This question will then be marked as such, and often nothing further will happen.
While this is all as it should be, it may leave the newcomer feeling like they did something wrong for not finding the duplicate themselves.
For this reason I propose that when we mark such questions as duplicate, we also make some remark indicating that this is not a fault with the question, and that the existence of this new version will help future visitors to find the answer they need. Hopefully, this will make the newcomer feel more welcome and they will be more inclined to stick around and ask other questions or even answer some.
Are you suggesting an automated note, or something like creating a culture where individual users leave some comment to the newcomer? If automated, I think what would be best is if the user gets notified with a message (rather than this just getting automatically posted in the text of the question), but is this possible on SE?
@Kimball To be honest, my thought on the matter did not really go any further than what I wrote in the answer, so I have no idea what a good implementation would look like.
An automated note would be nice, but that requires a higher level of implementation than we have access to. In the meanwhile, we can certainly leave a note.
Adding to Tobias' plea for better explanation of duplicate flags, I suggest we give an explanation more often (whenever we can?) for any close-votes.
Sure, we already have "canned" explanations that come with a close-vote, but since they are necessarily phrased in general terms, the OP may have difficulties to understand what specifically makes their question (for example) opinion-based.
In fact, we should always be able to explain how the general close-reason relates to the specific question. Such a reason-giving requirement would not only "be nice" to new users, it would also help safeguard borderline off-topic questions and make us less "trigger-happy".
I sometimes find myself wanting to close questions for being "too broad" just because I can't think of an informative answer, or for being "unclear" just because I don't quite understand what the issue is. But that doesn't mean that someone with better expertise cannot give a useful answer to a somewhat broad or (to me) opaque question. If others here have similar impulses, it might be a good idea to ask for specificity or clarification, wait if edits are made or useful answers are given, and only then, after a while, decide whether voting to close is actually helpful.
Another good reason to explain the closevote is that if the question gets closed, only the 'majority reason' gets stated. So, in that case all advice you give for improvement is lost if you've voted for a 'minority reason'.
There does seem to be an exception: if multiple Q’s are selected as duplicates, they all get listed.
Sometimes what I try to do is leave a comment stating that the question is not appropriate but suggesting how to refocus their question so it is more appropriate (and not vote to close or wait to vote). Unfortunately, I think the OP has rarely listened to these suggestions (for reasons I suspect alluded to in the Stack Overflow post linked to in the present question).
Is it possible to change the minimum reputation to unlock the chat privilege? Or changing it from "privilege" to a "basic right".
If new users had the opportunity to be redirected to the chat they would feel more welcome, having the opportunity to discuss opinion-based questions or being helped by others when facing some confusion/misunderstanding.
Recent example: Should I do BSc in mathematical physics or theoretical physics?
Reputation requirements are SE-wide, so that means it would need to be done at a higher level than here.
But pointing the poster to chat may not be such a bad idea for these kinds of questions. I tend to not use chat too much, so I forget to point other users there.
@aeismail Thank you, I didn't know that. However, for users with more reputation it is still a good step forward for integrating them with the community. There are several users daily active in the chat or, at least, visiting it to see if there is any discussion going on (including myself).
Besides this being a SE-wide requirement, I think it would also solve issues SE-wide (I can see the use on the sites I frequent, at least). Perhaps it would be good to raise this on [meta.se], but I have no idea where. I don't really like SE-staff's 'behind doors' survey+ 'hidden chat' approach to solving this problem, why not do everything in the daylight, as we usually solve the problems on SE?
Sadly, I am guessing that moderation problems would go up substantially in chat if no reputation was required to enter, or at least that this fear is behind the minimum reputation. I agree, though, that something in this direction might help new users.
Mods can invite users to chat. Perhaps we need to flag questions where it’s appropriate for mod intervention in this way.
What would help is if room owners could invite users (without the required reputation) to chat (feature request on Meta SE). Then we would just need to make a few interested and reputed users room owners of the Ivory Tower. These users could then also perform any ensuing moderation if required.
As a relatively new person here, I think the response about duplicates up above is a good one. Just to add to that, I feel like there are times where a question has maybe one answer, and it's not at all comprehensive or directly relevant to the new question being asked, but close enough where some would automatically close it.
I know this is basically asking for more lax standards in closing a duplicate, but I really do feel like there are sometimes pretty unsatisfactorily answered questions from a few years ago and it would be nice to seek a fresh and more relevant (and hopefully comprehensive) response.
Last point (and unrelated to the first)... I was directed to SE by a few colleagues, and they warned that it's mostly for STEM/comp people, and if you're humanities, social science, etc. you won't get much out of it. I guess I don't have an explicit suggestion here, but that feeling has certainly rung true for me so far.
Edited to add: I don't intend this at all to be snarky, but one relatively simple fix would be to figure out how to incentivize more people to answer more questions. I was searching through the first few pages of recent questions just a moment ago, and most questions had 0, 1, or 2 answers. If someone asks a question for the first time and gets 1 answer, they may not think it worth it to return and engage further.
Given the nature of SE, it's not a surprise that the majority of users are in STEM fields. That said, we are not exclusively a STEM site, and welcome all disciplines.
Also, the solution in the case of wanting better answers for duplicates is to provide a new answer to the older question.
I think users should have some better way of selecting tags or some tags should automatically be assigned to a question rather than the user having to explicitly search for a tag that may not necessarily exist.
Also, off-topic questions by new users should be automatically migrated to the suitable SE site rather than closing the question or deleting it which may leave a bad impression on the new user.
Downvotes for answers and questions should be attached with a 'reason' for the downvote so that the user knows what went wrong , this might also help avoid random downvoting.
And i personally think , questions from low reputation users who are fairly new should be put on hold for 10 minutes at a checkpoint once the user submits the question so that the moderators and bots have a chance to filter out very far off or inappropriate questions rather than having to clean up later , also to make up for the 10 minutes , new users can be allowed to post every 30 mins and all the questions that the moderators didn't get a chance to check will get posted automatically after the said 10 minutes.
Automatic tagging requires a level of AI that the system probably doesn't have. Perhaps they could offer up a list of the most frequently used tags on a given site as a set of starter choices, but you can't go much further than that. Migration is also a similar problem: how do you decide which site to send it to?
using a large set of distinctive keywords for each site and comparing with those in the question , the system can suggest the user if that qn is better off in this site.
@theenigma017: Given that human beings blatantly fail to apply tags or suggest migration targets, I strongly doubt that an automated system can do it.
i mean if you see "research" and then you see "thesis" and "professor" in the question, it is headed over to academia-related sites and not something like health or chemistry @Wrzlprmft
@theenigma017: Take a look at this.
@Wrzlprmft not just one keyword, match 3-4 distinctive keywords and you will end up with a narrow topic, there might be exceptions, but in the long run , it might work.
there might be exceptions – yes, but then people posting on the wrong site are exceptions right now. You would at least have to be that accurate – actually much more accurate to outweigh the frustration if your algorithm incorrectly suggests the wrong site. Take a look at some some migrated questions and consider whether an algorithm could have done this.
@Wrzlprmft then how about using such an algorithm to suggest a group of possible tags, that would be really useful and have less chances of going wrong when the user can decide rather than searching for a tag...
Leaving a comment explaining downvotes is already one of the good practices recommended by SE. I didn't understand why the "holding time" would help new users to feel welcome. The other suggestions are based on the site framework, while the human interaction plays the key role in this issue in my opinion. The moderators already have been migrating several questions to other sites (I think that I saw three questions migrated in the past week), so I don't think we need an automated system.
Please don't overcomplicate yourself. We just need to answer their questions, and they will feel welcome. What about this? We force our lovely moderators to answer each and every newcomer question, no matter what they ask. The new users will see exactly 5 answers from our moderators, they will feel very happy.
I think it will work as our moderators spend most of their awake time on this site anyway.
Yeah, not going to happen. Even if we had the time, we don't always know the answer.
Haha, I think forcing the mods to do it might be a bit much, but encouraging people to be chattier than usual in comments when screening first posts might help.
| Stack Exchange | 2025-03-21T12:54:48.547108 | 2018-04-29T23:55:45 | {
"license": "Creative Commons - Attribution Share-Alike - https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/",
"site": "academia.meta.stackexchange.com",
"url": "https://academia.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/4121",
"authors": [
"Discrete lizard",
"Kimball",
"Rachel",
"StrongBad",
"The Doctor",
"Tobias Kildetoft",
"Wrzlprmft",
"aeismail",
"cactus_pardner",
"gmatht",
"https://academia.meta.stackexchange.com/users/12592",
"https://academia.meta.stackexchange.com/users/13020",
"https://academia.meta.stackexchange.com/users/13022",
"https://academia.meta.stackexchange.com/users/13048",
"https://academia.meta.stackexchange.com/users/13081",
"https://academia.meta.stackexchange.com/users/19607",
"https://academia.meta.stackexchange.com/users/53",
"https://academia.meta.stackexchange.com/users/72231",
"https://academia.meta.stackexchange.com/users/7734",
"https://academia.meta.stackexchange.com/users/83941",
"https://academia.meta.stackexchange.com/users/88197",
"https://academia.meta.stackexchange.com/users/91637",
"https://academia.meta.stackexchange.com/users/929",
"m00am",
"sinoTrinity",
"theenigma017"
],
"all_licenses": [
"Creative Commons - Attribution Share-Alike - https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/",
"Creative Commons - Attribution Share-Alike - https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/"
],
"sort": "votes",
"include_comments": true
} |
4555 | Was this answer edited too heavily?
This question about patent infringement yielded a few moderately contentious answers, as judged by the number of flags on the question. One of them simply stated that China was a dictatorship with little respect for the American patent system. That answer received a lot of comment discussion about whether the answer was sufficient or whether it was baseless accusations. I then edited the answer, adding a number of links to sources on China's IP policy and removing the unsourced comments. A few people commented that my edits went too far.
Were my edits inappropriate?
Note: Please try to disassociate the diamond here from the activity. If you don't wish to, that's your prerogative, but any 20k+ user can see flags on questions. I edited in the mindset of a member of this site, not as a moderator.
I felt the removals were greater than the additions. Also, there's no need to provide references for these statements.
Note: Only moderators can see flags, not 20k users. But anyone can see that the original answer was controversial from the comments
You can't do much in China. China is a dictatorship, and it appears to
have a national policy of hacking businesses to steal their code and
data. No reason to expect them to respect your rights to your PhD
thesis.
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.
As you say that your advisor works for a UK university, you might be
able to do something there. I have no idea if that's a good idea or
not. Similarly, if anyone tries to claim rights to your invention
outside of China, it's possible you could do something.
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.
This is augmented with actual facts which weren't even hinted at in the original.
Lastly, while certainly suspicious, I wouldn't take it as proven that
your advisor was responsible, at least not based on what you've
written.
This last paragraph is good and important and the only reason I see to keep the answer around at all.
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.
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.
If undesirable content is upvoted I think in general it makes more sense to:
Add good other answers and trust in the users to upvote them more.
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.
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.
(no hard feelings)
Re: final point... none taken. I assume everyone here is acting in good faith.
To your first point, I guess I just disagree. The OP is trying to say "China is bad", but does so without any real backing. It can be salvaged by adding proper references and removing biased language.
Regarding freedom in China you should definitely check their "social credit score" system (hint: no naughty citizens allowed).
Plus "organ transplant tourism" (by executed prisoners).
@Fermiparadox You don't need to tell me that. I spend more time being a pacifism and human rights activist than discussing stuff on se. Personally, I don't like China. That doesn't change anything I wrote.
Just to post what I was thinking at the time, no, this was not inappropriate. 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.
I think the edits greatly improved the answer. I was not comfortable with the first paragraph but could not figure out how to easily fix it. I think it required a major overhaul to provide evidence and to make it less provocative. I think you did that without changing the intent of the answer.
"they "have a national policy of hacking and stealing" (which both isn't true and is pretty slanderous)." Nonsense. Every developed country has an intelligence agency which exists to perform hacking and copying information, both industrial and military. "Stealing" is an excessively vague way of saying copying information.
@AnonymousPhysicist - Again, I disagree. Using your definition, I could say "they have a national policy of playing and learning", which both are excessively vague ways of saying that they engage in CTF-style activities and then learn from what they took. Even with the "excessively", this is beyond vague and entering into Rorschach-style "see what you want" in the original text.
Some support in Help center, the last point on when to edit: https://academia.stackexchange.com/help/editing
"One of them simply stated that China was a dictatorship with little respect for the American patent system."
"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.
I didn't see any reason for the answer to be flagged or edited. It's firmly critical, but reasonable.
I conjecture that flaggers thought the answer stereotyped China as corrupt. But it seems that the reality is not "China is unfairly considered corrupt." Instead, the reality is that corruption outside China does not get as much attention as it should.
| Stack Exchange | 2025-03-21T12:54:48.548584 | 2019-09-13T12:37:32 | {
"license": "Creative Commons - Attribution Share-Alike - https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/",
"site": "academia.meta.stackexchange.com",
"url": "https://academia.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/4555",
"authors": [
"Anonymous Physicist",
"Boj",
"Laurel",
"Nobody",
"StrongBad",
"Tommi",
"eykanal",
"https://academia.meta.stackexchange.com/users/13017",
"https://academia.meta.stackexchange.com/users/13240",
"https://academia.meta.stackexchange.com/users/14230",
"https://academia.meta.stackexchange.com/users/15193",
"https://academia.meta.stackexchange.com/users/43087",
"https://academia.meta.stackexchange.com/users/56207",
"https://academia.meta.stackexchange.com/users/73",
"https://academia.meta.stackexchange.com/users/929",
"user"
],
"all_licenses": [
"Creative Commons - Attribution Share-Alike - https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/"
],
"sort": "votes",
"include_comments": true
} |
4653 | Dealing with the "diversity question" answer
The question How to answer the diversity question during faculty interview has attracted a few answers, but one in particular stands out as being both rather non-politically correct and also quite accurate. I'm curious if/how the community wishes to deal with this particular. It's already had a few flags raised (rude/abusive, not an answer). I'll post my own thoughts in an answer below.
Do we have any analysis of who upvoted the answer?
@DJClayworth - Nope.
"and also quite accurate" - clearly debatable.
"Understand that the above question is to weed-out individuals who do not lean as those in power lean." That's certainly not accurate.
@henning--reinstateMonica: That’s certainly not the intended or stated purpose by most of its proponents, but there’s a reasonable argument that that’s an ulterior social goal/effect. Compare an argument like “the purpose of the American two-party system is to block real change and maintain the dominance of the political elite”. I don’t agree with the answer’s argument, but I think it’s in the realm of “reasonable but debatable claim” rather than “outright falsehood”.
I think it's likely that the voting on this particular Q&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.
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.
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.
You're certainly right, but you wouldn't believe how many academics I met in my life who would give answers that look like "answers by someone who hasn't participated on Academia.SE"
@MassimoOrtolano Oh I would believe it, just speaking about this particular answer and the information available around it.
Didn't even realize that this was an HNQ. sigh That feature is one of the least useful and most damaging elements of the whole SE network.
@eykanal Eh, I don't know if I agree with "least useful" - it certainly helps people discover other parts of the network, and there was massive uproar when a certain site was excluded from the HNQ. But "most damaging" - yes, it certainly can be when the wrong questions get there. Might be worth another entry at https://academia.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/4454/moderators-can-now-exclude-questions-from-the-hnq-list-when-should-we-use-this
@eykanal If you look at the HNQ chat feed, you can see that this particular question had a single vote when it hit HNQ.
@BryanKrause Wow, really? How does the HNQ algorithm work? Can the mods tinker with it so that we don't have to wade through the same idiotic nonsense every time someone says "diversity"?
@ElizabethHenning We can remove questions from the HNQ list, and that has been removed, and there's also a chat that list the HNQ questions from this site, but we cannot foresee whether a question will become really problematic or not. See also this post and this one.
@ElizabethHenning There are probably some details on MSE somewhere you can dig up. The threshold is based on the level of activity on the site, so smaller sites can more easily hit the HNQ. Questions getting multiple answers shortly after being posted is one cause.
@MassimoOrtolano and Bryan Krause: Thanks for the info. The HNQ chat feed is an excellent idea, this is the first I've heard of it.
While I don't know anything about the poster of the answer, the question described is applicable to workplaces other than academia, so any of knowledge about academia shouldn't be seen as a disqualifying fault.
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.
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.
That doesn't make paulj's answer untrue; it is 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.
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.)
+1 The answer we are discussing doesn't actually provide any suggestions as to what to say in the interview, which was what the question asked.
Yeah I don't think it's a very helpful answer since it doesn't give advice on how to do well in the interview. But it succinctly informs on why you can't just stay quiet when asked those questions, and that questioning the premises of those questions is not going to work well. So it's not entirely without merit.
I'm not disagreeing with you, but to be a decent answer there needs to be some actual suggestions of what to say in answer to the question.
What do you mean by "political," exactly? I don't see anything political about the question "what will faculty do about diversity"; it's not a question about policy or government.
+1... I like the nuance here. That said, I'm not sure everyone reads this question the same way. I definitely read "how" as "what are my options in answers?"
@TannerSwett what universities should or shouldn't do about diversity is "political" because it's a political matter in society right now, and universities have a quite central position in public debate.
The question is not political. But the answer we are discussing is unquestionably political.
At the moment I'm writing this, it is the highest voted answer. To me, that's the community's answer.
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.
I'm not sure about it - several of the other answers have common ground, so votes may be split among similar answers.
But people can upvote as many answers as they want, so I don't clearly see where the split would happen.
They can, but we can't see if they do. For example if people voted only the first time they saw the issue and didn't come back to read newer answers.
I disagree that it's necessarily the "community's answer" depending on the definition of community - this question has been on the HNQ which tends to bring in voters from around the network that might not have any involvement with academia. That outside community might upvote sentiments that reflect their assumptions about what academia is and enjoy a bit of a controversial answer.
Well, the opposite could be true, right? Maybe all the downvotes come from those outside Academia. And in any case those outsiders still can vote here in meta. My point is that the meta question is choosing a subset of users to decide on the question, and it is not obvious to me why that would be fair.
At least one downvote came from Academia.
@MartinArgerami Users without rep on Academia can only upvote. Downvotes are gated by rep (and the 100 association bonus for rep on another site is not sufficient for downvoting privileges).
Unfortunately quip answers that don't explain much but agree with the voters' biases are quite common, esp. on politics SE. Since they often get posted first they tend to get a lot of votes in HNQ, even if they impart little information but a lot of opinion. It says more about the nature of SX (and HNQ in particular).. https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/9731/fastest-gun-in-the-west-problem
The answer is honestly quite accurate, but uses unnecessarily opinionated language. I would prefer if the answer would be simply factual, possibly as follows:
This question has only one correct answer, unfortunately. Providing anything other than a positive "I support diversity through <methods>" is likely to significantly harm your application.
The above says the same thing as the current answer but without the attitude.
What evidence can you (or, more appropriately, the answerer) point to to confirm it's veracity. If that info were provided in the answer, it would be a valuable answer, and not a "look how PC the process is" rant.
There's enough people in the US running around in red ball caps to convince me that sometimes what people believe to be true is not true.
@ScottSeidman - addressed in my comment on your answer.
Are we so fragile that we cannot tolerate a bit of what you call “attitude” (and I’d call “personality”) in an answer? I’d argue that this so-called attitude is precisely the reason the answer got so many more upvotes than other answers that say similar things but in the kind of bland, boring language you are advocating for. So, respectfully, when you say “the above says the same thing as the current answer but without the attitude”, to me that comes across as saying something flattering about paulj’s answer and unflattering about your suggested language, rather than the other way around.
@DanRomik In the "analog" life, as everyone around me knows well, I'm the opposite of fragile. Whenever I speak in public or with some authority everyone is scared by what I can say (friends say that I suffer from "excess of personality"). But here, as a moderator, I find it difficult to deal with answers like that. Look at the timeline and see how many flags that answer already received; as a moderator, you can: i) continue to decline flags; ii) ignore the flags, but after 6 rude/abusive flags the answer gets deleted automatically; iii) try to edit the answer to make it less controversial.
Not to mention the problem of moderating comments. There are clear limits in the SE platform that make it fragile with respect to certain questions or answers.
@MassimoOrtolano thanks for interesting perspective re: moderation. Well, yeah, sure, if you need to moderate, give it your best shot and I appreciate your efforts and am fine with whatever decision you make. But if you declined the flags initially then it sounds like you agree the answer deserves to stay, so declining more flags seems like a reasonable solution. Anyway, FWIW, count me as one community member who thinks this answer is no worse than many others and should be left up for people to judge on its merits, or lack thereof.
@DanRomik - My take is somewhat different than Massimo's; you can have all the attitude you want, but don't bring it here. This is a forum strangers to talk to each other. No one knows each other. Bringing unnecessary attitude is a great way to tick off someone with little added benefit. On this site, I'm all about the boring.
"only one correct answer" only to extent that if you wholeheartedly disagree with the University's policy you probably won't get hired. What that policy is might actually vary; there were [even] some openly pro-Trump colleges, but those would probably not be asking the "how" question. I mean your answer and paulj's are basically just saying "be a yes-man on this".
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?"
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.
We respond to this by downvoting. Also by upvoting the much better answers that there are to the question.
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.
And the reason for the downvote?
I didn't downvote, but I disagree with your take. "You should say what the interviewer wants to hear" seems to me an acceptable answer to the question.
Why do we all jump to the conclusion that the question is being asked because the OP has objections to the "diversity" issue? The question gives no indication that they know what a good answer sounds like, and every indication that is what they are asking. The answer to every question about interviews is "You should say what the interviewer wants to hear".
In the abstract, sure. The tough part is that usually you don't know what the interviewer wants to hear. In this case, though, the answer is known, and the penalty for answering wrong is the legal dept calling "risk!" and you not getting a job.
Why do you think the answer is known? I see people on this site jumping to the conclusion that the questioner is complaining about politics rather than actually wanting an answer to the question they asked.
@eykanal I would have no issue with the answer "You should say what the interviewer want's to hear." That's not how the answer is worded.
@eykanal -- have you been involved in such decisions, and can say that you know this happens? Can you point us to Inside Higher Ed articles that say it happens? Can you point us to a candidate that feels this happened to them?
@ScottSeidman - My comment on your answer addresses your points.
My take is that the implied undertone is "This is what you should say to get the job." (so it's an answer) followed by "You should consider whether you want the job when the question is asked".
Please upvote or downvote only on the merits of the answer itself, not on the credentials of its author.
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?
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.
This answer has attracted a significant number of rude/abusive flags (ironically, a similar situation to the post this meta question is discussing!). I've taken a stab at editing the answer to remove some of controversial language while trying to keep the spirit of the answer intact.
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.
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.
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.
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.
I'm sure for the same reason I'm willing to post answers to any question on this site... I've seen this same thing so many times that I'm comfortable stating it's a solid pattern by now. I have seen people get rejected for position on this basis, and I've seen people with comfortable jobs get fired for violating the spirit of the question. So yes... personally, I'm pretty confident that this "correct".
So, you've been in the room with a search committee, and you've heard "this is an absolutely outstanding candidate, except for that unfortunate answer to the diversity question, so we can't hire them"? If so, I stand corrected. I'm curious about the terminations you mention, and can sort of see that -- though usually as a result of public statements that counter a universities standards. I'm having a hard time figuring out if I put those in the same basket.
Your claim of credibility by virtue of experience probably belongs in your answer. It makes it seem less anecdotal
| Stack Exchange | 2025-03-21T12:54:48.549469 | 2020-01-30T13:50:09 | {
"license": "Creative Commons - Attribution Share-Alike - https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/",
"site": "academia.meta.stackexchange.com",
"url": "https://academia.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/4653",
"authors": [
"Andrew Grimm",
"Bryan Krause",
"DJClayworth",
"Dan Romik",
"Elizabeth Henning",
"Isaac Moses",
"Jim Raynor",
"MSalters",
"Martin Argerami",
"Massimo Ortolano",
"ObscureOwl",
"PLL",
"Scott Seidman",
"Sophie Swett",
"aquirdturtle",
"cag51",
"eykanal",
"got trolled too much this week",
"henning no longer feeds AI",
"https://academia.meta.stackexchange.com/users/1128",
"https://academia.meta.stackexchange.com/users/115975",
"https://academia.meta.stackexchange.com/users/1277",
"https://academia.meta.stackexchange.com/users/14493",
"https://academia.meta.stackexchange.com/users/14500",
"https://academia.meta.stackexchange.com/users/20058",
"https://academia.meta.stackexchange.com/users/20457",
"https://academia.meta.stackexchange.com/users/20869",
"https://academia.meta.stackexchange.com/users/27628",
"https://academia.meta.stackexchange.com/users/31917",
"https://academia.meta.stackexchange.com/users/3945",
"https://academia.meta.stackexchange.com/users/40589",
"https://academia.meta.stackexchange.com/users/43873",
"https://academia.meta.stackexchange.com/users/542",
"https://academia.meta.stackexchange.com/users/63475",
"https://academia.meta.stackexchange.com/users/66231",
"https://academia.meta.stackexchange.com/users/73",
"https://academia.meta.stackexchange.com/users/77539",
"https://academia.meta.stackexchange.com/users/79875",
"https://academia.meta.stackexchange.com/users/97962",
"shoover"
],
"all_licenses": [
"Creative Commons - Attribution Share-Alike - https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/"
],
"sort": "votes",
"include_comments": true
} |
1023 | Closing/migration criteria
There has been much discussion recently over when to to migrate questions away from the site. A while back, I found a question on meta.stackexchange which outlined the criteria one should use to make that decision. I can't find the question, but the process is as follows:
Is the question on-topic at your site? If yes, it should stay. (Whether it should be closed for other reasons is not relevant to migration.) If no...
Is the question on-topic at a different site? If yes, then...
Would the question be closed after migration? Some questions are on-topic but too broad, or poorly phrased, too detailed, or problematic for whatever reasons. Mods will generally handle this communication in the mod chat rooms, simply because posting a new question on meta anytime a potential migration comes up would quickly become unmanageable for both sites. This should be handled via flags, a mod will see the flag and we can ask the site whether they want it.
So, I'm proposing that we use this as our template for migration.
I realize that I went against the above guidelines myself recently, which is why I posted this; both as a reminder to myself and as a way of "officializing" these rules.
I hope that these guidelines are applicable across all SE network. It appears that they aren't.
Given this, I would add:
If there is reason* to suspect that the answer to 1. Is the question on-topic at your site? will be controversial, let the question be put on hold (and give a chance for OP to edit, high-rep users to vote to re-open, people to comment, etc.) before considering migration.
* For example, reasons might include: if the question has more than a couple of upvotes, if there is an answer with more than a couple of upvotes, if there is a healthy debate in the comments as to whether it's on topic, etc.
| Stack Exchange | 2025-03-21T12:54:48.551951 | 2014-05-20T14:23:31 | {
"license": "Creative Commons - Attribution Share-Alike - https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/",
"site": "academia.meta.stackexchange.com",
"url": "https://academia.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/1023",
"authors": [
"adipro",
"eykanal",
"https://academia.meta.stackexchange.com/users/10936",
"https://academia.meta.stackexchange.com/users/73"
],
"all_licenses": [
"Creative Commons - Attribution Share-Alike - https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/"
],
"sort": "votes",
"include_comments": true
} |
362 | merge [publications] and [papers] tags
We currently have two separate tags for publications and papers. As far as I can tell, they're identical; both discuss research articles. I propose to merge them, but just in case I'm missing some nuance, I wanted to bring it up here first.
Similarly: I found that the [tag:writing] and [tag:scientific-writing] tags are used interchangeably… I suggest we make them synonyms… if you agree, please go vote on that suggestion.
@F'x - Please post those as a separate post, and if no one objects, we can merge them manually. Mods have tools to set up tag aliases without requiring four votes (although you probably know that already :D )
@eykanal yeah, but I wanted to see if the community could gather enough votes for it… guess I'm not gonna hold my breath, though
@F'x - In a community this small, I doubt it. Even on the main SO site it can take months to get enough votes to set up a tag alias on some of the more obscure tags. It's just not something people look for.
I imagine that publications is broader than paper: a book chapter is a publication, it's not a paper. Probably, so is a popular science contribution (I've never heard those referred as “papers”, more like “pop sci articles”). Now, whether that difference is used in practice, I cannot say.
I can't say I've ever noticed people using the two tags differently.
A book is also a publication, not a paper.
I agree. I recommend that they be merged. They are 99% overlapping, and in practice seem to be used more or less interchangeable.
| Stack Exchange | 2025-03-21T12:54:48.552266 | 2013-01-25T17:45:12 | {
"license": "Creative Commons - Attribution Share-Alike - https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/",
"site": "academia.meta.stackexchange.com",
"url": "https://academia.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/362",
"authors": [
"F'x",
"JRN",
"eykanal",
"https://academia.meta.stackexchange.com/users/2700",
"https://academia.meta.stackexchange.com/users/64",
"https://academia.meta.stackexchange.com/users/73"
],
"all_licenses": [
"Creative Commons - Attribution Share-Alike - https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/"
],
"sort": "votes",
"include_comments": true
} |
178 | Third "excellent" on Area 51 - congratulations to all - nearly ready for graduation
Over on Area 51, this site has just achieved its third "Excellent" category, having just passed 150 users with a score of at least 200.
We just need to get questions per day up above 5 (currently 3.8, fortnightly median value), keep the number of answers up, and keep visits per day on a rising trend, and we should be ready to graduate out of beta.
(will self-delete as too localised, shortly)
No, keep this up... it's nice to point out when things are going well, and it'll look nice in the "community bulletin" box on the side :) Thanks to everyone who contributes to the site!
It's fun. Apparently I kickstarted something useful :)
| Stack Exchange | 2025-03-21T12:54:48.552521 | 2012-09-04T11:27:19 | {
"license": "Creative Commons - Attribution Share-Alike - https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/",
"site": "academia.meta.stackexchange.com",
"url": "https://academia.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/178",
"authors": [
"Konrad Rudolph",
"Stefano Borini",
"eykanal",
"https://academia.meta.stackexchange.com/users/348",
"https://academia.meta.stackexchange.com/users/349",
"https://academia.meta.stackexchange.com/users/5",
"https://academia.meta.stackexchange.com/users/73",
"syn1kk"
],
"all_licenses": [
"Creative Commons - Attribution Share-Alike - https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/"
],
"sort": "votes",
"include_comments": true
} |
104 | Are questions on pedagogy on topic?
There is currently an Educator proposal in Area 51 but it seems that a good portion of the work of many academics is teaching.
Is is appropriate to ask questions about pedagogy and student teaching/learning on this site?
One element of teaching is how to give a proper presentation. Elements of how to do so have previously also been discussed at TeX.SE.
Given the up votes to the question and eykanal's answer, should we edit the on topic page to clarify that pedagogy is on topic. I bring this up given how quickly we migrated away http://cogsci.stackexchange.com/questions/5395/what-impact-does-syntax-highlighting-have-on-students-progress-in-learning-a-ne as "off-topic".
@DanielE.Shub - Great idea, and I just noticed that I have the ability to modify the FAQ myself. I added a line to the FAQ, let me know what you think.
Good question, I would say that pedagogy questions relating to the following would be on-topic:
curriculum development for university courses
curriculum/textbook recommendations for university courses
techniques for presentation of material in university courses
graduate students asking whether a particular course would be helpful for their research
graduate students suggesting which courses to take as electives to help further their research
On a similar vein, the following would be off-topic:
anything related to non-university courses
students asking for help with specific courses
discipline issues
That's all I can think of, I'd love to see what others come up with.
That about sums my thoughts, too.
Why are discipline issues, as they arise in a college setting, off topic? EG: "I am teaching a 30 person calculus course, mostly freshman, which involves a lot of groupwork and discussion. I am glad that my students are eager to engage with each other, but I have trouble getting them to return attention to the board when I need to lecture again. How can I get them to make this transition more efficiently?" Seems on topic to me.
@DavidSpeyer - Without further context, that seems on-topic to me, but this comment thread is not the place for this discussion. Why don't you make a new meta post and include a link to any relevant question?
| Stack Exchange | 2025-03-21T12:54:48.552689 | 2012-04-04T13:41:49 | {
"license": "Creative Commons - Attribution Share-Alike - https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/",
"site": "academia.meta.stackexchange.com",
"url": "https://academia.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/104",
"authors": [
"David E Speyer",
"Lennart",
"StrongBad",
"aeismail",
"eykanal",
"gerrit",
"https://academia.meta.stackexchange.com/users/1033",
"https://academia.meta.stackexchange.com/users/1244",
"https://academia.meta.stackexchange.com/users/208",
"https://academia.meta.stackexchange.com/users/53",
"https://academia.meta.stackexchange.com/users/73",
"https://academia.meta.stackexchange.com/users/929"
],
"all_licenses": [
"Creative Commons - Attribution Share-Alike - https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/"
],
"sort": "votes",
"include_comments": true
} |
1950 | Should we create a site to help teachers with classroom technology?
Hello one and all academics. I'm Sam and I work at Stack Exchange Overflow. I come here before you because I'm not sure where else on the network to go! There isn't a Stack Exchange site for K-12 teachers, and I think they could benefit massively from one.
I think this because I live with a teacher and I see day and night how tirelessly she works. I see how little support from colleagues she receives. Unlike a lot of jobs (like mine), when she's in the heat of battle, she can't ask for reinforcements. Her job is so. damn. hard.
To make her job a little easier she's begun to implement Google Classroom at her school. After a couple weeks, it's showing promising returns. She's making fewer trips to the photocopier. Grading is easier. Students are engaging more.
But a lack of teacher-focused documentation almost led her not to adopt it. Outdated how-to's made implementation more difficult than it ever should have been.
This is a problem I think maybe we can solve, and that's why I created a site proposal:
Classroom Tech
I don't know if the site is scoped right. I don't know if it will work. A couple weeks ago I tweeted at a prominent Google Classroom advocate asking for her opinion. She said:
most T's don't use stacks.
I think maybe that's true because we don't have one yet. Curious what you think.
I think this would be better titled "Ed Tech" - that's a much more common term for this kind of thing.
You should also ask on Meta Math Educators.
Honestly, this proposal seems too narrow to me.
@Wrzlprmft good idea. Done.
@ff524 You're probably right, though I wonder if that term carries with it connotations that are intimidating to teachers who aren't tech savvy.
FWIW There exists a whole field called "Instructional Technology" that might be a better name. Teachers would make more mental links to that name than "Educational Technology", IMO.
My qualifications to answer this consist of two kids who just finished their second week of elementary school. So don't take me too seriously.
As StrongBad writes, we have had quite a few K-12 focused site proposals, none of which got off the ground. (If my kids' teachers are representative, I understand that. None of them are tech-affine.) So I'm very skeptical that a site that doesn't even focus on K-12 education as such, but a sub-aspect of K-12 education (namely, technology) would be viable.
I'd rather have a working K-12 education SE site which explicitly includes technology in its on-topic list.
Interesting. I wasn't familiar with the history of k-12 proposals in Area 51. Perhaps you're right about the too narrow scope. I really have no idea.
I think it could work. There is definitely a need for it. There is definitely enough teachers in the world. I think the issue is bringing in teachers t the network. There have been a couple of proposals over the years for both K-12 teaching, undergraduate education, and e-learning sites. They have all failed in the early stages of area 51.
I think a motivated individual who is willing to promote the proposal and knows how the system works, stands a chance of getting one off the ground.
+1 for "promote the proposal". Teachers aren't here, so they can't commit in area51, hence failure. This would require a lot of marketing, but it's a very good market to target; being cash-strapped, as educational institutions always are, they rely on internet a LOT these days. This could really be a big new market. Is there anyone in the SO Community Affairs team that would be willing to take this on?
@eykanal They can commit, just they are unaware of the system, so getting into it is more complicated for them.
@yo' I do not think eykanal mentioned it in a technical way, I think he mentioned exactly what you said. Part of this is the "commitment" phase is the second phase of an area 51 proposal.
Thanks for the input. Agreed 100% that this could use an evangelist. And to @eykanal's point, no, there isn't really anyone on the team whose roll currently fits this description. The lack of teachers on SE is definitely an interesting chicken & egg conundrum.
If we consider Moodle, Google Classrooms, or any other Learning Management System, I find it quite restrictive to target the site only for K-12 teachers, as these tools are also used in higher education by teachers that may not be tech-savvy.
On another aspect, if the objective of the proposal is to only provide help on how to use, implement or adapt said LMS, I feel like the questions better be directly asked to the support teams whose job is to actually answer these kinds of questions.
The problem you have identified is a very classical one in the field of technology-enhanced learning: teachers' acceptance of technologies. Just put this sentence in Google Scholar's search box and you will find plenty of studies. What some of these studies tell is that, basically, teachers will continue to use technologies that they perceive useful and easy to use. Since LMS are designed for educational purposes, I can only hope teachers find them useful. Improving the user experience is another issue though, and I am afraid we cannot do much about it on a website like StackExchange.
I think it would be far easier to have a teacher's mailing list. These probably accomplish 90% of what educators need, with half the technical challenges, and 10% of the work it takes to administer a complex site like SE.
| Stack Exchange | 2025-03-21T12:54:48.553465 | 2015-09-25T00:16:25 | {
"license": "Creative Commons - Attribution Share-Alike - https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/",
"site": "academia.meta.stackexchange.com",
"url": "https://academia.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/1950",
"authors": [
"StrongBad",
"TylerH",
"Wrzlprmft",
"alexwlchan",
"eykanal",
"ff524",
"https://academia.meta.stackexchange.com/users/10094",
"https://academia.meta.stackexchange.com/users/11365",
"https://academia.meta.stackexchange.com/users/12765",
"https://academia.meta.stackexchange.com/users/1471",
"https://academia.meta.stackexchange.com/users/254",
"https://academia.meta.stackexchange.com/users/73",
"https://academia.meta.stackexchange.com/users/7658",
"https://academia.meta.stackexchange.com/users/7734",
"https://academia.meta.stackexchange.com/users/929",
"samthebrand",
"xLeitix",
"yo'"
],
"all_licenses": [
"Creative Commons - Attribution Share-Alike - https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/"
],
"sort": "votes",
"include_comments": true
} |
92 | Why "avoid trivial, one-letter edits unless absolutely necessary"?
Why sholdn't the community welcome editing typos?
When I klick edit, a warning appears, asking me to "avoid trivial, one-letter edits unless absolutely necessary".
Is this to encourag the editor to come up with a non-trivial improvement, as long as they have the edit window open?
What is the preferred approch?
Would it be preferible to leave a comment? To flag the question? Ignore the typo?
Good question. The issue has been raised on the SO meta before, and the answers I can find are as follows:
There's no limit to nitpicking, and if the question is understandable, then tiny fixes don't add much other than to satisfy our grammar Nazi neuroses.
Editing the question bumps it back to the top of the page, which is discouraged.
When the question has been edited by 5+ people, it becomes Community Wiki, which (among other things) means no one earns any rep from the question.
as pointed out on in the comments on the SO meta question, such undesired side-effects of minor edits (bump, change to CW, etc., ), could be eliminated for minor edits (e.g. by having a check-box that says 'minor-edit')
@David - That definitely opens the door for abuse, but still, suggest it as a feature request on the main meta and see what people think.
| Stack Exchange | 2025-03-21T12:54:48.554165 | 2012-03-19T15:06:01 | {
"license": "Creative Commons - Attribution Share-Alike - https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/",
"site": "academia.meta.stackexchange.com",
"url": "https://academia.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/92",
"authors": [
"David LeBauer",
"Tony Boyles",
"eykanal",
"https://academia.meta.stackexchange.com/users/180",
"https://academia.meta.stackexchange.com/users/258",
"https://academia.meta.stackexchange.com/users/73"
],
"all_licenses": [
"Creative Commons - Attribution Share-Alike - https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/"
],
"sort": "votes",
"include_comments": true
} |
954 | Disambiguating reference-request tags
So I've embarked on something of a tag wiki editing project, and as I'm working through my list, I've hit reference-request. This appears to be used in two different cases, rather than just one:
Requests for citations, references or documents to support a question
Questions about asking a recommender for a letter of reference
These are clearly two very different types of questions. Thoughts on the best way to split the tag to make it more clear?
BTW: Good luck with tag wikis! :)
See http://meta.academia.stackexchange.com/questions/645/vote-on-tag-synonyms/678#678
Isn't there a less disruptive way for mods to do these retagging projects, so that old questions don't drive down new ones on the front page?
@ff524 No idea, but its done now.
@ff524 Mods can re-tag all question with a particular tag as something else without flooding the front page, but cannot (or at least I do not know how) mass re-tag a subset of a tag. Most sites try and do selective retagging slowly so as not to flood the front page.
On Stack Exchange sites reference-request has the first meaning. I think that it should have the same meaning on Academia.SE.
See:
https://mathoverflow.net/questions/tagged/reference-request
https://cs.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/reference-request
So for reference letters, why not reference-letters?
Seems reasonable to me. Once I'm back in a place with decent internet, I'll retag and label.
Or alternatively: [tag:recommendation-letters]?
As I have said before I agree that reference-request and references have split personalities and needs to be cleaned up. When I looked in the past the questions pretty cleanly fell into recommendation-letter and citations.
Despite the meaning of reference-request on other SE sites, I think we should either blacklist reference-request and references (which is pretty extreme or make them synonyms of either recommendation-letter and citations since it is ambiguous here. Being a synonym of citations would be more consistent with other SE sites, but I am not sure that is how we use it now. Maybe doing a count of the question before re tagging them would be useful to get a feel for how the tag is being used.
I think I'd be up for blacklisting - having retagged everything to date, it's a pretty heavy split, with most of the posts being more suitable for recommendation-letter. I added a definition as well, but as far as anyone reads it...
| Stack Exchange | 2025-03-21T12:54:48.554425 | 2014-05-07T14:38:21 | {
"license": "Creative Commons - Attribution Share-Alike - https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/",
"site": "academia.meta.stackexchange.com",
"url": "https://academia.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/954",
"authors": [
"Fomite",
"Piotr Migdal",
"StrongBad",
"ff524",
"https://academia.meta.stackexchange.com/users/11365",
"https://academia.meta.stackexchange.com/users/118",
"https://academia.meta.stackexchange.com/users/49",
"https://academia.meta.stackexchange.com/users/929"
],
"all_licenses": [
"Creative Commons - Attribution Share-Alike - https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/"
],
"sort": "votes",
"include_comments": true
} |
1093 | Time to Expressly Ban "I want to do X, Here's My Life Story..." questions?
Inspired by talking to a fellow Academia user at SciPy:
Every SE site seems to have a particular genre of questions that are essentially unanswerable. I've come to believe that the questions we get wherein someone asks, with an accompany tale of their career, coursework to date, interests, etc. "How do get into a top program in X" or "Should I apply to the University of Y".
There questions have, in my mind, three problems:
Many are too specific - they only generalize to someone specific.
They're also too broad, because they're not actually asking an actionable question.
They're inherently unanswerable. The people who know (the admission committee of University of X's Department of Y) won't answer, and no one else knows.
While these get closed fairly frequently, should we consider adding language discouraging these types of questions in the FAQ?
Unfortunately, no one reads the FAQ.
Care to suggest some language? We already discourage too specific, too broad, and unanswerable.
Related, and possibly a duplicate: http://meta.academia.stackexchange.com/questions/99/personal-advices-instead-of-general-questions-means-low-reusability
@StrongBad I'd edit the FAQ: "As a general rule, if you're asking about a particular institution, course, journal, or your chances of admission it's likely your question is too limited in scope." and cite that as the reason for closure.
I once contemplated whether our FAQ should have a statement that says that whenever you are tempted to include your life story in a question, it's probably going to be too localised.
It might be worth listing, say, 5 examples of questions that would fall under this ban, and make sure we all agree.
@eykanal I read the FAQ! In addition I'd like to state that this is a problem on many SE sites (especially Programmers.SE) as you stated; that said, this might be better off as a Meta.SE question perhaps? While it doesn't apply to all SE sites at the moment, there will likely be more questions like these in the future on different SE sites.
The fewer unique criteria and guidelines we have, the better, in my opinion, If questions can already be handled under existing rules, then I'd rather proceed that way, rather than introducing special categories. "Don't ask this, don't do that," is not a god way to run a site like this.
Besides, such an approach will lead to some potentially useful questions being placed on hold just because of the way the question writer approached it, rather than being a bad question.
some potentially useful questions being placed on hold just because of the way the question writer approached it - not necessarily a bad thing, if someone then goes and makes the question more generally useful.
There's no problem with badly-written good questions being put on hold. Indeed, that's the whole point of putting them on hold rather than deleting them!
I guess my beef comes from the "undergraduate" tag, which has seen some Pavlovian reactions. (As soon as undergraduate appears, some folks reflexively vote to close, even when the question isn't undergrad-specific.)
As a counterpoint to aeismail's statement "The fewer unique criteria and guidelines we have, the better", I would say that there are very good reasons for having somewhat redundant specific bans for common questions. The point of having rules in the first place is so that users, specifically new users, know what questions are in scope and which are not. The fact that we get so many of these questions clearly shows that new users are not able to tell that these questions are not in scope from the current rules.
I am very much in favor of adding a specific ban for this kind of question.
It may also be probable that rather than new users are not able to tell that these questions are not in scope from the current rules but that they don't read the rules in the first place.
@gman Sure, but isn't that sort of fatalistic? If we assume that people are not reading the rules anyway, then why discuss what they are?
Yes, we should discuss what rules are in place but if users don't read them then it's up to the community either to make a comment to the OP to read the rules or flag the question off topic. I actually agree there are too many of these questions as well. I also think the flagging tools already exist to deal with them. Of course if another flagging option was included for these type of questions it probably would be of benefit.
The problem with defining very specific bans is that it's very difficult to nail something down so well that it's easy to understand and apply it. There will always be a way to approach the ban so closely that it's hard to outright reject it, but it's still essentially the same type of question we are trying to avoid.
In general, where possible, it's better to define the community guidelines as principles that would also catch these problematic questions, rather than go down the path of writing a specific exclusion for each and every type of question we don't like.
Then, once the principles are defined, lead by example. Close these questions appropriately, add comments to teach others the principles that guide closing and encourage them to close such questions as well.
Over time the community will become aware of and accept that the principles cover certain types (or "smells" if you will) of questions and rather than having a hard line that you're constantly arguing with others about, you'll have a nice wide gray area that the community will define for you, and you shouldn't have to worry about it.
Great questions posed in this manner might succeed. Bad questions posed in this manner will generally be closed.
Everyone will be happy, and you won't be extending the battle over words for months and years, adding more and more language to the definition as you go along.
Teach them correct principles, and let them govern themselves.
When a user wants to do X and asks for help without giving life story, users automatically ask for details regarding the professional life as comments and the author edits the question and adds asked details. So it is essential for us users to read a life story or detailled paragraph to consider different aspects and give a good answer.
The part you refer to as life story of course can include unrelated information, however most of the time it also requires what potential answerers require to post useful advice. While the life story makes the question very specific, the key information in it (such as I am doing post doc, I am x years old, I have been an advisor for y years at z university z area) also makes the question also very general.
| Stack Exchange | 2025-03-21T12:54:48.554653 | 2014-07-08T22:57:06 | {
"license": "Creative Commons - Attribution Share-Alike - https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/",
"site": "academia.meta.stackexchange.com",
"url": "https://academia.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/1093",
"authors": [
"Chris Cirefice",
"David Ketcheson",
"David Richerby",
"Fomite",
"Peter Olson",
"StrongBad",
"aeismail",
"digitalsean",
"eykanal",
"ff524",
"gman",
"https://academia.meta.stackexchange.com/users/10094",
"https://academia.meta.stackexchange.com/users/10685",
"https://academia.meta.stackexchange.com/users/11365",
"https://academia.meta.stackexchange.com/users/118",
"https://academia.meta.stackexchange.com/users/12454",
"https://academia.meta.stackexchange.com/users/15360",
"https://academia.meta.stackexchange.com/users/4510",
"https://academia.meta.stackexchange.com/users/4534",
"https://academia.meta.stackexchange.com/users/53",
"https://academia.meta.stackexchange.com/users/73",
"https://academia.meta.stackexchange.com/users/81",
"https://academia.meta.stackexchange.com/users/929",
"xLeitix"
],
"all_licenses": [
"Creative Commons - Attribution Share-Alike - https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/"
],
"sort": "votes",
"include_comments": true
} |
Subsets and Splits
No community queries yet
The top public SQL queries from the community will appear here once available.