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3881 | Is a 'Kremlinology' tag too snarky?
First, a definition, from Wikipedia:
During the Cold War, lack of reliable information about the country
forced Western analysts to "read between the lines" and to use the
tiniest tidbits, such as the removal of portraits, the rearranging of
chairs, positions at the reviewing stand for parades in Red Square,
the choice of capital or small initial letters in phrases such as
"First Secretary", the arrangement of articles on the pages of the
party newspaper Pravda and other indirect signs to try to understand
what was happening in internal Soviet politics.
We get a lot of questions like this - trying to suss out what a professor is thinking based on a one-line email, or what being "With Editor" at a journal means after 7 days.
I've often thought it would be useful to be able to categorize these to help find duplicates, or mark them in the way many sites mark "Homework" questions, but it also feels a little snarky.
So I thought I'd pose the concept as a discussion.
Are there even any good questions that could be tagged with this?
We do get a lot of questions like this, but I would not be in favor of this as a tag concept.
This sounds like a meta tag - it's about the category of question, more than it is about the key topics in the question. Meta tags are discouraged on SE sites, and I think for good reason.
Also: Tags are most useful when it's easy to find them by name and figure out what they're for. We want to make it easy for new users to find the right tags to use on their posts, and for slightly more experienced users to know how to re-tag posts. But nobody comes here thinking, "I'm going to ask a question about reading between the lines"; they think, "I'm going to ask a question about the status message in a journal submission system". This tag seems a little too subtle to be really usable (except for the minority of very experienced users).
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917 | Migration paths for off-topic questions
Now that we're out of beta, will we get access to the full set of stackexchange sites for migrations ?
To give some insight into why this probably isn't needed (at least right now): we have very few migrations, and they are “all over the place”. Among 20 questions migrated (away from Academia) for the last 3 months, the most common target was CrossValidated, and it accounted for only 3 migrations. Then we have our own Meta site (2), then all other sites have had only one (successful) migration.
Not sure what power users get to see. I know moderators have the ability to migrate anywhere on SE.
Unless it is very obvious, each migration path is typically discussed separately. SE also requires in most cases that there is already a bit of a history of successful mod migrations to that specific site before enabling a path for community migrations.
So I'd start by looking at the migration statistics, I think only mods can see those, and see if there are any sites where a migration path might be useful. Then you can post a feature request and ask someone from SE to take a look at it.
I don't think this is planned. I know I put in a feature request for this a long time ago, but it was closed as status-declined. So, I'm thinking not.
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320 | Getting out of beta
Is there any sense of when we'll be able to leave beta ? I've been watching the stats, and while the number of questions/day bounces around the magic 5.0 mark, all the other markers seem quite strong (and the number of visits/day is steadily increasing).
A site graduates out of beta whenever The Powers That Be™ decide that the site is ready to graduate out of beta. Here's a good post from one of the other beta sites in which a Stack Exchange moderator described how the whole thing works. I will state, though, that increasing visibility, asking solid, relevant questions, providing thorough answers, and generally being highly involved in the site is exactly what we need to do, and (in my opinion) we're doing very well on those fronts. Keep up the good work!
On a related note, though, for what it's worth, there's really not that much of a practical difference between where we are and being out of beta. Graduated sites get a new paint job and elect their own mods (aeismail, Charles, and I are currently serving as Moderators Pro Tempore... you'll get to elect your own mods via public election when we graduate). Other than that, there's nothing magical about being out of beta that makes the site better or anything. Its still up to us—the community—to keep the material relevant and thorough and the participation high.
alas from long observation of various sites, the exact process/ threshholds by se mgt seems purposefully opaque/ vague/ somewhat subjective/ not fully connected to objective/ exact quantifiable metrics. ie basically a behind-the-scenes se mgt decision that is not entirely influenced by site activity/ use.
I'll answer to highlight some of the differences that there are between non-beta and beta sites. For starters, graduated sites can launch promotional operations and get some financial support from Stack Exchange for doing so, while it is much more restricted for sites still in beta. Second, graduated sites get more exposure (e.g., they are linked to in all SE page footers, which increase their search-engine ranking) than beta sites. Thirdly, the customized interface helps somewhat build a specific site identity… very popular sites can even hope for more of that (see how Gaming.SE became Arqade).
Finally, there is at least one drawback to graduating too early: rep levels for privileges are higher, which means upon graduation a lot of regulars will loose their mod-like powers (which can lead to more work for the mod team).
Regarding the timing, traffic still needs to improve (both in term of page views and question rate). It is growing quite slowly (check our stats), so we'll get there eventually. But organic growth is good, it gives the community time to create the best site possible.
So, while I hope Academia will soon graduate, I wouldn't hold my breath… but that's not a bad thing.
I don't really understand the difference between beta/not beta, but it seems to me that our questions per day is still on the low side. I think if we want to encourage repeat visits by people willing to answer questions, we need more questions. I also think we need to discuss delete/close/off topic issues a little more than we do (possibly in chat). Finally, the our tags still need a little work. I don't know if any of these things will directly lead to graduation, but I think they would help the site.
As for when, I am guessing on our beta birthday.
Regarding the "when" comment, that's almost certainly incorrect. See the other area51 sites currently in beta; many look similar to us, and they've been there for over two years. Really, I wouldn't worry about it; our site is doing pretty well, and the more we generate interest the better it will get.
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115 | Asking about a discussion on tenure system
I would love to ask a question on the tenure system that is in vogue in US. I see a few publications in Google, and also a few blog posts talking about the pros and cons of the system.
I wish to know the following:
Is the tenure system efficient as such?
Is it likely/probable/possible that it will get overhauled in the near/far future?
Why do we not have an annual incentive-based system (or something similar) instead of tenure?
Are there universities which have begun to do away with tenure already?
I am a bit doubtful if these questions are permissible or if they belong to community-wiki or if they belong at all. Most importantly I am afraid the answers may result in camps of people. Any idea how I should approach this? Thanks :)
PS: First post in meta, excuse me if I am not supposed to ask this here.
I suppose that you could frame the question as "Are there alternatives to the tenure system?" This would get most of the points you want across, without the potential for acrimony.
I somewhat agree with @EnergyNumbers; the questions, as you phrased them, are discussion questions, and are not suited to this forum. The first asks for pure opinion, the second asks for speculation, and the third asks for conjecture. The fourth is actually applicable, but I would suggest that a simple google search may be useful in providing an answer.
That being said, if you have a directed question about how the process works, or how to best pursue tenure, or questions about departmental handling of providing tenure, that would be applicable.
That's neat @eykanal. I wanted to have an idea about which is kosher and which is not and now this answer makes it clear.
I think that all of this discussion will fit in very well into most academic discussion forums. It's a discussion you're after, after all.
StackExchange is not a forum, and is not a place for discussion. It's a place for questions with factual objective answers.
Disagree. You can get factual, objective answers in a forum like Eng or mathSE, but in acadSE it has always been about people's viewpoints. What objective answers could one get for "Attending university as an adult freshman" or "What are the essential points that should be covered in a dissertation abstract?" ?
@bravo - Every stack exchange site has to define for itself what is "objective". In our case, providing anecdotal advice is a direct answer. You may get different advice from different people, but that's fine. Both questions ask a pointed, direct question that is able to be answered.
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152 | Is it fine to judge academia.SE by the same yardstick as that of others?
I've just been to the stats of travel.SE and I found their stats phenomenally better than ours. While 8 questions and 1800 visits per day is excellent, I do think that some part of this has to do with the objective of the site: academia is much more exclusive than travel; in other words, all academics can have travel queries at some point of time, but some or many travellers may never get academia-related queries.
This is the basis of my question: how sound is it to judge different SE sites based on the same set of criteria? Should A.SE shoot for the same targets as others?
btw this question has come up since the very beginning of area51 and the SE program. It's a lost cause to argue for different standards for different sites, because the SE admins believe that no matter what the site, there are self-sustaining levels of involvement that need to happen. They may not be entirely wrong on this.
On the other hand, academia.SE has much wider userbase than cogsci.SE or bio.SE... heck, it can have a potentially wider base than cstheory.SE and that made it out of beta. Since none of those sites were able to change the yardstick, I doubt academia.SE can do it.
@Suresh: It may be a lot cause, but that does not imply that we should not argue.
Fair enough. I guess I'm tired from the cstheory arguments. Also I do feel that 400+ visits per day is on the low side.
I suspect things will pick up significantly in about a month, when the (US) fall semester begins.
According to the SE "targets" A.SE is currently weak in questions per day (4.6/15) and visits per day (448/1500). I think we currently do not generate enough content to make people want to visit A.SE regularly. I would like to see a much greater number of questions per day. Three times as many, for a total of 15 questions per day, seems reasonable to me. So I think the target set by is for A.SE, independent of how other sites are judged.
I think in order to get to out target questions per day, our visits per day needs to increase. It wouldn't surprise me if this also needed to increase by a factor of 3 to get 3x as many questions. So again the SE target seems reasonable for A.SE.
Then there is the question of can we get to 15/1500. I think there are enough people in academia with on topic questions that we can.
We don't need 1500 visits and 15 questions per day to get out of beta. But we need to get out of the red zone and have a few green categories
I used to be a mod on another SE site whose stats were similar to those of Academia, if not a bit worse. It was also a rather "specialized" site. In private communication with Aarthi Devanathan, I was told not to worry much about the stats -- they understand that for more specialized sites, those standards are not necessarily the right ones to judge the health of a site.
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5345 | Why was my answer to how to evaluate journals deleted by one mod?
I left the following answer (mirror) to the question Asked to be part of Editorial Board. How to evaluate journal?:
If the journal is paywalled, I recommend to refuse so that you don't become one of the parasites that slow down research by sucking up funding and making research output inaccessible to all.
The answer was deleted by one mod. The mod's comment was:
Franck, please do not make self-promotional posts on Academia.SE to draw attention to your other posts. You aren't answering the question here which is about how to evaluate journals and respond to an invitation to an editorial board, you're just using this as an opportunity to complain about journal paywalls. There's a place for that, it's not here. Bryan Krause♦
I don't understand the comment, since I did answer the question "how to evaluate journals". My answer is "If the journal is paywalled, I recommend to refuse". Also, there are no rules against linking to one's question. It's a perfectly fine piece of advice to the OP, which would annually save billions of USD to the taxpayers if all of us follow it.
So why was my answer deleted by one mod?
I believe my comment was clear. Your answer is not specific to OP's situation, it does not address how to evaluate an unknown journal that has sent an invitation to participate in the editorial board. It does link tangentially to another post of yours that does not help answer this specific question.
@BryanKrause I believe my reply to your comment was clear: My answer is "If the journal is paywalled, I recommend to refuse". Why isn't that an answer in your mind?
It is not specific to OP's situation, it does not address how to evaluate an unknown journal that has sent an invitation to participate in the editorial board. You could post the very same answer to any post involving any interaction with a journal.
@BryanKrause It does address the OP's question on how to evaluate an unknown journal. My answer is: If it's paywalled, don't work for them. "You could post the very same answer to any post involving any interaction with a journal." no, it's specific to the case where the OP wonders if they should work for them.
You blatantly called academics that don't abandon pay-walled publications in favor of open source options "parasites". I'd hold that this is a direct violation of the "Be Nice" code of conduct.
@ScottSeidman I don't see any infractions to https://academia.stackexchange.com/conduct but I didn't read it very carefully and I can change "become one of the parasites" with "work for a one of the parasites" I thought the "Be Nice" code of conduct was to be nice between SE users, not toward behavior outside SE.
So, SE users uniformly share your fairly extreme views on open source publishing? There are no pay-journal editors here? No parasites to be seen?
@ScottSeidman it's neither personal nor specifically against SE users. But anyway I don't make the rules here, I get your point, I don't know what the SE policy is in that case. With Thai being said, the question here is about the deletion. If the deletion is due to the term I used, I'm ok to change it.
On top of what has been said, the question makes it clear that the asker is interested in reputation as recognised by academia in general – which judges paywalled journals differently than you, whether you like it or not. As always, this site is about how academia is, not how it should be.
@Wrzlprmft "the question makes it clear that the asker is interested in reputation as recognised by academia in general" exactly, that is why my response "If the journal is paywalled, I recommend to refuse" is an answer to the question. Many researchers are against paywalls, this is not at all an extreme, isolated opinion. Many researchers do not like that some other researchers are supporting paywalls. I'd like my answer to be undeleted so that the OP considers the aspect when evaluating the journal.
There is a huge difference between being against paywalls and seeing editorships for paywalled journals as disqualifying. Also, that is not the argument you were making. You did not write “you would be regarded as a parasite”; you wrote: “you would be a parasite”. (Please mind that changing this aspect won’t salvage your answer as many of the above problems persist.) As a sidenote, I consider your attitude pretty utopic: If editorship is relevant for one’s career, most academics don’t have the luxury to vote with their feet in this matter – they may only get this one chance.
@Wrzlprmft is the deletion due to the term I used?
@FranckDernoncourt: I didn’t say anything in that direction. (Although the term parasite is a problem as well.)
@Wrzlprmft ok so let's focus on the deletion. My answer addresses the OP's question on how to evaluate an unknown journal. My answer is: If it's paywalled, don't work for them." Therefore I don't understand why my answer got deleted. The entire research community doesn't have to agree with an answer.
@FranckDernoncourt: We are going in circles. I already addressed this in my first comment.
@Wrzlprmft I see. The entire research community doesn't have to agree with an answer, so I don't see my answer was deleted because some other researchers disagree with my answer.
Your sentence appears to be broken. Taking an educated guess: The question is not a vote on what users of this site think should be relevant criteria to evaluate a journal (and if it were, it should be closed as opinion-based). It’s about how to evaluate whether a new journal is reputable as seen by academia in general, with clear focus as to whether it’s predatory or otherwise scammy. Whether others agree with your answer is irrelevant here. An example for an answer that would only be wrong is: “Hiring committees tend to evaluate editorship of pay-to-view journals worse than no editorship.”
@Wrzlprmft No, the OP asked "More broadly, I am asking how to evaluate such offers [Asked to be part of Editorial Board], as I may be contacted again in the future by other publishers." My answer to the OP is that, amongst other criteria, they should look at whether the journal is paywalled. Sounds like a valid and reasonable answer to me.
Unless you ignore all context, I don’t see how that quoted sentence expands the scope of the question to all sorts of opinions about journals – and even if it did, the question would be too broad or opinionated for this site.
@Wrzlprmft what part of the context makes my answer irrelevant?
@FranckDernoncourt: I will not dissect the question for you. I already explained everything above.
@Wrzlprmft I have addressed all the concerns that you've raised above. My answer is not an isolated opinion, and it does answer OP's question "More broadly, I am asking how to evaluate such offers [Asked to be part of Editorial Board], as I may be contacted again in the future by other publishers.". And I have addressed the terminology issue. What other concerns do you have?
No, you have not (satisfyingly) addressed all my concerns. And if that’s how you understood this conversation, I don’t think there is any point in continuing it.
@Wrzlprmft which concern did I miss? Or which concern didn't I address satisfyingly? I can't read your mind. I am trying to make my arguments explicit and clear.
I'll summarize the answers that the question received in the comments on why the answer was deleted by one mod: 1) the answer is not specific to OP's situation 2) the answer's stance isn't shared broadly by the research community.
Relevant comments:
I believe my comment was clear. Your answer is not specific to OP's situation, it does not address how to evaluate an unknown journal that has sent an invitation to participate in the editorial board. It does link tangentially to another post of yours that does not help answer this specific question.
– Bryan Krause Aug 7 at 18:58
On top of what has been said, the question makes it clear that the asker is interested in reputation as recognised by academia in general – which judges paywalled journals differently than you, whether you like it or not. As always, this site is about how academia is, not how it should be. Wrzlprmft Aug 8 at 11:25
Downvoter: please let me know which argument i forgot, or how I could improve this answer otherwise.
You're missing the "be nice" violation, which seems important here too.
@jakebeal I asked "is the deletion due to the term I used?" but I didn't get a clear answer, so I have no ideas. I'd think that if 1 word is the issue, then write a comment and see if the author is ok to change before deleting the answer. I don't recall any answers being deleted for just 1 word without any comments first.
It's not about a single word. When I read your one-sentence answer in its entirety, I see something I'd expect to see from somebody looking to stir up drama on Twitter, not somebody providing a well-grounded answer on StackExchange. You might not have intended it that way, but that's how a number of people, including myself, appear to be perceiving it, and you might want to ask yourself why that is.
@jakebeal the "be nice" violation, if any, solely comes from the use of "parasites" imho. I don't see how the remaining "that slow down research by sucking up funding and making research output inaccessible to all" since it's a statement of fact (it is an obvious and well-documented consequence of paywalls. I even linked to supporting evidence).
You appear to be continuing to argue that your perception is correct, rather than reflecting on why others might have experienced your words differently.
@jakebeal I am not surprised that a few other researchers may dislike reading that sentence, given the amount of paper submissions that paywalls still receive, but I fail to see any violation to the be-nice policy. Which other term is the issue? "sucking up"? If so, I can replace it with a more neutral/formal term.
@FranckDernoncourt Perhaps your belief that everyone with a criticism of your answer is just a fan of paywalled journals is preventing you from understanding the actual criticism. I think jakebeal has made a great effort here to help you understand.
@BryanKrause I wrote "a few other researchers" and you claim that I think it's "everyone". Anyway, is there any violation to the be-nice policy? If not, is that a reason to delete the answer?
I explained the reasoning multiple times. You got it right in part A of this answer. Others have pointed out additional issues with the post.
@BryanKrause are the other issues a cause for deletion?
They were not the cause for deletion in this case, though it's certainly not helpful for a post when it has multiple issues.
I don't see what value there is in always pointing out "deleted by one mod" - it seems to imply some sort of rogue action, otherwise it is merely redundant. This is how the system works: if one mod clicks the "delete" button, the post is deleted. There is no way for more than one mod to delete a post, unless we each undelete it, then delete it again.
@BryanKrause But there is also a way for the non-mod users to delete an answer. Therefore, it's not redundant. And there is nothing implied.
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3249 | Should seemingly hard-to-answer questions be downvoted (and closed)?
I have posted a couple of questions on this website. Based on this small dataset, there seem to be a trend that hard-to-answer questions get downvoted, and even closed for some random reason (too broad, opinion-based, etc.). Even though from time to time there actually exists a good answer, which is hard to share when the question is closed or roomba-removed. Voters are free to do whatever, except serial serial voting, but I'd encourage genuine voters to think twice about whether they are downvoting/closing a question because it seems difficult or impossible to answer.
The down vote here is a reflection of meta voting where -1 means "no".
related: http://meta.academia.stackexchange.com/q/2209/10643
I am not sure if this answers your question in general, but it is related to the questions you tend to ask on the main site.
While I do not tend to down vote your questions,when reading your questions I often struggle with how they fit with our don't ask "policy":
You should only ask practical, answerable questions based on actual problems that you face.
While your questions tend to be practical and answerable, I don't always see how they could be about actual problems you face.
As a side note, I am not sure "actual problems" should be a requirement.
I think that “actual problems that you face” is copy-pasted on all SE without thinking too much about it, and the "problems that you face" is anyway not averrable.
@FranckDernoncourt the issue I see, and it is not a big issue to me but might be why people down vote your questions, is that I fail to see the problem that your questions are about. For example, I do not see why anyone needs to know how much it costs publishers to "process" books.
Ah, I see. I fail to understand why people would downvote on that basis, but you're probably right.
@FranckDernoncourt As somebody who thinks this rule (“actual problems that you face”) makes sense, let me explain myself. This rule aims at making sure that SE remains useful for readers, by preventing questions on purely rhetorical or philosophical topics or clearly unrealistic scenarios. In this light, I would say that most of your questions have been ok for me personally, but I am sure there were a few that I also downvoted. This would have been because they asked for "data on this and that" more than for a concrete, useful information.
@FranckDernoncourt To be concrete, a downvote is not a close vote. A close vote means that the question is out of scope or otherwise not well-formed and should be removed. A downvote may sometimes just mean that the question is likely not particularly interesting.
@xLeitix I guess dataset requests are a (large) subset of reference request. I typically use them to orient my opinions on some academic-related questions or decisions. Sometimes I post them on http://opendata.stackexchange.com/ when it's really data-heavy. Downvoting is not a close vote, but may cause the question to be automatically deleted (even if a question has a score of 0). That's my only issue with downvotes. I've had dozens of questions deleted because of that, so that's for sure an actual problem that I face :/ I can't even back them up on Quora anymore since they became Twitter.
The voting rules aren't very strict (as opposed to closing for example) but I don't think the fact that a question is hard to answer is a reason to down-vote. A question should "show research effort be useful and clear" to warrant an up-vote but it's also a matter of personal interests.
I don't think that the issue with the questions you mention is that they are "hard" but rather that they look very much like advertisement for your opinions and pet peeves* that you tried too hard to make look like questions.
My guess is that some users doubt that you genuinely think there are possible answers that would fit this site's format but rather hope for extended discussions in comments supporting your opinion.
Sometimes the click-bait works and you gather many votes, sometimes it's too obnoxious and the opinionated undertone triggers down-votes.
*Ok, so you dislike that some people pay to read articles. We get it.
Ps. Many of your other questions are fine in my opinion.
Thanks, I guess you're right, that could explain some/most downvotes. I do try to ask unbiased questions though, but in case I fail, you're most welcome to improve it, I'd appreciate it. When I am looking for references (using the reference request tag), I actually prefer not to get opinion-based comments or unreferenced answer, as it clutters the page. I try not to express my opinions on the education or research systems on this website, as I want to concentrate on facts. When debates start in comments, I don't participate, unless to add facts or to point a logical fault in a reasoning.
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4930 | Are questions about reach, target, and safety schools acceptable?
That was the intent of this question, which was closed (as a "duplicate"). Perhaps I did not make this intent clear enough, and I would welcome any suggestions in that direction. Assuming I succeed in that initial task...
Of course, college admissions, both graduate and undergrad, rely heavily on "soft" factors like the quality of research letters of recommendation. Even so, grades and test scores will help sort candidates into probable*, possible and unlikely candidates for different schools. Or different schools might fall into the category of reach, target, and safety for the same candidate. Would a properly asked question about a "first pass" evaluation be acceptable here?
I can see the question being closed for other reasons, but not as a "duplicate." The gist of the other question was, if you have "low end" credentials, how can you attract enough favor from admissions officers to compensate? My question was the opposite: Assuming that you have high end (or at least moderate) formal credentials how do you evaluate yourself against other high end candidates to estimate whether the schools you are applying to are reach or target schools?
*Here, "probable" would mean relatively probable. If your chances of being accepted to a particular school are about 25%, and that school accepts only 5% of candidates, I would consider you a "probable," even though less than 50-50.
I think you're missing the general point of the answer marked as duplicate, which is that the admissions process is based on a complex combination of factors that are judged by human beings by their own personal criteria, not a machine or formula. That makes it basically impossible for anyone to judge your chances in any situation unless perhaps your chance is zero.
Ultimately the probability that you are admitted is either zero or one, you find out when you apply.
The duplicate target also says "particularly for weak or borderline students" - that is, it's geared a bit towards that group because that's the common question that gets reposted here all the time, but not limited to those who are unsure they will be admitted to any graduate school at all. As you point out, a selective program will choose a mere fraction of applicants, and will reject many strong candidates. So, for that program, really everyone is a borderline applicant in some sense.
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622 | What's the official policy on URL shortners?
I was under the impression that URL shortners were either discouraged or outright banned. I recently edited a question to replace a bit.ly link with a direct link, and that edit suggestion was rejected. What is the official policy of this site for URL shortners? Certainly there's no need for them.
There is no official policy on shorteners, except that "Let me google that for you" links are banned. However, link shorteners are not recommended for use on SE sites, because of their somewhat ephemeral character.
Your edits should not have been rejected.
Besides the ephemeral character, some people may object to using link shorteners to track who clicks on links.
I was not aware of a specific policy. Links shortener are not a good idea in general, because they might be shorter-lived than their targets… however, there are cases where they are useful, including in comments (limited number of characters, and URLs length is included in the limit).
Regarding edit suggestions, remember that every edit bumps the post to the top of the front page, moving out some more recent content. Thus, minor edits to old questions are not always welcome (not saying that was the reason in your case, but it might have been).
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5419 | Why was this question mod hammered 7+ years after the fact?
This question was unilaterally deleted by a mod 7 years after it was asked. It was brought up over at MO meta as an example of a moderator (in this case me) not allowing a user to delete content. That was likely the motivating factor for deleting the question, but I don't see it meeting the standards for deletion, never mind mod deletion. I still stand by my actions then. I think everything is available to 10k+ users in the comments, but a quick recap might help:
OP asked a question about a sensitive topic (department chair being a jerk) from a throw away account. The question did not include any identifiable information or specifics. I thought it was a reasonable question, so I answered it. OP then vandalized the question in an attempt to delete it, I rolled the edit back, and OP vandalized it again. At that point I used my diamond mod powers to temporarily lock the post while the content dispute was resolved. Before locking the post, I suggested two courses of action (post disassociation and account deletion) to the OP that I thought were suitable since the post did not contain any identifying information and was from a throw away account. OP never really followed up except to complain once.
Ah, sorry, I actually wasn't aware of the history here. If I had been, I probably would have posted on meta -- or at least consulted with other mods -- before nuking it.
What happened here is that a user flagged this question (perhaps due to the MO discussion you linked, of which I was unaware), suggesting that it should be closed because the original poster had expressed "concerns about their safety" if the post was allowed to stay. I did not form a judgment on this claim either way.
Instead, I saw a question that was extremely off-topic and low quality -- it basically boils down to "I've mad about these 6 things, any advice?" Respectfully, I'm surprised you answered it at all. I also saw that it was 7+ years old, had few votes, and had caused a fair amount of drama. So, I thought that deleting the post was a reasonable thing to do. It's been long enough that the only answerer (you) won't even lose the rep (not that you will have a rep shortage anytime soon).
Given that this question apparently has historical significance, maybe this was the wrong call. But maybe not; this still feels like a low-quality question that has already caused way too many issues. I don't feel super strongly either way, will gladly take feedback if there is a consensus.
I feel/felt that by deleting it, it hid my actions, and the reasons for them, from people. While I don't think it is a great question, I wouldn't go so far as saying it is extremely off topic. Seeing you delete it made me question if I should have deleted it 7 years ago. Noting that I can currently see makes me think the question put OP at risk.
Yeah, I think your decision 7 years ago was fine. It is normally not our policy to delete questions that have answers, and 7 years ago there wasn't much reason to deviate from that policy. But at this point, I'd say the post has (even) less value than it did then, and it continues to generate flags, so let's err on the side of putting it out of its misery.
Moderation standards can evolve. I don't think it needed to be deleted but I think it's fine to leave as is
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273 | Why aren't more questions being asked?
Informally watching our stats on Area 51 leads me to the conclusion that our number of users and visits per day have increased faster than our questions per day. We use to be averaging a question per 100 visits and now we are averaging a question per 200 visits. I am concerned that we do not have enough questions to keep the interest of our new visitors. Should we as frequent users ask some general interest questions, by which I mean questions we had earlier in our careers and now know the answers to, to try and keep interest/visits high. Hopefully more questions would encourage new users to ask more questions.
Seems this has been resolved... =P
Before we jump to conclusions, do we have statistics about the rate of question generation on "graduated" sites?
It may be that we're getting a lot more "casual users," who just want answers to a particular question. When they find it, they don't need to ask it, because it's already there.
That said, if there are a few "low-lying fruit" questions, then we could certainly encourage them to be asked! Not quite sure of the best way to go about doing this, but I'm open to suggestions.
“Seeding” can happen very naturally, by the regulars simply asking more questions. It is good to ask questions, even hypothetical, that come to your mind or come up during lunch discussions with colleagues or friends. Even if you think you have an answer, even if it doesn't apply to you, as long as it fits the site (not overly broad, not too localized, etc.). I regularly do it (in fact, more than 25% of my posts are questions), here and on other SE sites, just like I would ask a colleague at coffee (“hey, I was wondering about …, maybe you know the answer or have an idea on that”).
Organic growth is healthy. All the statistics I've seen indicate that's what Academia.SE is experiencing, so we shouldn't worry overmuch.
Stats aren't bad and, AFAIK, they are going up (from time to time I check them).
The later is a think that SE admins care them most so I bet that we are not in danger. I really doubt if they care at all about views/question; but if there is a single parameter they want to be high, it's views :).
And personally, I think that the number of questions is not bad. Compare to other sites. Especially when subtracting piss-poor quality questions.
When it comes to seeding - why not? But it would rather generate more views, that (much) more questions :).
I would rather think about extending scope (e.g. also to a bit more localized questions).
If you look at some other far more popular beta sites, you'll see our question rate is pretty typical. Without having access to the stats, do note that as we get more popular (and as more questions are asked), more people will arrive here from google search results, see their answer, and then leave. That's not necessarily a bad thing at all. Hopefully they'll stay in the longer term, but I wouldn't be too worried.
This is a good time to put in another plug for advertising, though. If you're in a university, post flyers, tell students to use the site, ask the administration to send students here, install rootkits on students research computers to send them here instead of google, whatever works to generate more traffic.
I am not sure we want to compare ourselves to beta sites.
To answer your question Why aren't more questions being asked?
Obviously, people in the community around the Academia beta site rather think twice then ask a question that maybe down-voted or closed for some reason (too localize, too broad, off-topic, duplicate...). As eykanal and Piotr Migdal mentioned, it is typical for beta sites. The community around beta sites are more interested in the forum and StockExchange in general comparing to majority of non-beta sites visitors. "Beta" users will probably become users with +200 (500,1000,...) reputation in the future. These people generate content of higher quality but as we all know, it is very difficult to have both quality and quantity.
On the other hand, if you take a look at normal sites (non-beta), you can see very often people with 1 point of reputation, several times per day. These people are new (as I was once) and most likely did not know about StockExchange before. They do not care much about the community, they want they questions answered. Of course, their questions do not have high number of votes and are often closed, but, there is nothing wrong with that(!!). (this is a very nice discussion tree regarding duplicate question in stackoverflow; Academia will not suffer that much because there will be no question about programming and stuff.)
(one interesting from AL&U meta about a lot of closed and down-vote questions)
What I am trying to say is that if the Academia site is going to become a non-beta, sooner or later it is going to happened and we should not be surprised. Users are here to ask (and answer) and core users to moderate, to make the content as much valuable for others as possible.
With a little bit of humour we can say: When there will be more questions? When you will see a lot of them closed :D
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1159 | Custom close reason for questions that are not about academia
Maybe I am missing something, but we don't seem to have a close reason for questions that are wildly off topic. Do we need a custom close reason for questions that are clearly off topic here, which may or may not fit on another site. Maybe something like:
This question appears to be off-topic because it is about not about academia. It may fit on-topic at another site within the SE network, in which case please flag the question and suggest where you would like it to be migrated.
If I try to flag a post, I have the option “It is blatantly off-topic”. Is this not available via the regular vote-to-close options?
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1231 | Tags related to graduate admissions and the job search
We currently have a number of tags related to the graduate admissions and the job search. application, application-letter, cover-letter, faculty-application, graduate-admissions, job-search, statement-of-purpose. The tag wikis for postdocs and tenure-track also suggest they include aspects of the job search.
It seems reasonable to split questions about admissions into graduate school from searches for employment, but I am not sure where application falls into this mix. It is also not clear to me if subdividing the search for employment into categories is really needed, but it seems like we should do it somewhat consistently. I think we should at a minimum re-tag the relevant questions under postdocs and tenure-track as job-search or maybe even split job-search and faculty-application into postdoc-application, non-tenure-track-application, and tenure-track-application.
I am not sure how to handle application-letter, cover-letter, and statement-of-purpose. The statement-of-purpose tag seems popular enough that we probably want to keep it, but I am less convinced that the others are really needed (apart from being synonyms).
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352 | Being nice when closing questions
I think we need to be nicer when closing questions. I think of new people look at having their question closed as being a slap in the face and a real turn off for the site. The automated messages are informative, but not that nice. I don't think they suggest welcoming edits to improve the question. We have had a couple of recent questions be closed/edited/reopened very quickly and I think that is a good thing.
I think the last (generally the 5th unless you have mod powers) person who votes to close a question should post a "personal" comment. This should only get added when the question actually gets closed since the OP will not find out about close votes until the question is closed (unless they have enough rep, and then they presumably understand the process).
I would propose something like:
Your question was closed as a duplicate. A link is provided at the top of your question to the possible duplicate. If you don't think your question is really a duplicate, please edit your question to highlight the differences and then we can reopen it.
Obviously something different would be needed for localized and not constructive questions.
What do people think? Can we just change the automated text to be nicer?
This isn't a bad idea, but I think a discussion like this belongs on the main SE meta, as you're proposing a change to something site-wide. We don't really have the capability to do that only here. I'm moving this question there.
I'm re-opening this question. A discussion took place on the main SE meta, which raised some interesting points, but I think we can have different discussion here, more related to our own community (where scale is less of an issue).
As a very junior user of SE sites, I have found myself in the position of having questions closed on numerous occasions, without explanation or the chance to improve my question. All I'm left with is an impersonal and officious comment which does nothing to help me to understand why my question was closed or to help me improve future questions. I'm left with the feeling of having been cut out of a very cliquey community, unwelcoming towards new members.
A more friendly and helpful, personalised comment would be very welcome indeed. I just wish that more SE site communities recognised this!
Don't forget you can help out and provide some of those personal comments even if it wasn't you who voted to close.
I'm usually too late and the question is already closed when I see them, as I'm an infrequent user of SE sites, but I agree with your comment, Daniel.
Changing the automated text would be a tall order, as that would be done network-wide and the SE team is understandably resistant to such changes. Besides, there's something odd about trying to make an automated message have a personal touch. It means more coming from one of the actual close voters.
I'm a moderator on Physics and when I close questions there, I almost always leave a comment roughly of the form
Hi [username], and welcome to Physics Stack Exchange! This question is inappropriate for this site because [reason]. If you'd like to [make specific changes], I'll be happy to reopen it. See our [FAQ] for more information.
which I think helps at least some new users not to be too put off by the closure.
The problem, for me, is that this blurb also needs to include the line "please alert me that you made the change by writing @myusername in a comment after you make the change". Anything to get around this would be very welcome for me.
Oh, well of course you can tack that on at the end.
I think is an excellent idea. I find myself writing something like that very often (one example here, others exist on mostly deleted posts). Having that text show up automatically—particularly with instructions to message me (the closer) after editing—would save me a lot of typing. I'd rather people edit questions and become a regular then close the question forever and drive the questioner away.
I'd like to bring to everyone's attention the AutoReviewComments userscript, which I understand is exactly done for this purpose. It gives you (editable) templates for the most typical comments one can leave under new users' questions.
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3690 | Community countdown event for March for Science
The March for Science is an event/protest/rally being held on April 22 2017. The main march will occur in Washington DC, but there will likely be marches all over the world. There is an SE chat room dedicated to the march. As many of our community members are scientists and/or support science, I was wondering if we wanted a community event countdown to be shown on the main page. As the event is somewhat political in nature, I wanted to check with the community before creating an event. The countdown timer is not overbearing and is just a small item on the side bar.
Please do! I will ask around on Physics.SE to see how we can promote this event as well. =)
I've created a similar meta post on Physics.SE.
Maybe policy makers don't have access to pawalled papers. Or perhaps they get confused by the results.
@FranckDernoncourt is your comment related to my question, because I fail to see the link ...
@StrongBad The link is that many aspects need to be improved about science: this march is just one of many initiatives, and I don't think it deserves a particular highlights.
I don't think this warrants a community event countdown. That feature is intended for Academia.SE chat events, not just events of interest.
I think a regular community ad is a much better way to promote this kind of event.
I agree with her ^^
Of course, maybe it could be a chat event, if the community was interested in that...
Agreed. The presence of significant overlap between the members of two communities (Academia SE and Marchers for Science) doesn't make them the same thing. kim's chat event suggestion sounds like a cool idea, for those interested.
Yes, we should.
It is somewhat political in nature, but it has been endorsed by major organisations, such as the AAAS (which publishes Science magazine) and the American Geophysical Union (AGU), and the American Statistical Association (ASA):
Major U.S. science groups endorse March for Science, Feb. 23, 2017, Science, DOI:10.1126/science.aal0697.
I think later it will be visible in the news. I think in the current political atmosphere, a global march, with a main march in Washington D.C., on the Earth's Day, is obviously strongly political, despite that it is communicated mainly as apolitical. We will see that in the news. Be back at 4/23.
More funding for science means more money for scientific publishers. Maybe that's why publishers support the march (conveniently ignoring that publishers' paywalls probably don't help making science more accessible, which is supposed to be one of the main goals of the march).
The main issue I have with this march is that I don't understand to whom the protest is addressed. Going through marchforscience.com, it seems to be mostly geared toward governments, especially the newly elected US government, but when I read the Our Principles and Goals page of the march it looks to me that most of the issues being raised are caused by researchers themselves.
Science that serves the common good: Scientists work to build a better understanding of the world around us. Science is a process, not a product -- a tool of discovery that allows us to constantly expand and revise our knowledge of the universe. In doing so, science serves the interests of all humans, not just those in power. We must protect the rights of every person to engage with, learn from, and help shape science, free from manipulation by special interests.
How can every person engage with, learn from, and help shape science, given that most papers, code and data isn't freely publicly available? That's the responsibility of researchers.
OK for the "free from manipulation" part, thouh governments are just one of many entities that may try to manipulate researchers' results.
Cutting-edge science education: We support science education that teaches children and adults to think critically, ask questions, and evaluate truth based on the weight of evidence. Science is not a field that should be understood only by a small few -- every person, from every background, deserves an education that encourages scientific learning alongside the arts and humanities. Science works best when scientists come from diverse perspectives, and we must work to encourage and support a new generation of scientists that increasingly includes historically underrepresented groups.
The US government is not responsible for the insane tuition fees that the private universities charge in the US.
Open and honest science communication and inclusive public outreach: Gag rules on scientists in government and environmental organizations impede access to information that is a public right. Our tax dollars support this scientific research and withholding their results limits the public’s ability to learn from the important developments and discoveries that we have come to expect from our scientists. In addition, scientists often rely on the public to help identify new questions that need to be answered.
If researchers want to make the research funded by the taxpayers available to the taxpayers they should quit publishing in paywalled venues.
Evidence-based policy and regulations in the public interest
Science observes and asks questions about the world. Our understanding is constantly changing, presenting us with new questions and answers. Science gives us the ability to examine these questions, enabling us to craft improved policies and regulations that serve our best interests. Political decision-making that affects the lives of Americans and the world at large should make use of peer-reviewed evidence and scientific consensus, not personal whims and decrees.
OK.
Funding for scientific research and its applications:
De-funding and hiring freezes in the sciences are against any country’s best interests. We believe that the federal budget should reflect the powerful and vital role that science plays in supporting our democracy. We advocate federal funding in support of research, scientific hiring, and agency application of science to management. This funding cannot be limited to environmental and medical fields -- scientific support must be inclusive of diverse disciplines.
OK but keep in mind hundreds of millions wasted by researchers every year just to pay for paywalls, because researchers keep publishing in paywalled venues.
Humanize science: Science is first and foremost a human process -- it is conducted, applied, and supported by a diverse body of people. Scientific inquiry is not an abstract process that happens independent of culture and community. It is an enterprise carried out by people who seek to expand our knowledge of the world in the hope of building a better, more informed society.
Since the goals are redundant, I'll also repeat myself: if researchers want a "better, more informed society", they should make their research output (papers/code/data) freely and publicly available.
Partner with the public: We join together as scientists and supporters of science to embody the importance of partnerships formed between scientists and the broader community. Science works best when scientists share our findings with and engage the communities we serve in shaping, sharing, and participating in the research process. We also look to the public for inspiration about what new questions need to be asked about the world around us. The lines of communication must go in both directions. If scientists hope to discuss their work with the public, they must also listen to the public's thoughts and opinions on science and research. Progress can only be made by mutual respect.
I don't think the government's intervention is necessary here.
Advocate for open, inclusive, and accessible science: We strive to break down barriers in our own community. A career in science should be an option for anyone and everyone who is passionate about discovery. Likewise, the process and results of scientific inquiry should be open to all. Science can ably and accurately inform the decision-making of all people, from the choices we make as consumers to the policies we adopt through public debate. By bringing scientists to “teach-in” at the National Mall and in public spaces around the globe, we voice our support for science being freely available.
Again, the lack of openness is mostly an issue caused by researchers, not the governments.
Support scientists: We gather together to stand up for scientists, including those in public service. We pledge to speak up for them when they are silenced, to protect them when they are threatened and to provide them with support when they feel they can no longer serve their institutions. Scientists in both public and private sectors must be allowed to communicate their results freely, without misrepresentation or distortion and without the fear of retribution.
OK
Affirm science as a democratic value: Science is a vital feature of a working democracy, spurring innovation, critical thinking, increased understanding, and better, healthier lives for all people. By marching in Washington, DC and around the world, we take one of many steps to become more active in our communities and in democratic life. We hold our leaders -- both in science and in politics -- accountable to the highest standards of honesty, fairness, and integrity. We gather together to send a message: we will all work to ensure that the scientific community is making our democracy stronger.
OK. (finally they indicate that leaders in science - not just politics - are also responsible)
This really reads like a good example of whataboutism.
@Dirk Well I was just going through the goals of the march and trying to see who are responsible for each of them.
@Dirk, so who is the protest addressed to, then? The first two sentences of this answer are key, the rest of it is not. Great point, Franck; +1.
The US government is not responsible for the insane tuition fees that the private universities charge in the US It is because it subsidizes credit. When credit is artificially cheap, prices go up, c.f. subprime crisis.
Also I find particularly lame that you'd try to hijack a movement motivated by concerns of the American scientific community about a government that shows a staggering scientific illiteracy and a daunting penchant for obscurantism to advertise your pet publishing scheme.
@CapeCode The march for science organizers should state their goals more clearly on their website then. As it currently is, when I read the Our Principles and Goals page of the march it looks to me that most of the issues being raised are caused by researchers themselves (see my answer). As a result, it looks to me as an attempt to blame governments for issues that are actually caused by researchers. That is very misleading for the general public. As for my "pet publishing scheme", yes I believe that taxpayers should be able to access the output of publicly funded research (eg paper) for free
It's ludicrous and unsubstantiated to imply that the current hostility towards science expressed by the executive branch of the US government is a consequence of researchers publishing in "paywalled" venues. The hostility is due to conflicts between political opinions and personal interests with scientific evidence. Don't try to squeeze one of your endless rants into that issue.
@CapeCode I have never said it is a consequence of researchers publishing in "paywalled" venues. I think publishing in "paywalled" venues doesn't help scientific illiteracy amongst the general public though.
@FranckDernoncourt It would make an interesting question on the main site to ask whether quality open-access journals, such as the ones by EGU/Copernicus, have a higher readership and enhance scientific literacy among the general public, compared to closed-access ones; or whether both are anyway only being read by researchers with affiliations through which they would have access to both.
@gerrit Good idea: Are open access papers read by a larger readership than paywalled papers? Feel free to rephrase.
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3766 | Custom close reasons
Following on from this answer, I think a discussion of our custom close reasons would be helpful. We can currently only have 3 custom close reasons. If we want more we would have to ask/beg the SE team to create more for us. While it would be desirable to know the usage of the custom close reasons, usage data are unavailable.
The idea for each answer to have:
Proposed text of a custom close reason
A description of the kind of questions it would apply to
Some examples to demonstrate the need for this close reason
Links to any discussion threads on meta relevant to this close reason
usage data are unavailable – That’s not true anymore (see also the comment on the linked question). You and all other users with more than 10 k can see extensive usage statistics here.
Also, is there a reason you are suggesting to revive close reasons that have been overhauled years ago?
Finally, I am not sure what exactly you aim at with this question? Do you want to change our custom close reasons? If yes, then voting in this format is problematic as the ensemble is important and we have a clone problem. If you just want documentation, I think that individual FAQs per close reason are more useful.
Close Reason:
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.
Description of Questions:
Stealing from the previous discussion:
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".
These 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.
Example Questions:
Another student used my completed work, what should I do?
Previous Discussions:
Discussion of the need
Discussion of the text
Close Reason:
Questions about problems facing undergraduate students are off-topic unless they can also apply to graduate or post-graduate academicians as described in What topics can I ask about here?
Description of Questions:
Example Questions:
Previous Discussions:
I'd happily nuke this close reason because I think that it's been misused too many times.
Close Reason:
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?
Description of Questions:
Example Questions:
Previous Discussions:
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3820 | When the close reason is the answer
This question Can a non-committee-member ask questions while watching a friend's PhD defense? has been closed for depending on individual factors. While there is no question in my mind, and in fact my answer says, it depends on the department, I think this is an inappropriate use of the close reason. Unlike many of the questions closed for individual factors, this one seems useful to other people and is not really about the minutia of departmental policies, but really a fundamental question about how academia varies.
Should this question be reopened?
Questions closed for this reason mainly come in two categories:
The answer depends on a lot of individual factors. This is the typical “Decide my life for me” question.
The answer depends completely on a single factor.
The question in question would fall into the second category and I don’t see how it differs relevantly from other questions in this category.
To take an arbitrary example for comparison:
Do I have to take a seminar course?
There is little more to answer than: “It depends.” Answering questions with this gets annoying very quickly.
The close reason answers the question as good as we can.
The question is slightly helpful to others in the same situation, telling them whom they need to ask.
If somebody oblivious of academia’s inhomogeneity answers this question from personal experience, it’s misleading.
There is a plethora of similar, but not-exactly-duplicate questions that suffer from the same problem (e.g., you can ask one about every detail of the graduation ceremony).
The asker is probably not aware that academia differs in this aspect.
If there is a big difference anywhere, it’s in the last point, as in your example question, the asker cannot to be blamed for being naïve.
But then, we (and other SE sites) do from time to time close questions where the asker cannot be reasonably aware of the problem, for example too-broad questions where an outsider cannot reasonably expect that there are entire books covering the topic.
This is one of those cases, where I would advocate upvoting the question despite voting to close it – which also ensures that the question does not get automatically deleted and thus remains visible to future visitors.
Sidenote: The situation of many not-exactly-duplicate questions suggests canonical Q&As at first glance, but do we really want canonical questions where the answer is little more than “it depends”? Also, the number of such questions may be very high, considering the number of bullet points to Academia varies more than you think it does (and that’s not an exhaustive list).
I like your categories. I guess I see the first category as not having an answer, but the second category seems to have an answer that covers the extremes of the system and their pros and cons. A subtle rewording of many of the questions in the second category would, in my opinion, make them on topic. That said, making people jump through hoops when we know what they want seems silly. I think I need to dig a little to understand how many questions of the second category we get.
What subtle rewording do you have in mind?
"Is it typical for a non-committee-member to ask questions while watching a friend's PhD defense?" To me, these are the same question, but wording it this way seems less likely to get a close-for-individual-factors vote; we have lots of questions that have this wording or something like it. (not sure if @StrongBad was thinking along the same lines)
@BryanKrause your phrasing is better, but yes exactly that.
@BryanKrause: I don’t see how your proposed wording solves anything. The answer is still: “it depends” (I cannot remember a defence where this did not happen, while it is obviously atypical in contexts where only the committee can ask questions to begin with). Also, this is not about what questions are likely to get voted to close, but which questions cause problems and should be closed.
My reading of @StrongBad's argument is 2-fold: 1) that the "individual factors" close reason should be interpreted narrowly rather than broadly, and 2) that this is one of the types of questions that, although it does somewhat depend on individual factors, it does not depend so much on individual factors that one cannot give a strong answer; indeed, StrongBad's own answer to the question can be useful to anybody else in the same predicament, whereas the "what should I do with my life" sort of questions never are.
@BryanKrause: it does not depend so much on individual factors that one cannot give a strong answer – Unless you consider “it depends, ask those who know” a strong answer, I disagree. Looking at it again, I noticed that even some aspects of StrongBad’s answer do not generalise (see my comment there). And as for the close reason answering the question, I have no problem with this. Unless the question is deleted, it can still be found and help other people. I don’t see the point in having a bazillion questions where the only good answer is “it depends”.
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1988 | Are book reviews on topic?
On the subway to work today I saw someone reading a book about motherhood as a scientist that I thought looked interesting from the cover. While I can look at book reviews in lots of places, I was curious if book review type questions are on topic here? Book reviews are, to an extent, opinion, but in my mind are based on evidence from a critical reading of the book and therefore seem like an okay fit. I think there are numerous books that our community would like more information on.
I am not exactly sure what from a book review question would take. The way I am thinking about it is people would likely ask and answer their own question. Is it inappropriate to ask a question about a book and then provide a book review type answer?
(I'm not strong in my opinion, so if you don't mind, I'll only comment.) IMHO, while book reviews should be objective, they always carry personal opinion. Also, there is a lot of pressure for pushing advertisement into reviews, and I'm not quite sure you want this sort of force in this place. Note that reviews are in general off-topic on the SE network. The only general exception seems to be what you ask for direct comparison of two closely related products; this happens a lot for instance on [Photography.SE], as far as I know.
I think it would be inappropriate for a Q&A site, in the form you describe.
It basically violates every rule in the help center article on What Not to Ask. That's not to say we can't decide to break those rules, but I think we need a more compelling reason than "this is interesting and useful content" - I think it's worth breaking those rules only if "this is interesting and useful content that is helped by Q&A format."
I think this is a case where the SE format hurts, rather than helps.
This site isn't really suited to long-form writing.
The cornerstone of the SE model is voting. This works well, because we have a solid base of users with expertise on Academia, and we accept questions about Academia, so many of our users are qualified to vote on many of our questions and answers. On book reviews, only users who have read the book will be able to vote on the review in any meaningful way.
Honestly, I don't see really see a difference between allowing reviews of books, vs. allowing reviews of universities, journals, conferences, etc. (Those can also be based on evidence, but we specifically disallow those here as "shopping questions.") I definitely don't want to start allowing questions asking for reviews of universities, journals, conferences, etc., for all the reasons discussed in previous meta posts on this subject.
We don't really have a good mechanism for shutting down opinion-based answers. All we can do is shut down questions that are likely to lead to opinion-based answers. I think that book review questions are likely to lead to opinion-based answers (even if it's possible to write an evidence-based answer as well).
This kind of content is better suited for a blog format. We've already seen the negative side of users trying to use this site as a platform for their opinions and ideas. I do not want to invite more of that.
Having said that, if this community wants an Academia.SE blog for book reviews and related non-Q&A content, presumably it could happen.
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4516 | Big list question for reference managers
This recent question on reference managers and note taking has got me thinking again. I am on the record of not liking big-list questions and really not liking big-list software questions. Questions about reference managers seem to keep coming up.
Do we want a big-list type question similar to this LaTeX editors question and if so, what do we want the answers to look like?
I'd support this. One question is whether we want to permit judgements or comparisons, or whether we simply want a list. Relately, should it be a list in a single answer, or do we go for one solution per answer to allow for voting?
Several times I've found big-list questions very useful, and I don't think there are enough sound reasons to ban them (whatever SE says).
For the format, community wiki and the shorter, the better: the relevant link, and a short description of what one likes about the product. Please, please let's not ask an essay for every suggestion.
+1 for wiki and short'n'sweet.
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4622 | A request for SE employees and CMs
I am taking my mod hat off for a moment and am asking this question as a regular user. This question does not necessarily reflect the opinions of the other moderators or other users of Academia.SE as I have not asked anyone their opinions.
As some of you are aware SE has caused quite a debacle over the past few months. This question turned into a focus on SE's removal of a moderator, but peripherally mentions the previous changes regarding the licensing of OUR content and the inclusion of ads on the sites. It has finally grown to the point where SE employees are removing community ads and non-offensive content from user profiles and blaming it on their lawyers.
I ran as a moderator saying that
My personal opinion is that the community opinion rules, so it will be difficult for me to be in disagreement with the community. I like to think that the SE policy is that the community opinion rules. If the community opinion is so against the SE opinion, the SE team has moderators who can handle it. If the SE team really pisses our community off, I would go to bat for our community in private (e.g., in the mod only teacher's lounge) and in our public chat and meta.
I believe that the most recent actions of deleting dissenting opinions has violated that trust I put into SE. The purpose of this question is to politely request that CMs and SE employees stay the hell out of our community. Please do not edit user profiles, remove community ads, delete content, or anything else. As a moderator, I am aware that sometimes your tools can be very valuable in helping us deal with issues. I am willing to give that all up if you will leave us alone. Your actions, inactions and general ineptitude have led to your contributions having a net negative effect and I do not consider you welcome in our community any longer.
[Reluctantly, puts my mod hat back on]
Personally, what I find more seriously worrying is the lack of accountability in all this process: if you, a moderator, had not told me, I would probably not have noticed that a lot of controversial content has been deleted. Moderator actions and deleted questions are essentially invisible to the community, and in my view that is wrong and very open to abuse.
@FedericoPoloni I agree. The lack of a big sign announcing the change from CC 3.x to CC 4.x and the lack of a sign about the changes to the CoC is pretty insulting.
"removing community ads and non-offensive content from user profiles and blaming it on their lawyers." Surely the lawyers did tell them to do that.
https://law.stackexchange.com/questions/46492/can-a-website-incur-liability-for-linking-to-a-funding-campaign-for-a-lawsuit-ag
@AnonymousPhysicist lawyers explain risks, they don't make you do things. My interpretation of the answer on the law question is that SE needs to do what is best for its shareholders. We did it to maximize profits doesn't sound as good as the lawyers made made us do it.
"SE needs to do what is best for its shareholders" I am bewildered that you expect them to do anything but that.
@AnonymousPhysicist I don't expect them to do anything but that. I just wish they would have been honest and not say the lawyers made them do it.
@Heutlhe no. We need diamond mods. What I am saying is I no longer think SE employees value the same things we do and the drawbacks of the policies they are putting forward and enforcing out weigh the good their enhanced powers provide.
Do you actually expect a request to keep staff out of their own platform to work?
What makes you think your belief reflects the one of the majority of the community? Meta is only a small percentage of the community itself and tends to have the "hive mind" mentality.
@IEatBagels I am definitely not sure I am in the majority and if I had to guess would say I am in the minority. As I stated at the beginning of this question, I am only speaking for myself. I am fully open to answers telling me why I am being silly and over reacting. I am also open to answers/discussion about why I am not going far enough.
I'm making a full answer out of a comment I made. I'd like to preface this by saying that Stack Exchange Inc. dropped all of the balls where firing Monica is concerned, and certain SE employees are due a less than stellar performance review. I intend to focus entirely on the request that the CM's refrain from removing certain community content.
That said, unless I'm further out of the loop than I thought, the censored content is not so much dissenting opinion as it is directly soliciting funds to sue Stack Exchange Inc. It's the job of the legal department to advise SE inc. to keep such content off the sites, and with a credible threat of a lawsuit on the table, it would be bloody stupid for the company to disregard their lawyers' advice. Too bad they couldn't start making reasonable decisions earlier in L'Affaire Cellio.
So, in this one case, this really is their house and if you don't like their rules it's you that needs to go away.
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4165 | Follow on to the lingerie–elevator question
The original question about the lingerie joke made in an elevator was controversial leading to a lively meta discussion. The consensus appeared to be to ask a new, but related, question on issue. This has been done but the initial reception has not been positive. What is wrong with the new question and what can be improved?
Looks like a little bit of time has been sufficient to rescue it... for now at least. :-)
@jakebeal it already has 4 down votes compared to the first question which only ended up with a total of 5 down votes. People tend not to down vote.
Having just read the new question, there are two things about it that currently bother me/signal a poorly-formed question.
(1) The double negatives in the title. "How can I avoid being intolerant and unsupportive ...?". This has the flavor that something is getting bent or overworked in an attempt to take something trashy and make it marginally acceptable. Imagine if the title instead was, "How can I be tolerant and supportive ... ?" That's shorter, clearer, more direct, and doesn't have the "odor" of some ulterior motive being masked. It's also a totally different question, of course.
(2) The line after the quote about the OP's deep-seated fears, "As a male member of academe, I am worried. I feel bewildered and fear that I might also offend someone some day." That seems ridiculous; it's hard to imagine someone so oblivious as to be terrorized at not understanding that mentioning ladies' underwear is a faux pas; or that some amount decorum must essentially be practiced. Rather, this has the scent of a propagandist. I don't think this line adds anything to the question.
I'm not so sure that he may be oblivious necessarily but more that inadvertently a bad joke might slip out and he's worried his career might be ruined too. Women do make bad sexual jokes like this too you know right? Have you never made a bad joke before that you regretted? The difference is the woman he offended didn't handle this situation maturely. She should have confronted him personally and he would probably have said I'm sorry. Instead she was trying to go after his job which was stupid over something that obviously didn't have the intent to be offensive.
@LateralTerminal It may be news to you that things that are obvious to you are not obvious to everyone. Besides "didn't have the intent to be offensive" does not mean "was not offensive." || After someone makes a demeaning, sexualized comment to you, I think it is fair to immediately involve a third party. Who knows how they'd react in private? || Third, their professional organization has no power over the rude professor's job.
@AzorAhai 1. I never said the joke wasn't offensive. 2&3. How he'd act in private are you serious? Maybe if he would have said "I'd love to see you in women's lingerie" But he didn't say anything offensive to her directly. He just made a slightly taboo joke that wasn't funny and honestly not appropriate. It was something he shouldn't have said obviously but overall not a big deal at all. She could have said, "Hey I find that a bit offensive" He would most likely say "Oh I'm sorry it was a bad old man joke at my expense" There was no reason at all to involve a 3rd party.
@LateralTerminal I never said the joke wasn't offensive. ... But he didn't say anything offensive to her directly. Please explain how these two statements are congruous. || What is the point of having codes of conduct if violations of them are not reasons to involve the committee?
@AzorAhai The joke is offensive because it's taboo. It's inappropriate among strangers. He didn't say anything offensive to her directly because he never specifically said anything bad about her or bad about women specifically. It was just an old elevator pun. The point of codes of conduct are to resolve real issues plaguing men, women, and race. Real issues are actual mean statements against people like "I'd love to see you in the lingerie department" not "lingerie department please" Again his statement was offensive but not grounds to involve a committee followed by an unequivocal apology
@LateralTerminal One would think a culture that allows men to make demeaning jokes about women to women would be a real issue.
@AzorAhai Yes I agree. I also agree that it could be interpreted that he would be a pervert for wanting to go to the women's lingerie department. But it's also painfully obvious that he never intended the joke to sound that way. That leads to my point that "OP's deep seated fears" may or not be legit.
@LateralTerminal Did not intended the joke to sound demeaning != not demeaning. I think I said that already? We're going in circles here, I'll leave you to it.
@AzorAhai Well that's where I'd argue that it's not really clear at all that it's demeaning. That's just how you personally interpreted it. Technically anything can be offensive if you say it's your opinion that it's offensive.
Regarding the close-vote due to the question being allegedly off-topic, because it better fits in the workplace or interpersonal skills: If I member correctly, our policy is that relevance on another site does not imply irrelevance on this site. I've voted to reopen.
That is my understanding also. There is overlap between the sites and just because it can go someplace else doesn't mean it has to. Also, at least for the original version, it was clear the other sites did not want it.
I'm happy about the efforts to rescue the essence of the question.
However, I felt that the question needed some sharpening of focus. I'll explain here what my thinking was in the edits I've proposed.
The quote from the linked article showed that this was a gender issue -- yet the title and the tags were a whitewash. So I proposed an edit to the title.
I also added two additional paragraphs from the cited article, so that readers will understand that Prof. X didn't just make an insensitive, silly "joke" in the elevator -- in fact, he dug himself in deeper by emailing the complainant and calling the complaint "frivolous." It will be easier to explain to the original OP (and people in his shoes) what was wrong with Prof. X's actions, and how to avoid doing something similar, if this information is included.
And I made the asker's gender explicit.
I think the question would have been improved if it removed the citation of the original article to keep focused.
Instead, the answers seem to be based on a reading of that article, and so the intended refocusing of the question has been lost. For example, the question says nothing about the process of apologizing nor about the way Prof Y responded, and the answers and discussion in the comments has become largely a discussion about those topics.
However, I am wary to suggest an edit to the question at this point since it already has several answers and a lot of attention.
The context of the response is necessary to answer the question since the "problem" the asker is trying to avoid was largely caused by the response, not the initial action described in the question. A response based solely on the question would likely be a strawman since it is missing necessary information.
@Barker That wasn't how the amended question was originally asked.
Sure, but the question was basically "How do farms burn cows for electricity?" and the answer is they don't, they capture methane from the cows and burn that. If you are saying we can't bring in the external information of the methane capture, then we can't answer the question. Similarly, if we can't address what the guy actually got in trouble for the answers won't be any more relevant than speculations on the combustion of cows.
I was initially skeptical that edits could address my concerns about the original question: not specific to academia, bad subjective (all answers equally valid, no problem to be solved, and rant like), too broad, and likely to lead to tangential discussion. I was surprise and think the new questions addresses all of my concerns.
Academics blur the lines between professional and social interactions. Further some academics are hypersensitive to issues of harassment while others are socially oblivious. The actions we can/should take are sufficiently different from the actions that should be taken in other workplaces that it seems reasonable to ask here.
By asking for actions that can be taken, not all answers will be equally valid. Some actions will be more effective and others will be easier to implement. There is clearly a problem with harassment in academia and hence knowing how to avoid it is important. The question does not imply that the behavior is not offensive and does not seem like a rant in disguise.
While the question is still broad, it is clearly a topic some members of the community wish to tackle. Any discussion that arises from the question and answers seems like it will lead to better answers as opposed to simply disagreements.
It seems like some of the issues with the response to the original question have persisted nonetheless.
The original question was fine.
People just didn't like it because it looked like the original question was invented just to get rep on the site. I'm honestly not sure. OP could have been a troll but we can't know that. The original question could have been the legitimate fears of someone.
The new question is just bad because it's a totally different question!
The original question asks this:
Help me understand why this is offensive?
The new question is mostly heavy pandering. The new question asks this:
How do I not accidentally say something offensive?
Both questions are not great but the new question is awful and removes all intent of the original question.
lingerie–elevator question is exculisivly a gender issue question.
It is a perpetual struggle of females in academia to be taken seriously.
Lack of female moderators and female members of academia SE, made the question about something else.
This, as I suppose, is coming from the male members. Most of the people here feel irresponsible to female struggle in academia, they fail to recognize assaults that are sex-based.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=13&v=h3Yrhv33Zb8
Why men cannot recognize their fault and appologize?
Poor questions and mismanagement are not the result of a lack of female moderators.
The question was made about something else because the original question was not a good fit, but the community thought there was a piece of the question that was/is a good fit. Apart from bringing it to the attention of the community and cleaning up comments, we didn't really moderate much. Finally we have a woman on the moderation team.
@StrongBad when willl be plural and not singular!
@SSimon probably not for a long time since elections are not held on a regular basis and as far as I know no women ran in the last election. Then again, as far as I know we have elected every woman that has ever run. I am not really sure where this is going as clearly woman are underrepresented at academia.se.
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3627 | Is there something more radical than "protecting" a question?
As you probably have noticed, the question What to do with a student coming to class in revealing clothing, to the degree that it disrupts the teaching environment? has attracted 16k views and 19 answers.
I don't believe there is really 19 different things the OP can do in this situation. Actually I believe there's three: tell her to stop, tell the other students to control their hormones, and tell his higher-ups to take the matter off him. Yet, new answers keep flowing in. At this point, I believe that most of the new answerers just want to chip in and tell the world their opinion but they haven't even read what the other people have written.
Given that the question is already protected, and we cannot close it because it is on-topic (and it's actually a good question for Academia.SE), what else can we do to stop the flow? Is there a "second level of protection", or something more radical that we can do to stop the flow of answers? Or maybe the SE philosophy is "let them answer and downvote them"?
Let them answer, and downvote them. :)
Comments are not for extended discussion; this conversation has been moved to chat.
The next level would be to lock the question but this seems extreme. The real problem in my opinion is that the question is on the hot networkquestion list. We need better control of that. I proposed Allow mods or gold tag badge holders to prevent question from being on hot network questions list
Also this proposal.
A possibility would be to temporarily lock the question, say for a couple of days. That would let the heat die down but wouldn't prevent new answers for ever. (OTOH, there's still the risk that somebody answering in a month's time and bumping the question would get enough attention to put it back on the HNQ list, so I agree that better control of HNQ seems to be the only long-term solution.)
Does anyone know of any research on how many (or if any) of people attracted to a site due to a HNQ stay and become a productive, or at least not destructive, member? I've certainly joined sites after seeing an interesting HNQ.
@mkennedy see http://meta.academia.stackexchange.com/questions/3582/has-academia-being-featured-in-hot-network-questions-improved-the-community
@StrongBad Thank you! Too bad we can't search for the association bonus, then check what the user was doing just before that, AKA were they looking at a HNQ.
Agree a lot of this is a product of hot network question. I only come here on
I sometimes leave this comment on answers that don't add anything new:
It's not clear what this adds over existing answers that suggest the same approach, such as [link to answer that suggests same approach]; can you edit to clarify? On Academia.SE, we are generally looking for answers that offer a "fresh take": see What are we generally looking for in answers?
It's not exactly "something more radical", but it at least helps inform such users about our expectations.
Is it okay for a non-moderator to comment in this way? Or should one flag to request that a moderator write such a comment?
@aparente001 The diamond moderators are here to deal with things the community can't see or don't have the same ability to act on - if you flag for a moderator to do something you could have done yourself, it's likely to be declined with the reason "Flags should only be used to make moderators aware of content that requires their intervention". TL;DR - don't flag for a moderator to write a comment when you can write one yourself.
Okay, I gather it would not be presumptuous for a garden variety community member to make such a comment. If I understood correctly.
@aparente001 That is correct.
It is true that most of the answers are just emotional responses, but locking the question might deny probable legitimate answers to be posted in the future. @gnometorule seems to have a good trivial suggestion for this matter; downvote answers you feel that are bad and move on.
Also, I feel that your comment under the question is a good solution already: telling them to check all answer posts before attempting to post another answer. It helps people think twice before posting an answer (It sure prevented me from posting an answer).
My thought about this would be to have an option called 'duplicate answer vote', but not sure how well that would work out.
Interesting idea. I wonder, could we flag as duplicate, as a variant of not-an-answer?
@aparente001 Maybe, but not in this case. Many of the answers posted for the referred question are quite good answers that seem to address the question although very much similar.
A moderator or garden variety good Samaritan with foresight and courage could have edited "revealing" out of the title. I think that word caught the eye and kapow, the views started to climb and then skyrocketed.
Easy for me to think of this now....
Edit:
I will be more specific. Example:
What to do with a student coming to class in distracting outfit, to the degree that it disrupts the teaching environment? h
That's a rather important part of the question... While it's good to make a title less clickbait-y (and I actually edited the first version of this question to do that), it should still include the details necessary to understand what the question is about!
So, then the title would say the problem is that a student is coming to class in clothing, and this is disruptive? And somehow it would be less disruptive if they came to class without clothing?
You could edit the title to say, "(Sorry, no pictures; don't bother clicking through from HNQ.)" ;) Kidding but you're right; there's a definite element of clickbait in the title.
@NateEldredge - See edited answer.
Well, I think that makes the question a bit different. There are many other ways an outfit could be distracting (bright colors, noisy jingling metal, controversial slogans, generally outlandish, etc) that should, I think, be addressed differently than one that is distracting specifically because it's revealing. The question could be broadened to cover all clothing-related issues, but risks losing track of the question the OP actually has.
@NateEldredge - The text of the question can include the specifics of the outfit. What I'm suggesting is that the question be edited to be slightly vaguer and broader, but which still fits the meat of the question. In other words, a title that will cause less of a sensation. // Note, I can imagine some non-revealing outfits that could fit the question as well. For example, someone who shows up to class in a high neckline, long skirt and long sleeves, but with sequins and glitter, might still make some folks uncomfortable.
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2108 | More options for low quality posts
As I have recently passed the 10k reputation threshold, Stack Exchange is now asking me for more moderation work, including handling low quality posts. The interface for this task seems inadequate to me.
When a low-quality post is reported, I have only four options: Looks ok, Edit, Recommend deletion, and Skip.
What is the effect of Recommend Deletion? Does the post get deleted immediately, or does it get passed to a "lozenge" moderator? How many such recommendations are needed? Documentation and contextual help is lacking.
What if I want to flag the post as "should be a comment", for instance? The moderation page contains a copy of the answer, but the "flag" link isn't there. I need to navigate to a different page, with at least four clicks, to recommend that a low-quality answer should be a comment. This seems bad UI for a reasonably common task.
Are the (allegedly) low-quality posts that I see in the moderation queue determined automatically, or based on some user flagging them? If it's the latter, I think that the interface should tell me who flagged it.
My guess is this has been covered on the main meta. I will try and take a look later.
Here is an intensive FAQ on reviewing on Meta SE. Do not trust on the documentation in the review interface or what’s written on the buttons, it’s misleading.
As the linked post does a good job of explaining things, I will keep my answers to your individual points brief:
What is the effect of Recommend Deletion? Does the post get deleted immediately, or does it get passed to a "lozenge" moderator? How many such recommendations are needed?
If six users with less than 20 k recommend deletion, the post gets immediately deleted. Users with more than 20 k count double.
What if I want to flag the post as "should be a comment", for instance? The moderation page contains a copy of the answer, but the "flag" link isn't there. I need to navigate to a different page, with at least four clicks, to recommend that a low-quality answer should be a comment.
The canned comments you can select when you “recommend deletion” are just that: comments. They do not have any further effect. If you think that an answer should be a comment, flag it for moderator attention.
Having a flag button in the low-quality queue has already been requested here.
Are the (allegedly) low-quality posts that I see in the moderation queue determined automatically, or based on some user flagging them?
Both. In that queue you get automatically identified posts (this is also called a flag) as well as posts which have been flagged as not an answer or very low quality.
As I have recently passed the 10k reputation threshold, Stack Exchange is now asking me for more moderation work, including handling low quality posts.
As a sidenote: The only thing that changed when you obtained 10 k reputation in this respect is that you now get an alert in the top bar if there are more than two posts to review. You could review low-quality posts since you have reached 2 k reputation.
The main new ability that you got is casting delete votes on closed questions (older than two days). Also, you get to see deleted posts, reviews by other users as well as all the information available on this page.
Thanks for the thorough answer. This gives me all the information I need. Nevertheless, I will not accept this answer, though, because I would like to see a better interface and documentation on the page itself, so the feature-request is still open.
@FedericoPoloni while the SE team looks at the individual metas, it is often better to ask things like this on the main meta. One exception is for things that do not scale well, but I think in this case, your suggestion applies equally to all SE sites.
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3845 | Do we need a canonical question for "bailing out of accepted position"?
Every now and then people ask whether it is appropriate to leave a (phd, postdoc, tenure-track...) position they have accepted for a better one that became available later, or in any case how to behave when multiple positions have incompatible deadlines. The last example is Swap Postdoc position . Other older examples are Is it OK to turn down a postdoc offer (contract not signed yet) after getting a better postdoc offer, Postdoc positions: turning down alternative offers safely and timely, Tenure-track offer with other applications in progress .
This would suggest to write a "canonical question" on the subject. On the other hand, I am not so sure that a general answer exists --- maybe all these questions have peculiarities that require them to be answered on an individual basis. What do you think about it?
(I am not asking this because I wish to write myself the canonical question and answer -- on the contrary, I don't think I am experienced enough to answer this.)
I am of the opinion that reneging on an accepted PhD position, a grant, a postdoc position, and a tenure track is sufficiently different that merging them all into a single answer is not very useful. Yes, the answer to all of those questions is no, you should not, but the practical implications are, I think, different enough that the canonical answer will add little as it would need to address all of these different aspects to be of real value.
Another aspect is that we have actually answered virtually all permutations of this question already, so we should be able to close pretty much all of these questions in the future as a duplicate of one of the existing questions - so it's not that we save work by having a canonical question.
I agree. There is a standard protocol for reneging on a PhD position acceptance in the U.S. (According to an agreement most U.S. universities have signed onto, another PhD program can't accept you unless you have a letter from the first department releasing you from the commitment. And I don't know of any cases of departments refusing to write these letters.) This answer wouldn't apply to any other case.
Pondering my own answers to these types of question, I actually think there is a canonical version that exists.
Perhaps the canonical question would be something like:
Switching Positions After Accepting an Offer
I have currently accepted a position, however in between when I accepted the position and now I have gotten another offer that is more appealing for personal or professional reasons. Is it ethical to accept this new offer and leave the other position, and if so, how do I do so while minimizing any damage to my career?
Trying to keep it vague enough that it's widely applicable, while covering most cases.
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4569 | Who decided for these elections?
As you probably know, moderator elections on SE are held "periodically", where this confusing word is used in the sense of "from time to time", and not "at regular intervals".
Just for information: this time, who decided to hold the present moderator elections on academia.se? Is it a decision of our current moderators, because they feel they need more help, or is it a decision that came from the Stack Exchange staff? If so, were our mods consulted? Do they agree?
Reason behind the question: given that there are few candidates, and people have suggested that we may not fill all open positions, it would be interesting to know if our mods expressed the desire to get more workforce.
As I said in this comment
because we need more help. We had a private conversation amongst ourselves about our availability going forward and the amount of work/time moderating requires and decided that having two more people would make things better.
From there we talked to the SE staff and they agreed and scheduled an election.
In general, SE staff tries to keep an eye on what is happening and if they think more mods would be helpful, they suggest it to the current moderators. I am not sure if they ever force an election against the will of the existing moderators.
Also, elections are only run if there is at least one more candidate than positions, so the outcome of our election (and all elections) will result in all the positions being filed.
Thanks! I missed that comment. (I wasn't suggesting that the alternative was forcing elections against your will, by the way.)
Seems like a good call. Especially in a relatively mature community like this, it'd seem like we'd have a lot of good candidates who could be trusted to use mod powers appropriately, ideally mitigating some of the tedium from a smaller set of moderators.
@Nat speaking for myself the issue is that when we have to make a hard call and want to reach a consensus we need another moderator, and hopefully two, to be able to talk it through. The routine stuff is not a big deal and we handle it alone most of the time.
What probably puzzled some users (it certainly puzzled me) is the relatively short distance of this election from the previous one. I think that from this there are two lessons to be learned: i) Upcoming elections should be announced in advance by the moderators to all the community with an informal meta post (hey guys, we're going to need n more moderators for reason whatever); ii) elections, which are generally burdensome, should take into account a longer time span for the number of requested moderators.
@MassimoOrtolano we are academics, we don't judge our future availability all that well and when we get behind we tend to hope that we will catch up next week. I am not sure if longer time frames would help, but that is probably something worth asking about on the main meta. The SE team can probably pull data about when election questions come in, when people nominate themselves, and when users vote.
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4361 | Do we need a tag for classroom behavior/etiquette/discipline?
Do we need a tag for classroom behavior/etiquette/discipline? When retagging What to do about a professor who doesn't seem to grasp the concept of e-books?, I was unsure of what to use.
Maybe we need a “classroom” or “lecture-hall” tag? I think the issue here is the addition of venue-specific behavior more than just etiquette, is de we already have the latter tag.
We do already have [tag:coursework] although it doesn't seem to get used very often (maybe that tag implies that it's about actual assignments rather than course-based education more broadly). I feel like there should be a tag to differentiate the university-level course/classroom questions from questions about research relationships.
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5466 | When to use tag:publications vs tag:journals
When should I use publications vs journals? They overlap a lot, and people often use them for general question on how to write a paper. Should we have a policy on when one is appropriate rather than the other? Are they mutually exclusive? Is one a subset of the other?
The current tag wiki is not really helpful here.
As Jon's answer says, the journals tag description is:
Online or printed academic periodicals in specific subjects to which the research papers in various topics are sent by the authors and are published after being reviewed and accepted by the editorial board.
This may be roughly the definition of a journal, but I think it's pretty useless. Over the past couple of years, we have been replacing these definitions with more useful guidance. So, I recommend we rewrite it along the lines of:
Questions related to journals: how to select journals, the internal workings of journals, and the role that journals play in academic publishing. Note that we do not accept questions seeking journal recommendations.
From this, it will be clearer that the journals tag is more about...well...journals, while the publications tag is more general. In particular, most questions about preparing publications, the need for publications, dealing with a lack of publications, etc., should use the latter.
Looks good to me! To be even more explicit, I'd even add "The tags [writing], [publications], [peer-review] may be more appropriate in certain cases."
@FedericoPoloni The tag [paper-submission] might be worth a mention too.
journals says, with 2306 questions currently:
Online or printed academic periodicals in specific subjects to which the research papers in various topics are sent by the authors and are published after being reviewed and accepted by the editorial board.
publications says, with 7553 questions currently:
Questions related to academic publications including online and traditional journals, books, and conference proceedings.
Clearly publications is broader and more general, and likely many of the 2306 journals questions may be tagged with publications as well (somebody could run a query, I'm not an SEDE expert). But not all publications questions should be journals questions.
There are enough questions tagged with one or the other that it seems to me we should not merge into one broad publications tag if one really wants to focus on journals questions.
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4889 | My question disappeared and my rep went 100 points down without any information/notification given to me, even post deletion. Why?
I had recently asked a question about authenticity/information about a scientific research abstracts database called inexsy (www.inexsy.com) (They call it information exchange system on their site). I had asked this question a few days back and just a couple of hours ago some new user ( I dont recall his username) posting irrelavant comments and answers and by the time I saw, he was rude to a user (Scaahu)(I dont know if he is a moderator). There was a close vote and a downvote that happened in between the exchange between these users. After a an hour or so I came back to this site to see my question disappear and a -100 to my reputation, all without any information/nortification from anyone. I just saw Rep go down and when I searched the question it was not there. I'd like to know what happened and why my rep was -100 and question deleted with no information given to me, even post deletion. I do not have the link to the question. Appreciate some information.
The question was flagged as spam by two users. I reviewed the flags and agreed that it looked spammy, and deleted it as such. A post deleted as spam causes a penalty of 100 reputation points.
I apologize if I have misinterpreted your post but, probably, from the way it was formulated, it would have attracted other spam flags anyway. I'll ask the SE staff to clear the spam flag so that you can recovery the reputation, but please don't repost that question, even in a different form: it would be closed as a shopping question.
Thanks for the reply Massimo. It clears the air. Otherwise I was wondering what would have happened.
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4521 | Why this question is closed?
Reopen Request for this Question. Its not apparent why this question was closed in the first place.
It might be an idea to copy and paste the original post and place it here because users with less than 10K cannot see deleted posts. If this meta post is anything to judge by, I'd say lack of detail is at fault.
I see the following problems with your question:
It is not clear what exactly you wish to know:
Whether to do such an internship?
Where to search an institution for the internship?
How to contact somebody for such an internship?
Please consider the following FAQ regarding this: "Here's my situation, any suggestions?" is not an answerable question
It’s not very clear what kind of an internship you envision. For example:
Do you need funding?
Do you have any restrictions or preferences in terms of location?
Your academic background is unclear.
How far did your academic career go and do you want it to continue?
Depending on the answers to the above, the answer to the question could depend strongly on your individual background, personal preferences etc. Please see this FAQ.
If you want your question reopened, please edit it to address the above as far as possible.
| Stack Exchange | 2025-03-21T12:54:48.564933 | 2019-08-11T11:50:03 | {
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1517 | Are questions on government research labs on-topic?
One definition of academia defines it as:
The environment or community concerned with the pursuit of research, education, and scholarship.
Whereas others would relate it more strictly to universities. Which brings me to my question:
Are questions relating to the environment in government research laboratories on-topic? For example, would a question like What to expect during an interview for a research position at a government research lab in [country]? be on-topic? (Notwithstanding that the question is perhaps a little bit broad).
Yes. Per the help center:
This site is for academics of all levels—from aspiring graduate and professional students to senior researchers — as well as anyone in or interested in research-related or research-adjacent fields.
That includes research in government and industry settings.
Speaking as a researcher in industry, I completely agree. :-)
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1393 | How broad is too broad?
I am going to do research in Japan for 4 months, as such I want to ask questions about Japanese academia. How broad can I make my question?
For example:
What do I need to know before travelling to Japan for an academic fellowship?
is an open ended question, that has an infinitude of potentially correct answers, and thus doesn't really fall inside your guidelines.
How does British academia differ from Japanese academia with respect to etiquette and other social niceties?
is a very broad question, but is likely to give long, high quality answers that explain "how", and invites experience based answers. However it doesn't really tell me what I need to know (i.e. what's going to trip me up when I go there), and if you remove the 'academia' part, it's non-obvious that the question remains specific to the site (as presumably the differences between Japanese academia and British academia are massively overshadowed by the general differences between British and Japanese culture).
Do I need to bring omiyage for my host on a first meeting?
is specific, but as I am unfamiliar with Japanese culture I don't know what questions I need to ask, so it doesn't answer my real question of what do I need to know. Furthermore I'll end up asking a large number of questions, most of which will have insignificant answers, as I don't know in advance what will be different.
What questions should I ask on Academia.SE before I go to Japan for 4 months to prevent embarrassing myself?
technically fits your guidelines (although it is a bit poll-y) but it's a bit too meta for my taste and is likely to give bad answers.
What are some good resources for preparing to study in Japan?
is obviously just asking for short, link-based answers, and even though it is probably helpful to me (although Googling hasn't really found me anything massively helpful) it isn't a high-quality question.
How can I ask my question in a way that I get answers that are useful to other people planning short-term study in Japan (something the Japanese government is actively promoting, and thus something useful to a large number of others)? Is this an appropriate venue for such a question at all? Is this question always going to fall under the category of too-localised?
There is a similar question about a short-term visit to the U.S. that seems to be well-received:
What's the etiquette for a short visit to a US university department?
In May, I'll be visiting a department at Columbia University in the US for a few days. What's the etiquette on visiting (answers relevant to US in general are welcome, to prevent this question getting too localised)?
I'd like to spend some time with quite a few of the researchers, and compare notes on ongoing work. I'll read their recent publications in advance. Should I be inviting staff out for a coffee and a chat; or dinner; or a talk in the lab?
Context: I'm a faculty researcher, and would be looking to spend a bit of time with postdoc researchers, and those professors whose jobs are primarily research, rather than admin or teaching.
Any reason an analogous question for Japan would not be suitable for you?
What do I need to know before travelling to Japan for an academic fellowship?
Travel Stack Exchange would be a better bet for you with a question like this. Probably stuff like health insurance, visas, documents, immunizations. Nothing academic-specific comes to mind in relation to a topic like this.
How does British academia differ from Japanese academia with respect to etiquette and other social niceties?
This seems okay for the site when you frame it "as a fellowship student from a foreign country" I think. Might not get a lot of responses since it's a small subset. Removing "British" might yield more responses.
Do I need to bring omiyage for my host on a first meeting?
U wot mate? (Very low yield question, since probably 99.5% of us don't know what an omiyage is. Is it tasty?) Might be better to use Travel.SE, or Japan.SE if one of those actually exists. Or even a travel website.
You should target for questions that are applicable to more than you, in the vein of the second question. The country of destination will likely matter little in terms of actually coming up with an answer, except for very culture-specific questions, which will likely belong on a different SE entirely.
| Stack Exchange | 2025-03-21T12:54:48.565162 | 2014-12-04T18:24:40 | {
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5202 | When and why did we disable anonymous questions?
SE sites used to allow anyone to ask questions in guest mode, with a user name of the form userXXXXX . See this question. This is particularly valuable for sites which often involve legal or interpersonal issues; I was going to ask such a question this morning.
That is why I learned that, if you go to academia.SE in incognito mode and attempt to ask a question you will now see this screen:
Moreover, the site will not simply let you create an account with a fake e-mail address, but will send a confirmation e-mail to the address you enter, so you need an actual throw away.
I am annoyed. While it is obviously possible to get a throw away e-mail and set up a throw away account, this is adding extra hurdles. Was this really necessary to keep out spam?
Not a full explanation, but some general information:
This is a site-specific setting.
This was activated earlier this year and successfully put an end to a very annoying spam wave. So, it was arguably necessary at the time.
Whether this is still necessary now is up to debate and something we will naturally only truly know after deactivation.
A welcome side effect of this was that it reduced other unwelcome contributions.
Naturally, it’s difficult to estimate to what extent this reduced welcome contributions.
I initiated a discussion with the other mods and CMs as to whether we want to change this setting.
Mind that we will likely not just put this up to a vote here on meta, because you (the community) do not have access to a considerable amount of information factoring in this decision.
We moderators conferred with the staff and decided to leave unregistered posting disabled for the following reasons (summarised):
Before being disabled, the vast majority of posts from unregistered users had been bad by objective standards (votes, closure, etc.).
Since unregistered posting was disabled, we have seen a subjective reduction of abusive behaviour and other nastiness. This is stuff that causes disruption and requires moderator work to a significant extent.
It reduces blatant spam. This doesn’t require much moderator work, but it may be visible for some hours if no moderator is around, causing disruption.
Mind that we do see the upsides of enabling unregistered posts, such as lowering the entry barrier.
We decided not to actively put this to a vote by the community. However, if anybody feels sufficiently strongly enough about this to make a meta post soliciting a community consensus on this, we see this as an indicator that the downsides of disabling registered voting may need more attention.
This is a good summary; I would just clarify the comment about "significant moderator work." I think it is not so much that we are overworked and cannot keep up; rather, the issue is that excessive intervention by diamond mods is inherently discouraged by the theory of moderation. In other words: sometimes the solution is not buying larger garbage cans (even if you can afford them), but in eliminating processes that produce mostly garbage.
@cag51: Indeed, and what I totally forgot to mention is that this also causes general disruption.
I think this policy is OK moving forward, but consideration needs to be given to the multiple-account approach that would be required to "anonymously" post.
Multiple accounts are allowed for valid reasons (How should sockpuppets be handled on Stack Exchange?), which would facilitate anonymous questions, but at the cost of a little more trouble for the person asking.
Personally, my assumption is that there's always a risk of account info being compromised, and the user doxxed -- so my policy moving forward would be to not ask any questions that I wouldn't want associated with my personal identity, unless I could ask it completely anonymously, without any potential link to any identifying information. I don't know enough about SE user policies to know if that's possible.
Moderators have access to some account information regardless of registration, see: https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/149636/who-can-see-what-in-my-profile We do not view this information unless necessary, and all access is logged. SE the company potentially has access to any information that they store when you access a web page through a browser (like the rest of the web). The only effect of disabling guest/unregistered questions from the perspective of a user who wants to ask anonymously is that they must use an email address that they can receive emails at to register the account.
That's sort of what I thought, @BryanKrause. That would 100% preclude me from asking any questions that would be compromising in any way. I don't mind that, but so long as you're looking into issues surrounding the impact of disabling anon questions, I thought I'd provide the data.
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166 | Are questions of college admission and application submission allowed?
I am 31 year old and graduated with an Bachelors Degree nearly 10 years ago. I'd like to go back to school for an entirely different field of expertise and earn a doctorate.
Are questions regarding such topics application for admissions allowed here on this site? FYI, I did read the FAQ. It seems a bit vague on this topic.
Admissions to undergraduate programs are generally off-topic; admissions to graduate programs are on-topic, so long as they follow the group guidelines (in other words, be general enough that the answer might help someone else).
A question on "returning to school to pursue a doctorate in another field" would probably be on-topic. You could post a sample of your question here to check if it's OK.
Sir, I know this question is outside the site's focus: http://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/41471/a-request-from-a-tenth-grader-for-advice-regarding-college-admissions
But I really need advice. Where can I ask this question? Because it obviously can't be reworded to fit the rules, I have to give up hopes of getting it open here... I need to ask this elsewhere, but where? And I think I've asked a genuine enough question... So it's not that the question itself was improper... Any suggestions sir?
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171 | where can I track site visits over time?
I know that the site stats (on the left side of the front page) include visitors/day. I'm guessing that is averaged over some time frame. Is there a place that I can see the number of visitors on each particular day?
You can see that information on the Quantcast site:
http://www.quantcast.com/academia.stackexchange.com
Thanks, this is exactly what I was looking for!
Unfortunately, they don't make that data public. The number you see is pretty good for gauging trends, though.
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249 | Is a question on the current usage of academic indicators (h-index, impact factor, etc) too loose a question for Academia.SE?
I would be interested to know if anyone has objective facts and reports on how academic workplaces are currently using these academic indicators. For instance in the upcoming REF2014, academics are urged to use the papers in journals with the highest impact factors
I would not like to start a discussion on how "not representative", or how flawed, these numbers are, or generic rants.
Would that be an ok question for Academia.SE?
That's definitely on-topic here, as this directly relates to academia, and you should state directly in the question that you don't want it to degrade to an off-topic discussion about the usefulness of the measures. I think the question can stand on it's own without having to go down that road.
thanks, posted on Academia.SE
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5248 | I can't get the 'Autobiographer' badge
I have changed and saved the 'About me' section, but cannot get the Autobiographer badge for both main and meta sites.
I did it several times and waited several hours, but the badge does not appear.
Might it be a bug?
Most (all?) badges are awarded as part of a daily batch script that runs, so you should not expect to see them until up to 24 hours after you've performed the action necessary to earn the badge.
Presumably this avoids repeating costly (performance-wise) queries more than necessary.
Likely the place to find more information if you're interested would be to search on the main meta: https://meta.stackexchange.com
I think I got the badge now. Thank you for your explanation.
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3325 | Is backup of a scientific book on-topic?
Is this question on topic?
I am an amateur mathematician.
Currently I have two Git repositories (at BitBucket.org and GitHub.com) with copies of my book.
Is it worth to add even more Git repositories to make sure that my book will survive even if I die?
I don't think we can answer that, it'll be probably closed because it depends too much on your personal preferences.
To answer the question, 'is this question on topic', I believe the question is too specific (about the use of a particular website). Perhaps a better question would be 'what is the best way to ensure code will be accessible in the future?' This will extend much more beyond particular websites and will be focused more on techniques and strategies which may be more applicable to academia in general.
That question is probably not on-topic, because:
It really has nothing to do with academia. You're asking how to ensure your work exists in perpetuity, which is a concern with any user-created content.
It's unlikely to have a single correct answer, and would probably end up as a discussion on various ways to store materials both online and offline.
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1084 | What does a "well-received question" and a "positive question record" mean?
I see that I was just awarded the "Inquisitive" badge. Looking at the explanation of this badge, it says:
Asked a well-received question on 30 separate days, and maintained a
positive question record
I'm guessing that this requires at least 30 questions because the questions must be asked on 30 different days but I am unclear what makes a question "well-received" and what a positive question record means.
I'm guessing a positive question record means that I have less than x% of my questions with negative net votes but that is also unclear.
A set of new "asking questions" badges were rolled out yesterday. These are described more fully on MSE.
In a nutshell, "well-received" means
open, not deleted, and has a score > 0
And "positive question record" means
(total questions - negative questions - closed - deleted)/total questions >= 0.5
That helps a lot. Thanks! Why don't we add this to the tag description (I do not see a way to edit it)?
@earthling badge descriptions are global to all SE sites, suggestions for changing them should go to MSE
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649 | How to deal with the "academic" tag?
We current have an academic tag, which probably doesn't make much sense given that our SE topic (and title) is “Academia”. So, two questions:
Can we get rid of it? By retagging its 11 questions, possibly by mod mass-retagging (which doesn't bump the questions, as far as I remember).
Is there a way to blacklist it?
Having looked at the questions tagged by [academic] it is clear it has not been used for any specific purpose and is completely superfluous. A good start is perhaps untagging the questions?
I've slowly retagged all the academic questions. Now, a request to the mods: could you blacklist it? I don't think it can ever be useful as a tag, so blacklisting it will avoid it reappearing in the future.
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652 | Can we have some fun?
Some Stack Exchange sites, while enforcing regular policies/limits, allow for a little fun now and then, either by letting some “fun” soft big-list questions exist, or by prompting them on specific occasions (I think the site on Judaism has regular fun/soft session near Pessach, but I cannot find a specific reference for that). As this SE blog post explains, it's OK to have some fun, we just don't want the site to be overrun with “fun questions”.
What should our policy be? Do we allow fun questions? Do we need specific occasions for that? Or if we accept them unconditionally, do we have some sort of tacit agreement to keep their number (active fun Q’s at the same time, I mean) reasonable? Do we want them to be community-wiki, as some sites do, so as not to game too much the reputation system? (or do we simply not care?)
Example of “fun” questions I could see, and which I would personally enjoy, would be something like (or subsets thereof):
what's your favorite research abstract? paper title? TOC graphics? conference title
what is the most bizarre/extravagant/longest position title you've ever encountered?
what's the most ridiculously harsh review you've ever received?
etc.
The Judaism SE allows for this sort of thing near Purim, and—for those of you familiar enough with Judaism to appreciate insider jokes—you can see the humor by perusing the "Purim Torah in jest" tag.
I created a chat room for "fun". If it dies it dies.
More about fun on SE in general, including a specific mention of Purim Torah, occurred in one of the podcasts.
There are two questions here, that are really important to separate out:
Do we want to have fun?
Do we want this to be the sort of site where people feel free to add frivolous material?
The first question is one of those meaningless questions like "do you want some free money?" It implies that we can get something good, without any negative consequences.
That is an illusion.
The second question is what this is really about. Stack Exchange sites have a successful identity, and a prosperous niche in the web ecosystem, precisely because there is so much level-headed professionalism about the questions and answers.
There are lots of places for fun. All of the fun questions suggested in the question above can be asked and answered on chat, to your heart's content. Or at a thousand other places on the web.
Academia Stack Exchange has a unique place, for its level-headed professionalism. If we start allowing questions that are outside the scope of the current guidelines, because they're frivolous, bad-subjective, and/or lack a definitive right answer, we will devalue all the content.
Not everything in life has to be frivolous, fluffy and fun. Some things are just better when they are sober and useful.
So let's keep academia.SE as the sober and useful place.
For the other stuff, get a kitten.
Your dichotomy is also an illusion, if I reuse your lexicon: the illusion that the choice is Manichaean, between black (“sober and useful”) and white (“people feel free to add frivolous material”). I do not want the second one, but I do not really want the first one either. Hence the suggestion that we allow for something in-between.
@CharlesMorisset but why does it need to be on the main site? Why not chat?
@CharlesMorisset big-list questions are broken windows. That's why they're discouraged across all of Stack Exchange. I don't understand this urge to muck about with a proven successful recipe, as if we were somehow magically going to be immune to broken windows.
@CharlesMorisset attracting users with questions that don't really fit the SE format is what bothers me. The whole community can benefit from the question in chat. We could even flag it up on the sidebar to let people know.
@CharlesMorisset thank you for making my point for me. That's exactly the problem with them. They're populist tosh. And that's not what we're here for. There's plenty of other places on the web for lowest-common-denominator material.
@EnergyNumbers read the blog post I linked to, by Jeff Atwood, on good fun and bad fun… and look at the example question he gives, “Strangest language feature”… it's clear that it's not exactly “discouraged across all of Stack Exchange”. I'd say it's to be handled with care, that's all.
@F'x and you too have made my point for me: look at the lock notice on that question: "This question exists because it has historical significance, but it is not considered a good, on-topic question for this site, so please do not use it as evidence that you can ask similar questions here."
I wanted my question to be relatively neutral, so I'm posting here (as an answer) one argument I can think of for allowing fun questions (in addition to, well, having fun): it can help us attract some more traffic and possibly some of the users who discover the site through these questions may stay on.
Also, on possible way we could use to avoid being overrun is to make a selection here on Meta: we could suggest ideas of fun questions, and say post one of them every Friday. That would be regular at enough, yet one question a week (at most) is not going to be too much.
I had the same idea of having a post here on Meta to propose the questions. I disagree with the frequency, though. Approximately monthly might work better.
I disagree. One thing that I like about AC.SE is that it is not "fun". There are already a to of academic forums where fun questions can be discussed. Our questions are already on the soft side and I think blurring the lines further would be bad.
What about a monthly fun chat room? It wouldn't be as archival, but I think that is not only okay, but maybe better. I like the concept of a fun chat better for a number of reasons. I think one of the hopes of doing "fun" things is to attract new people. With questions we are attracting new people in a deceptive manner since fun questions are an exception. I also like the idea of a chat room since I think the questions will benefit from more discussion which the QA style isn't great for. It also might get people to use chat more which would be good for us. Finally, once we allow/encourage fun questions, going back will be hard. If fun on chat flops, we can then rediscuss the issue and then potentially try questions on the main board.
@CharlesMorisset If we go this route, big list questions will be next. For example, should we bring back questions like the highly up voted but deleted bibliography software question. I just see a blurring of the lines.
I'm not against this, so long as:
There's some semblance of structure to the fun, and
It's constrained to a certain time period.
My recommendation would be to hold such an event near the semester demarcations, when there's an air of "time to relax for a bit" in the air already. Personally, I would aim for two or three times a year maximum, with those times being end of April/early May (end of semester) and late August/early September (beginning of year), with the optional third being near beginning of January.
For those periods, I would use the tag "Aca-dumb-ic" (I just made that up) and allow anything in that tag, so long as it relates to academia in some tangential way. If it gets too out of hand we could add more restrictions to ensure the site still looks like a professional Q/A site with a fun undertone, rather than the opposite.
Is your proposal to also close them soon after the fact like Purim Torah? Would we then vote to delete them like regular questions? If so I don't see how this is different from chat.
@DanielE.Shub - Is that what they do on Mi Yodea? I know that some of the older ones (e.g., this one) are still around. Either way, I don't think that's necessary here; the questions would be around for posterity.
I would like to point out that "end of semester" is a very relative term, as academic year planning varies quite a bit between countries
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386 | Increasing our number of questions posted
Today, I was comparing our current stats with those of Mathematica.SE when it graduated. It is good to see that most numbers are very similar, except for the number of questions asked per day.
I can see how that would be different, with Mathematica being a site where people asks many shorter questions, while ours tend to be on the longer side (and we have more answers per question).
Now the question I had (more like, the discussion I wanted to start, really) is: do we need to let this number grow on its own, as traffic will increase, or is there something we can/want to do to help it increase?
This sounds very similar to a previous question of yours :) As I recall, we chose to lean towards closing & subsequent deletion rather than editing just for the purpose of postcount++.
@eykanal the last part is, true… let me remove it and let the broader question stand
Related http://meta.academia.stackexchange.com/questions/273/why-arent-more-questions-being-asked. Now that is it 3 months later has your opinion changed?
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288 | Can I ask which universities offer programs that specialize in X? (X = software development processes)
I am currently in my grad program in CS, and I am interested in studying software engineering processes, project management, and metrics in a PhD program.
Can I ask here or on the main Academia site which universities are currently focused on researching the areas in which I am interested?
That's not really the point of Academia.SE. The goal of this board is to collect questions and advice on problems related to all of academia, not just tools that can benefit one discipline, or especially one subdiscipline.
The general rule about what should go on the board is to ask: "can the answer to this question help someone who is in a different department at a different school?" If yes, then it's appropriate for the board. If not, it probably won't work.
Sounds good. How about "What kind of methods are there to search for graduate and doctoral programs that specialize in certain areas of research?"
I think that would be acceptable. We'd have to watch out for it not degenerating into "my favorite method is X," but otherwise I'd be fine with it.
@DavidKaczynski You can even make it more specific. However, the point is that to make it objective (e.g. not "tell me what are the best departments doing X") and that can be answered with reasonable amount of resources (so not "post any link to department doing X").
I agree with @aeismail regarding the subdiscipline, as those are very localized, but I'm wondering whether we should relax this for broad disciplines (i.e. mathematics, history, political science, etc). Note that we already allow questions specific to a single location; many approve of that, with no negative feedback on that at all. On the other hand, we have also agreed that university-specific questions are too specific (I couldn't find a link for that one, but that's how we tend to vote). I don't see how disciplines are different from locations in that respect.
As an example, this question was flagged as off-topic. While I agree it's argumentative, using the above argument it's sufficiently broad to be relevant to many users, and with a simple edit it could be quite useful.
+1 I'm for relaxing it a bit. As long as it is not too localized (i.e. a matter of one person preferences) for me it's perfectly fine to ask "How to do [blah] in experimental history" when neither "How to do [blah]" nor "How to do [blah] in history" is precise enough.
@eykanal: The main issue is to avoid a "what are resources for X" where X is every possible department. It's OK to ask, but I think it's always better to move upwards in generality.
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792 | Is asking for help how to complete a degree off-topic?
I'm 80 % done with a B.Sc. in computer science and I want to know how I should finish it, in what order, or if you think that I shouldn't complete the degree at all because I'm already employed full-time as an application developer and I also have another academic degree in another field (I have an M.Sc. in economics but I like and I work with computer programming and I'm not very interested in management.)
Would this question be off-topic because the answer possibly would help only me, because the answer would be subjective, or an inappropriate question for any other reason?
The point of this board is to ask questions related to academic and research-oriented careers beyond the undergraduate level, as well as issues earlier on in the career that lead into them.
If you're planning to finish your bachelor's and then go into industry, this really isn't the place to ask that question. If you're planning, however, to continue on to master's studies, and want to know how to orient things so as to put yourself in the best possible light, that's a different subject altogether.
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3700 | On topic to ask for feedback on draft of degree project report?
I do a degree project in computer science. We are around halfway done. I'd like somebody who is knowledgeable to give feedback on our work so far.
Could that be on topic for this site or somewhere else on SE?
This is off-topic here because it is about the content of your specific field and not about academia. It’s also not suited for any other site on the network because it’s a request for unspecific critique and not for information.
In fact, I doubt that you will find anybody on the Internet doing this work voluntarily, because only somebody familiar with your specific field can do this and it is a considerable amount of work.
The person who can and should give you feedback on this is your supervisor, or at least some senior member of their work group. You may also get feedback from a fellow student, but they may not be capable to spot certain problems.
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3288 | Difference between 'evaluation' and 'evaluation-criteria' tags
The evaluation and evaluation-criteria tags seem extremely similar to me.
evaluation is used in 30 questions. Its description is
Questions relating to academic evaluation and the process of evaluation.
evaluation-criteria is used in 18 questions. Its description is
How to appraise or prepare for the appraisal of/by mentors, students, grants, applications, or work performance.
Can we merge these two tags or just drop one? They seem to cover the same area and having two is redundant.
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3862 | FAQ for authorship standards
This is inspired by: Can PhD students publish papers as sole author without including their supervisor?
Authorship standards come up often, and I think there are at least two issues which are commonly re-iterated on these posts, and could use a standard answer or FAQ entry. These are:
There are established professional standards for authorship, at least in some fields, e.g. ICMJE standards. (Perhaps a list here would be appropriate)
New graduate students often under-estimate the work required to choose a problem and set the group's general research direction, which can qualify an advisor for authorship even if they do not perform the research.
Is it worth creating a FAQ with information like this, or should we just point people at questions like: What are the minimum contributions required for co-authorship ? If so, what else should be there?
I think what you want is a canonical question on the main site, not a FAQ on Meta.
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3958 | How should we deal with "cross-cutting" questions?
With more and more "soft" Stack Exchange sites popping up, it feels there is an increasing amount of questions that "could" in principle be on-topic in multiple sites.
A recent example is this question: the question is about sexual harassment in college, which is clearly in scope here; however, the question could have easily also gone to IPS, and would have certainly been in scope there as well. Now, the twist is that I am pretty sure that the question would have received fairly different answers at IPS - here on Academia many users seemed to be in favor of reporting the students, while on IPS the answers would have probably gone more into a "work with the students to increase awareness" direction. It feels to me that OP has, probably without knowing it, biased the advise she has received by her choice of where to ask the question.
It seems to me that a network-wide feature for controlled cross-posting would be awesome. Is this something that has been considered? Is there something fundamentally wrong with such a feature?
This isn't the kind of thing an individual site can propose and develop. It belongs on (the) Meta, where it has been effectively though not quite officially status-declined for a long time. There are 125 question results for "cross posting" and many are duplicates.
And here is a similar proposal on [meta.se].
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3513 | Which pictures belong to which university in the academia.stackexchange cover picture?
I can notice that the leftmost is MIT, the tallest one is UCBerkeley, but I couldn't figure out others. May be the second one from left is Cambridge.
They're just buildings that look like they might be typical university buildings. Many universities have a clock tower, for example, not only UC Berkeley.
@ff524 Still no one can deny that leftmost depicts MIT
You mean the one with columns? Again, many universities have such buildings. See e.g. Columbia University.
Cambridge, England or Cambridge, USA? Both are home to famous universities.
@gerrit yes, but for all I know the universities in Cambridge, MA are usually not referred to as "Cambridge." (Furthermore, one of them was already mentioned separately.)
To be more precise, they look a lot like the average USA-centric image of a university.
I do not think that the buildings are intended to represent particular universities, instead the are just fictional buildings that look like university buildings.
You can read more about this in the post where the designers explained their design UPDATED (APRIL 14): Design for Academia.se
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4112 | How do I announce the new subreddit "Indian Academia" here, as nothing other than questions seem to be allowed here?
I haven't found a subreddit with dense source of data on Indian academia (career, education, research education questions) in reddit or in other sites. Sites related to academy (like https://academia.stackexchange.com/, i.e. this one) seem to be more general, and non-local. This new subreddit for indian academia, might allow having source for local data on the indian academy.
Here is the link to it: https://www.reddit.com/r/Indian_Academia/
You don't "announce" anything on the main board. Stack Exchange is explicitly a Q&A forum, so such links are considered to be spam, and are therefore always off-topic.
You may mention it in the chat room, but that's about it.
I consider it acceptable to make such announcements on Meta Academia or in chat, as they generally pertain to parts of this community. You can also try to get sufficient upvotes on a community promotion ad such that it is shown on the main site.
That being said, you are kind of announcing something that is likely viewed as a competing platform or community or a platform for questions that we do not allow for good reason. Either way, do not expect that such a proposal is met with much enthusiasm.
I agree with you that it's okay to use the site Meta. Do you know if there's any documentation to back up this opinion? I haven't been able to find any. (Not an urgent question -- but if you ever find something please ping me -- thanks.)
From a previous meta question here, it also appears that you could include a link to that in the "About Me" section of your profile. That is seen when someone mouses over your identification information, so if you answer questions about academia in India, people who find your answers useful will be more likely to see it.
This next part is perhaps more controversial, but if you encounter a question that is closed as off-topic here (such as polling questions or shopping questions or very situation-specific questions seeking advice) and you think that the subreddit might provide useful answers, you might comment with a suggestion to try that resource.
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4481 | Why am I anonymous on Academia but not on other Stack Exchange sites?
I post mainly on Mathematics Stack Exchange, under my own name, and less frequently on other SE sites. I notice that, although signed in via Math SE, my posts on Academia SE go under a user number rather than under my name. This is not a big issue for me, but I don't see the need to be anonymous here. Is there a simple remedy for this?
You need to set your profile globally. When you edit your profile you will see two boxes. One that says "save changes just for this community" and the other "save and copy changes to all public profiles" at the bottom of the page. If you want all your profiles to be the same, chose the "all" box. You probably want to start editing from your math profile if that is the one you want to go everywhere.
There is a lot of information on the main meta. Maybe Don't force sync with my oldest account on my network profile but there is probably something better
Thank you. I've done that. At present, my user number hasn't changed to my name on this site. Perhaps only new posts will carry my name?
@user10691 it should change the name retroactively on all existing posts and even comments directed at you. Maybe you need to make a little change to the text for it to get saved. You can always edit your academia profile directly and save it locally or globally.
As you (presumably) can see, your last recommendation has worked now.
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756 | Is right to hold a question being abused by viewer?
I asked five question and two of them are being put on hold by viewer. Seriously, there are really no right to judge other people's question as no question is stupid. If you have no interest in my question or opinion conflict with mine, just go away please? I have no idea why ppl like bad fire work so much.
Questions are put on hold when the community deems that they do not adhere to the site's rules and format. It gives time for you and other people to improve them, if possible, into a more fact-based answerable question. If not, they will be deleted in the future. In fact, one of your questions “on hold” was edited, improved and people then voted to reopen it. Which shows that the process works, even if it can be a bit frustrating sometimes!
“there are really no right to judge other people's question as no question is stupid” — This site has a limited scope and format, and not all sensical questions are suitable here. The community decided on the scope, and how best to manage it. As the “owner and manager” of this site, it has every right to judge whether a question is appropriate here. But if it judges a question is not, it doesn't mean it's stupid.
Finally, regarding “just go away please”: I'm not sure coming to an established community, and say “if you don't like the way I do things, please go away” makes a lot of sense :)
Questions can be good questions and still not be appropriate for Stack Exchange.
The guidelines of Stack Exchange sites state that questions should not be "opinion based"; they should also ask a clear question. One of the questions you are referring to fell into each category, respectively.
I will note that the questions have gotten many negative votes, as well as close votes. That means the general consensus of the community is that they are not good fits for the site. However, close votes and downvotes are not "abuse." They are how the site expresses itself—and this is a community-driven site.
Every question contained opinion because they are not mathematical question and even for mathematical question, they have axiom which are pre-assumed and can think of as opinion imposed by people. I'm not sure you or the whole community can decide how much opinion contained within the question. All you can decide is you like the question or not, which is not fair.
The issue is if the question is "opinion-based," not if it contains opinions. And it's not that hard to tell when questions can actually rely on facts and experience, and when people are just pontificating. But whether it is "fair" or not, that's the system that Stack Exchange uses. Just because you don't like the results of the system doesn't mean that the system has treated you unfairly.
I only see one of your questions put on hold and that appears to have supporters who want it re-opened. While I did not vote to close it I am not sure I can vote to re-open because of the structure of your question.
The problem, as I see it, with your question is that it has an unsupported premise that large egos or perhaps arrogance is a better term is overwhelmingly present in academia. The lack of support for the negative premise comes off as a rant. I think this is what is "turning people off."
If you could structure your question in a more constructive way, I suspect you could get some very useful answers from the community here. I know I have.
The community decides what are low-quality contributions, and have various means of dealing with it. As you've found on most of your contributions to date, that includes a combination of editing, downvoting, closing and deleting.
That's exactly how and why this site is so successful: the experienced posters can and do assess the quality of contributions, and use the moderation tools available to them to maintain the site's well-defined scope, and its quality.
You have walked into someone else's house, started throwing things around, and shouting.
You've been told that this is not acceptable behaviour.
And now you're asking the other tenants to move out?
Most of your posts have been about your dysfunctional relationship with your supervisor (and maybe with others). And now you've written about it inappropriately here, creating dysfunctional patterns with other posters here.
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1790 | Reputation dropped by 70 points, and I have no idea why
My reputation dropped by 70 points taking me below the magic 3000 mark (I was kind of excited to be able to cast open/close votes). There doesn't seem to be any rhyme or reason for the drop (I had no recent downvotes, for example). However, I'm sure there is a logical explanation that I'm not aware of. What is the likely cause in this case?
Reputation can change for other reasons than up and downvotes. If a user deletes a question, for instance, all of the associated reputation earned with that question would be deleted. So most likely, a user deleted either a question (or perhaps even an entire profile). That would explain a sudden reputation drop.
Thanks. I did some poking around, and it seems that a certain user's account is no longer active, and one of my answers to their questions, which was upvoted 7 times, no longer exists.
@MadJack Note that the question was downvoted (-4 score). When a user's account is deleted, their downvoted questions are deleted automatically; questions with a net positive score (and their answers) aren't. So you can feel reasonably "safe" answering questions with a high score, because even if the owner leaves Academia.SE the question (and your answer) will stay.
@ff524 Thanks very much for the additional information.
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3902 | Should my comment have been deleted?
In this this question, Federico Poloni's wrote an answer:
You can write an e-mail to the authors and ask for a copy of their published paper. Almost everyone will be happy to send you one. [...]
which is a very good answer. However, as an academic, I wanted to share my experience on when I would use the suggested solution. I added a comment in line with:
I would only write to the authors if Sci-Hub dies.
This is not only my choice. For too many fellow academics and scientists, Sci-Hub is the first option, even when legal access exists.
Unfortunately, my comment was deleted. It was by no way unconstructive, offensive, or rude.
Would the moderators kindly justify the deletion? Wasn't it opinion-based?
I like your comment ("I would only write to the authors if Sci-Hub dies"), but I wouldn't discourage e-mail requests in favour of potentially illegal activities.
Let me start with I did not delete your comment and you are probably not going to like this answer ;)
Comments are the bane of the SE system in my opinion. We need them, but we don't like them. Quoting the help center
Comments are temporary "Post-It" notes left on a question or answer.
As you say, we try and delete comments that are unconstructive, offensive, or rude. But we also try and deal with cases that violate
When should I comment?
You should submit a comment if you want to:
Request clarification from the author;
Leave constructive criticism that guides the author in improving the post;
Add relevant but minor or transient information to a post (e.g. a link to a related question, or an alert to the author that the question has been updated).
Your comment was flagged as no longer needed. As it wasn't really doing any of the above and may have actually fallen into the When shouldn't I comment category of Secondary discussion it seems like it really wasn't needed.
Of course as you are probably aware, there are tons of comments that are not good comments and we have not deleted them all. As I said, you are probably not going to like the answer that your comment was deleted because it wasn't needed despite the fact that lots of other comments that are not needed do not get deleted.
As for what you should do. You should really turn that comment into a new answer that can be properly voted on and evaluated.
I actually liked your answer - specifically the acknowledgement that "lots of other comments that are not needed do not get deleted." ;)
I was the moderator that deleted your comment. StrongBad's answer explains the reason very well. I would just elaborate on the following:
Of course as you are probably aware, there are tons of comments that are not good comments and we have not deleted them all. As I said, you are probably not going to like the answer that your comment was deleted because it wasn't needed despite the fact that lots of other comments that are not needed do not get deleted.
This site is primarily moderated by the community. In the case of comments, that means that diamond moderators review a comment if it is flagged by one or more members of the community. If the comment should be deleted (according to the criteria explained in StrongBad's answer), and it is brought to our attention via a flag, then we delete it.
The reason why so many deletion-eligible comments are not deleted, is because they haven't been flagged, and so they haven't been reviewed by a moderator. (Contrary to popular belief, it is not because moderators read all comments and delete the ones they disagree with, while leaving the ones they agree with.)
Your comment was flagged, I handled the flag and reviewed the comment, and since it met the criteria for deletion, I deleted it. It really had nothing to do with my opinions about Sci-Hub (for the record, I have no strong opinions about it one way or the other).
What do you mean when you speak about the "criteria for deletion" that the comment met?
@FedericoPoloni see my answer and the [help] for what comments are about.
@StrongBad Nothing in the help center mentions comment deletion, as far as I can see. You mean the "when should/shouldn't I comment" part? That's why I am confused; I don't know of any particular guideline about comment deletion.
@FedericoPoloni I think I summed it up when I was elected https://academia.meta.stackexchange.com/a/1009/929 it seems ff524 has changed her views to include flagged comments https://academia.meta.stackexchange.com/a/1000/929 but yeah, basically comments are temporary post its and should be deleted.
@FedericoPoloni Generally if a comment is flagged and it falls into the "when shouldn't I comment" categories, I'll delete it.
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4353 | Should we react when somebody says they're contemplating suicide?
I really wanted to avoid posting this on meta and avoid drawing too much attention to it, but I've flagged the question in question yesterday and no action was taken. I checked the moderation rules; they say to flag anything that seems weird, exceptional or in any way deserving moderator attention, and this definitely seemed like it to me.
In this post, an extremely demoralized PhD student is asking for advice on how to retain his motivation and continue. The question is not particularly good but I sympathised with the situation so I followed it. The OP didn't seem particularly receptive to advice given, and mentioning additional difficulties and hardships in comments, but that is their own choice.
Through comments he expressed he is thinking of changing labs and Universities again (which would be his second switch), and various advice popped up about how switching for the second time might be even harder than the first time and possibly not the best idea. Then the OP responded by saying that is a really bad break, he saw that as his only choice and is now contemplating suicide.
To me, that was extremely alarming. Alarming, for one, out of the concern about the OP, his health and his well-being. Distressing for me to witness it. But, even moving away from the personal level (of just seeing somebody threatening with suicide), the result for Academia.SE is that we have a question about how to get out of a demoralizing PhD situation, ending on the note that (as a result of the advice given on this platform), the OP is now contemplating suicide. Surely this is not the message we want to send: that such a demoralizing situation has no solution and leads to something as drastic as that.
It's been more than 24 hours now, and I do think something should be done about that comment standing there. The OP is probably in a delicate state, so sending a message we do not care about what he has to say and deleting it might not be the right approach, and I don't know what is, so I am asking here:
Especially seeing that we get a lot of questions from people in very stressful, demoralizing and bad situations, should we, and how should we as a community, react when an OP shares that they are contemplating harming themselves?
These are always difficult situations and as mods we always need users to make us aware of things that we might miss. A while back mods were given a new tool that allows us to contact the stack exchange team (CMs) with a stock reason of a suicidal user. I believe that this supersedes the past suggestions given in What's the official SE response to serious mentions of suicide or self-harm in posts? which can be summarized as (1) close with an appropriate message, (2) flag for mod attention, (3) use "contact us" to call in the CMs. As a user, you should definitely flag and maybe even us "contact us" link at the bottom of every page. As for closing, I don't know. My assumption is that the CMs deal with these things quickly and if they thought closing the question was useful, they would.
After talking to a CM, when you flag the question/comment/answer there is no reason not leave a comment like:
It sounds like you're going through a really hard time. I'd really like to help you, but unfortunately, we're not well-equipped to do so here. Your best option is probably to call the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline. People are on call there to talk to people struggling with the same kind of issues you are, regardless of location. US: +1-800-273-8255. If calling's not good, they can chat with you live online. Just go to this site, and you can talk with someone online from 10PM-6AM UTC: http://suicidepreventionlifeline.org/GetHelp/LifelineChat.aspx It might not help, but what's the harm?
In terms of this specific question, as with many mod things, we are aware of it and handling it quietly and privately.
Thank you for saying you are aware of it and are handling it privately, it really puts my mind at ease. Since I flagged that comment and couldn't see anything happening, I just grew very worried. Could you please clarify what you mean by "as a user you should definitely flag and maybe use contact us" - since I can't see a contact us button, and you said it was a tool given to the mods, how does this apply to what a regular user should do?
@penelope made a small edit. Every page has a "contact" link at the bottom left: help//chat//contact//mobile.
Thank you for the clarification, and the comment is a great idea. Just... one last question. I've noticed the "contact" button now, but looking through the options, I assume as a regular user I would just use "other" as a reason in the contact form and describe the problem?
@penelope exactly users do not get a suicide choice, but mods do (well technically it is a different mechanism). The idea is to make sure people are aware. I think we let our users down by not commenting earlier and being more transparent in what was happening.
It's not an easy situation to handle. I keep thinking that leaving a comment such as the one you posted should have been something I taught of myself, and something I could have done straight away when I spotted it. Instead I just got terrified and panicked - I think it took me a couple of hours before I even flagged it.
Strongbad, maybe it would be better to substitute this message with the international version since the person is in Europe per one of the comments.
@MassimoOrtolano yes that would be better. I cannot do it now, but will do it later if someone else doesn't get to it first.
One of the reasons I was initially weary of posting it on Meta is that I wasn't sure how comfortable it would be for the OP to attract lots of attention, but now this post is showing up as a "hot meta post". Do you think this is a valid concern, and that something, if anything should be done?
Strongbad, I've just reported the comment (slightly adapted) about the international hotline.
See this Reddit r/SuicideWatch post to get an idea of what it's actually like calling these numbers (they often make things worse). In response to "but what's the harm?" (a) involuntary admission [i.e., being locked up], (b) suicidality becoming a permanent part of one's medical history (which interferes with child custody, employment, medical treatment, residency, etc.), and (c) having a random person patronizingly trying to "quick fix" intricate and highly personal problems in someone's life.
@RebeccaJ.Stones: Perhaps you should bring this up as an answer to the above Meta.SE post. Particularly if there is some other approach that you think is better, and if there's evidence to support it.
@RebeccaJ.Stones I asked this question to find a solution - since I really didn't know how to act or react in a situation like that. My initial reaction (which I am not particularly proud of) - was to flag the post, and then slowly stew in my own increasing panic as the time passed and I couldn't observe anything happening. I don't know how to deal with such situation beyond a general understanding that quietly not doing anything is probably not great. I think it is very important how we handle these type of situations - so if you have any advice for us, I think we would all love to read it.
There are anonymous options for help lines. It depends on the country, but even when your country does not have such an anonymous line, there are offers online, which can be used anonymously.
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5436 | Questions about practices related to specific computer science subfield -- when are they on topic?
There were recently two questions about specific, different, computer science subfield.
Why do a lot of publications ignore better results from other papers // compare only to old results (example in deep learning and biomed) [closed]
When teaching Computer Architecture, why are universities using obscure or even made-up CPUs? Why not x86, ARM or RISC-V?
Going through what is defined as on topic in the help centre, I am honestly a bit confused by the outcome of the above two questions.
On one hand, it says that questions about academic writing and publishing as well as the academic research process are on-topic. On the other hand, it also says that we should not ask questions about the content of research and coursework (rather than the process of teaching). Further, it also clarifies that we should specify the subfield our question relates to, so we could receive relevant answers.
Both questions were initially well-received, however the first, deep learning, question was eventually closed as off-topic, where the only comment explaining this decision at least partially was the following (now moved to chat):
Azor Ahai -him-: "You're asking a question about something you've observed in deep learning. This SE is about academia, not about why people in one field do one thing. Because we're on SO, this site tends to be overly permissive of questions related to math/CS. "Entirely," no. "Off-topic" yes."
I find that the closed question actually directly related to standard practices in writing, publishing and research in a specific research field/subfield (deep learning). There was a latter attempt to make the question general and less specific to deep learning (which, I think, made the question worse), but eventually it was left closed.
On the other hand, the second, computer architecture, question, is still rapidly collecting upvotes and answers. However, this one actually seems to be about "the content of coursework", something explicitly listed as off-topic in the help centre. Additionally, there is actually a whole stack for Computer Science Educators, which might be better suited for teaching-focused questions (while academia mostly focuses on research-focused questions).
Could somebody clarify what is on topic and what is not? Do we, or do we not, welcome questions on specific sub-fields? Do we only welcome those questions if there are no other suitable SEs for those questions? If the outcome of these two questions is representative of what we believe to be on and off-topic, should we update our help centre definitions to reflect the viewpoint of the community?
I think the second one hit the Hot network stage, so most votes and answers are not from regulars here.
Personally, I think both questions should be open. However, I agree with you that it can be very hard to predict how a question will be received. The advantage of this is that it's community-driven; if you don't like the status quo, you can cast votes accordingly. But I agree the uncertainty is a bit of a problem, as it can be scary to post a question in this state. If there's a suggestion for how to better codify our policies, or to update the help center, I think we'd be open to that.
Here's my understanding of the status quo:
Do we, or do we not, welcome questions on specific sub-fields?
Most of our well-received questions apply to a broad swath of academia. A question on a specific sub-field might be OK if it is just an example of a concept that applies more broadly. A notional example:
"How to handle students who routinely turn in picoblaze code that does not compile?" While nominally about picoblaze, this question is really about students who turn in work that they know is wrong but don't ask for help. As such, this one seems okay to me.
"What are the pros and cons of using a made-up language like Picoblaze?" More borderline -- this will probably come down to how it is phrased. If it were phrased as "Should I teach assembly using x86 or Picoblaze?", that would probably get closed. Whereas if you asked "Should I teach my students a real but complicated language or a notional but more tractable language," that would probably be well received.
"How I debug my picoblaze subroutine" -- this is a content question (regardless of whether it's for research or coursework) and should be closed.
Do we only welcome those questions if there are no other suitable SEs for those questions?
This has nothing to do with it. Some questions could be posted on multiple sites (though we discourage simultaneous cross-posting, and a borderline question that has been cross-posted might get closed or even mod-hammered). Other questions don't belong anywhere; the various stacks do not span the space.
You mostly focus on the question that has stayed open in your answer, but as I personally also think both should have been open, I was more interested in the case of the closed question. The first question was seemingly well received initially, with 8 upvotes, and well-received answers. It still got closed, and I left it as such as it got closed by a community vote. I've only raised this now because of the perceived inconsistency (and cast a re-open vote), but since two weeks have passed, I'm not sure if there's enough interest in the old question to re-examine that question.
I agree the other question should also be open, but as I have an answer on that page, an executive decision from me might be perceived as a “conflict of interest.” Will see if anyone else replies to your question.
I think at this point we can safely say that no action has been taken regarding the closed question, despite the fact that this has been singled out as a "hot meta post". In fact, it seems to be a very well received question for meta, but very little discussion. And my original question still stands: there seems to be a difference between what our rules say and what the community does. Would be great to have a community opinion on this rather than a mod ruling, but I'm just not sure how to solicit more activity around this topic except asking a question here on meta...
Yeah, if you want to pursue it, I recommend opening a new meta post titled along the lines of: "Can we reopen the question about..."
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4436 | What to do with "is plagiarism plagiarism" questions?
We have seen the definition of plagiarism numerous times on this site, more or less elaborated, but always in its core:
Plagiarism is passing someone else's work as your own
I am all for questions which ask to understand the concept better, or understand the importance of it better, or are encountering the concept of self-plagiarism for the first time as a young researcher and trying to understand that, or peculiar and particular situations involving plagiarism.
But, this recent question (and I believe I have seen more similar ones before it, which is why I am posting to the meta, but can't dig them out right now) basically asks:
I want to pass my friends work as my own, but additionally he owns a pink elephant. Is this still plagiarism?
(where owning a pink elephant could be any other completely irrelevant reasoning). It seems to me that this question (and many other alike) are basically asking:
Is plagiarism plagiarism?
The answer to this question does not really contribute anything new to the site, the OP could have found this information out by glancing on most of our plagiarism tagged questions, and all the answers just elaborate on "Plagiarism is passing someone else's work as your own.", which can be seen in many, many other questions.
I downvoted the question in question, as I think it is a bad question. I was also thinking of casting a close vote, but none of the reasons seemed to be quite on the spot. Ultimately, I don't think it's a good question, good fit, or worth keeping, but since I can see four up-votes on it, I was just wondering whether this is really the community opinion.
Different communication styles. You reformulate the question as
"Is plagiarism plagiarism?"
This makes the question sound really silly. However, the question was not that. Let me explain.
Many people (me included) here are from maths and informatics. The way we (learned to) attack a problem starts with Step 0: Understand all definitions. So we start by looking up the definition of "plagiarism" and work with that.
However, many people do not so. If you ever taught a inteoductory math class, you will know the problem: The students have to solve an exercise which is virtually just looking
up and writing down the definition (and then they would obtain the solution), but they fail. This is often hard for instructors to understand/explain, because we are used to think in a certain way.
A user may not look up the definition of "plagiarism", only having a vague understand of some things related to this word which she heard at some point. They do not realise that their question can be reformulated so silly. Also, many people would not understand what their question has to do with a "pink elephant". Not all people think this abstractly to see the connection to their question.
On a related note: I have the impression that often when somebody asks something where the answer is clearly written somewhere, they are heavily downvoted and attacked ("what about this is unclear?" "Why do you ask the question when the answer is written exactly on this website?").
I come from a country/culture, where what is written/what is the truth is often not the same. (E.g. it is not uncommon that the syllabus says "written exam on February 18", but if you never ask the professor about when the exam is, it could happen that he just says at some point "by the way, the exam will be oral and on February 8, before and afterwards there will be no exams"). Websites (e.g. for applications) often have strict rules - but in reality, if you talk to people, you find out that you don't need everything the website says etc.
With this I want to say: Even if there
are well-defined rules about what plagiarism is, I do not find it unbelievable that people (from certain cultures) are unsure about whether or not they are followed.
Every single semester, I explicitly teach my students a slightly more elaborate version of
Plagiarism is passing someone else's work as your own
And every semester, there is at least one instance of plagiarism by a student who has an existing (wrong or incomplete) understanding of what plagiarism is, and doesn't recognize the difference between what I told them and what they had previously understood.
For example, I think in that specific question, the OP had previously heard something like "If your project is the same as one of your classmates' projects, it's going to be flagged as plagiarism". When someone who has heard this reads
Plagiarism is passing someone else's work as your own
they may think, "Well, I've heard it's plagiarism if I submit a classmate's work as my own, so that definition is basically the same as what I've heard". Then, given that (mis)understanding, they may still think it may not be plagiarism if they're not plagiarizing from a literal "classmate".
I don't think this misunderstanding is unique to the OP of that question - I've come across this before. I do think there is some value to explicitly addressing common misunderstandings of plagiarism in the Q&A format.
a kind of confirmation bias, you may say?
Well, I guess the question has received some attention now and it's generally positively received, so I got my answer. I just hope that when somebody else asks "Me and a friend got a same assignment at different Universities because the professor gives the same course at two Unis", we can mark it as a duplicate of this one even tho it says "different colleges same Uni", and don't need to explicitly address that difference (or some similar similar situation).
Couldn't have put it better than this answer. :)
Let me say a few things about a more general issue. Most of the questions like this and other similar repeated questions come from newcomers with rep 1 or 101 and little experience elsewhere. Many don't know how the site operates nor what they can learn from tags until they get a bit more experience.
Likewise many newcomers don't know to distinguish this site from a "chatty" email list and so write some things that are superfluous. Comments in particular often become chatty.
I think we need to be a bit tolerant of all such novice "errors" and pass them to the help page or otherwise help them.
OTOH, self plagiarism is a special issue since, IMO, it isn't universally understood. Ten or so years ago few worried much about it, especially novice researchers, of whom we see a lot here. So, repeating the definitions, and the reasons behind them, seem to me to be a good thing.
But it would also be good to have a way to mark canonical questions and answers so that those who want to help can quickly find a way to redirect the OP to the answers they need before there is too much redundancy in the site.
I totally agree, especially on the last part. It would be great to have a general question/answer where one can redirect OP, like it is usually done with the "What does the peer-review state $whatever mean?" questions that are redirected to "What does the typical workflow of a journal look like?".
| Stack Exchange | 2025-03-21T12:54:48.570934 | 2019-02-19T17:16:57 | {
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2035 | Scooping content from Academia SE - is that ok?
When googling to understand a recent question better, I came across a web site whose entire focus is to scoop from Academia SE; here is an example for the question I looked into. It's attributed (if somewhat wrongly; the quotes mention "stackoverflow.com").
I've come across this before, either as a question on the site-wide meta, or the one of mathematics; but forgot if SE takes action in such cases. Despite the attribution, it just doesn't seem right. It's one thing to quote a favorite question in your blog, or tweet it; another completely if it turns into a massive copy and paste operation to generate content.
This already happened with other sites. There should be a discussion on the main meta on how to contact SE managers to deal with that, and in which cases they should be contacted.
If you look at the bottom of every page, you'll see "user contributions licensed under cc by-sa 3.0 with attribution required". Under this license it is perfectly legal to copy and paste every post on the entire site, so long as you attribute it properly.
To elaborate on that, the specifics of what 'attribute it properly' mean are spelled out in the Attribution Required post on the Stack Exchange blog.
@E.P. The Stack Exchange "requirement" of a particular type of attribution is unlikely to be enforceable, given the terms of the CC BY-SA license.
@Franck That's up for grabs / neither here not there (I tend to side with Steve Jessop's comment there, but to each their own), but even if not enforceable, breaking those terms is what's known in the lingo as "not cool". In any case, the purpose of this post is to help future visitors decide whether they should report a scraper or not, in which case the criteria that apply are exactly the ones in that blog post. Thanks for the link, though.
@FranckDernoncourt yes, but the site in question doesn't provide any attribution at all to the author, which is certainly against cc-by-sa.
See A site (or scraper) is copying content from Stack Exchange. What do I do?. This post details:
When to report such sites,
When not to report such sites,
How to report such sites
The site you have given as an example does not meet the attribution requirements, so you should report it.
I reported it, as described in the question you linked to.
You can easily find on their website an answer of yours which has
no link whatsoever back to your post,
no mention of your username or name,
no mention of the license, even less a link to it.
This is an egregious copyright violation and you, as an author, can and should send a DMCA takedown notice to defend the commons. Follow the DMCA instructions of the registrar, which is based in USA and can shut down the domain.
StackExchange has less power than you in this matter, though it's nice to notify them with the general procedure linked above.
Update: newtips.co is responsive to DMCA notices, they removed a post of mine; pcusernet.com is still up; bighow.org is still up, I now sent a notice to their host ramnode.com as they are in violation of AUP.
Update 2: pcusernet.com is blocked on Firefox and Chromium as malware site, bighow.org continues business as usual but has removed my post. Do send complaints for every plagiarism of your own posts, eventually they'll give up!
I've acted on newtips.co, bighow.org and pcuser.com for infringement of my copyright on a SE post: I 0) archived the infringing URLs with archive.org and archive.is, 1) wrote the admin to terminate the cc-by-sa license, 2) filed a claim with the registrar and host where reachable, 3) reported pcuser.com to Google ads support. Let's see what happens to the sites and to the OP's posts. :)
| Stack Exchange | 2025-03-21T12:54:48.571628 | 2015-11-16T14:10:56 | {
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4902 | Question hammered closed by community
Today, I noticed two questions being hammered closed by “community;” here is one example: How can I appropriately call my professor?. While both questions might have been candidates for closure for the reasons given, I am wondering if this is something I just missed seeing in my years on stackexchange, or a new feature (e.g., using ML to find likely candidates for closure). If it’s an algorithm, I find it a bit risky as false positives will happen, and re-opening a good question is harder than closing a bad one.
See Bryan's answer here. In short: the vote by community user indicates that OP agreed their question was a duplicate. You can see this by mousing over "community" in the question's timeline.
Thanks for clarifying!
If the OP closed it themselves, shouldn't the interface say "closed XX days ago by " rather than "closed XX days ago by Community", though? This would be clearer and more factually accurate.
Yes, it would be clearer. The rationale behind the current message (which we as Academia.SE cannot change) is that OP cannot actually close their own post; rather, their vote to close triggers the AutoMod, which mod hammers it closed. "Community" is the name of the AutoMod.
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1292 | Questioning the merger of the [publications] and [publishing] tags
Recently the publications and publishing tags were merged. On the surface this may seem as a good move, however, I think it was quite unfortunate.
First, publishing should be about the process and publications about the product. This means that both could successfully co-exist if this distinction was made. If the tag wikis are considered less clear in the distinction, I would suggest making this distinction more clear and live with the fact that things have been muddled in the past and think about the future use instead.
Second, now we have publications (product) swallowing the publishing (process). At the same time we maintain journals (product) and books (product) so that the process of publishing is largely lost. Unless we want journals and books to be seen as a subdivision of publications and hence have publications most often accompanied by either journals or books it would seem merging all into publications would be the next logical step (and I am not sure I would agree with that either.
In other words, losing the publishing was not a good move. So how should this best be resolved? Do we want tags that better reflect different aspects of the core theme in academia of publications and publishing or will lumping them together and in time rendering them so wide that they are essentially meaningless be the way.
I am the moderator who merged that synonym. The reason I did this was because they had been used without their intended distinction. That is,
questions already tagged with publishing were no more likely to be about the process of publishing than questions with publications, and
questions already tagged with publications were no more likely to be about the output of publishing than questions with publishing.
This made both tags less useful in practice, since you could not go to either one and expect to get all the questions about process or output (either separately or together). Any time you did a search by tag, you had to do two searches, one with publishing and one with publications.
But, you are right that for such a large tag, I really should have brought it up on meta first, and I'm sorry about that.
Note that intended use is not really relevant in merge actions:
Merge is a tool for when Tag B carries no meaning distinct from Tag A in the way it is currently applied, regardless of how they are meant to be used, or how they will be used going forward.
Synonyms are a tool to enforce "We've decided to use Tag A for both A and B in the future," regardless of any difference they may have carried in the past.
Merge relates to past use, synonyms relate to future/intended use, and they are independent actions. Tags that are currently not distinct in their usage but will have different future usage should be merged and not made synonyms; tags that currently have different usage but we've decided to combine in the future should be made synonyms but not merged.
Regarding future/intended use, I'm not convinced that making the tag wikis more clear would solve this issue. In practice, tags whose distinction is not obvious (even without the wiki) tend to be abused.
Instead, I would propose to have a series of more specific tags about the publishing process.
We already have a set of tags which (especially when used together with publications) discriminate between many parts of the publishing process (from the author's point of view):
writing on writing the content of the publication
typesetting and formatting on typesetting and formatting a publication
authorship on resolving disputes about authorship credit
paper-submission on submitting a paper for review or publication. (Note that currently, this tag includes "The process of preparing a scientific manuscript"; I proposed to narrow its scope here.)
peer-review on the peer review part of the process
online-publication on making a paper available online
copyright on the process of copyright transfer
Do we have questions about the publishing process that aren't successfully distinguished by these tags?
There are obviously two ways to look at the problem. Beneath it all is the problem of tag wikis and the way tags are used. In most cases mergers are non-critical but merging two huge (in terms of use) tags, each with at least distinctly different intended use has in my opinion not been successful.
@Peter intended use is not really relevant in merge actions. Merge is a tool for when Tag B currently carries no meaning distinct from Tag A (regardless of how they are meant to be used, or how they will be used going forward). With our without the merge, to distinguish between 'output' and 'process' in these tags we'd have to retag about 1000 questions.
@Peter (cont.) This is distinct from synonyms that aren't merged, which mean "These tags have been used differently in the past, and we'd lose meaningful information by merging, but we've decided to use Tag A for both meanings in the future." Merge relates to past use, synonyms relate to future/intended use.
Could 'publications' and 'publishing' be made into synonyms for tags with more obvious scope? E.g., have 'publishing' be a synonym for 'publication-process'?
| Stack Exchange | 2025-03-21T12:54:48.572097 | 2014-10-08T09:03:46 | {
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815 | Math Teaching and Pedagogy is now registering 200 people for a private beta.
Math Teaching and Pedagogy Stackexchange has passed its first test and is now registering 200 users for a private beta. Anyone can commit at levels from 'Professionals' to 'Enthusiasts' or even 'Just Curious'. As this would be the first education proposal to succeed, the input from experienced members of academia.se from all areas would be helpful.
To register, follow the link and hit "Commit". Thanks to those who helped in the first phase.
http://area51.stackexchange.com/proposals/64216/mathematics-learning-studying-and-education
Thanks for reminding us. It asks me about my real name. I am reluctant to do so. I always use my user name scaaahu on SE sites. Can I keep using that to register?
Yes, many people have done so.
possible duplicate of Proposal for math teaching/pedagogy SE needs an influx of new people
| Stack Exchange | 2025-03-21T12:54:48.572464 | 2014-02-22T13:14:02 | {
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785 | Proposal for math teaching/pedagogy SE needs an influx of new people
Many people are unaware that Stackexchange allows users to create their own sites using a model similar to the question/answer system used on their main sites. Someone creates a proposal, others write down some question titles, and finally all users vote to see which questions are the best. One such proposal is Math Teaching and Pedagogy.
The site moves forward when 40 questions have 10 votes each. But there's a catch: each person gets just five votes. So a LOT of people have to vote (well, 80 people).
The math teaching/pedagogy proposal needs less than 80 votes from other users. Once it gets them, people have a chance to sign up using their email for a private beta, where you try to answer or ask 10 questions to give the new site momentum. Once 200 people sign up, the site is created.
Please take the time to consider this proposal. As of now, <8 or 9 academia.SE people have voted there, so you would be a new population who cares about education and who can influence the future of the site.
Consider checking it out; casting your votes brings you no obligations.
Here's the link:http://area51.stackexchange.com/proposals/64216/mathematics-learning-studying-and-education
A little bit confused. 10 votes already counts or the number of upvotes must be greater than 10? I saw many example questions has count 10.
Yeah, 10 votes already counts.
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706 | Is it possile to search for text in comments?
I read a comment that was interesting to me and lost track of where it occurred. I cannot seem to search for key words I know were part of the comment to locate it. All that appears are the usual Q and A posts. Is it possible to also search for text in comments in some way?
If it is not currently possible I am requesting this as a new feature.
Comments are considered "ephemeral" and "second-class citizens" on the site. If a comment is informative, it should ideally be expanded into a full-fledged answer, or its information edited into the post it is attached to. It is thus “by design” that comments cannot be searched for. To perform such searches, you may use Google rather than Stack Exchange's search engine.
| Stack Exchange | 2025-03-21T12:54:48.572700 | 2013-12-05T08:41:40 | {
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457 | Policy on answering old questions
Is there a standard policy on answering old questions? What about questions that have already had accepted answers?
I don't want to flood the top of the queue with old questions simply because I supplied an answer. I guess a follow-on comment would be that it would be nice if either
Questions older than such-and-such a date didn't jump to the top, or
There was a checkbox for old questions that said, "do not move question to the top."
This really runs counter to the goal of the site. An accepted answer could be replaced by an even better one—but if the old question doesn't resurface, no one will know it's there! (Hence my downvote.)
Okay, if it is okay to answer old questions, then that's great. Thanks!
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608 | Use of unexplained abbreviations
Throughout the months I have been reading Ac.SE I have come across questions where the context of the question in a way depends on some abbreviation which is not explicitly defined. I realise that some abbreviations have become common knowledge (e.g. PhD, CS..) but some others might be ambiguous to many.
In publications one is often required to "introduce" any abbreviation that recurs, and I suppose it would not be too much to expect the same here.
What do you think? Is there an "official policy" on this matter?
If this ever happens just leave a comment. We don't have a policy for this, and I don't think we need one. If something confuses you, ask! That's what comments are for. We have quite an active community here; even if the poster doesn't address your concern, someone else likely will.
I believe this is the right way to go. I wouldn't want a formal policy. There are already enough rules to follow.
Either leave a comment, or edit the question/answer to spell out the abbreviation.
I'd vote for leaving a comment, so the user realises the abbreviation is not as general as he may have thought. I certainly learned to be more careful when it was pointed out to me.
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1012 | Is it possible to get usage data from SE?
After having gone through some old questions that I have participated in, I have come to think what we are accumulating here is pretty useful data on demographics and usage of the site. I was hoping to ask a couple of questions and/or improve my answers based on real statistics from Academia.SE.
I recall some post, in junction with mod elections, about a particular service on SE where one could poll some basic queries on the database behind these sites, but I cant find it again. Is this service still available? does it exist for all SE sites (or only major ones like SO)?
PS: I hope my description is not too vague, if so do tell and I will try to improve it.
What I was thinking of is apparently called StackExchange Data Explorer and half an hour of calm thinking apparently was all I needed to reconstruct the train of thought that led me to where I saw it first.
Anyhow, I am supplying this as an answer, so it may be of use to whoever that may be interested in running queries on SE sites.
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697 | Can't seem to find a particular question/answer, what do i do?
I have been trying to locate a particular answer but couldn't find it, even when using every bit of information I remember from the answer in question (in my case: it was an answer about dealing with the impostor syndrome and contained lots of links, if I remember correctly written by F'x)
I figured that could be a good meta question; what can you do if you cant find some material on AC.SE even though you are sure it exists (or -ed at some point)?
Ask others for their help, on the chat or here!
Probably not by me: the only post I ever wrote on the issue is that one, and though it contains a few links it's very short.
I can also confirmed that there is no such post among our deleted answers, unless it doesn't actually contain the word “impost[oe]r” (and even then, chances that good content was deleted are very slim).
Maybe you didn't find it on account of the two possible spellings? (-or/-er)
I'm pretty sure this is the question you're looking for, anyway. Not sure why it wouldn't show up in a search. If you know that someone posted an answer to a specific question, I definitely recommend searching their "answers" page (e.g., my own). That's how I found this particular question.
well it apparently didnt show up in my impostor syndrome is:question search because the OP (or I) misspelled it :) anyways thanks for the link to the question
Both variants (imposter/impostor) are accepted spellings. Also: you misspelt “misspelled” ;-)
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4035 | Mod election process: set up of existing mods and how candidates compare to that
I seemingly have missed the right timing for the question collection but something I came to think about when reading candidates presentations was "how do these folks compare to the already existing mods?"
So I think it would be beneficial to know who are the existing mods, how much time they currently spend moderating (if this is measurable) and of course which time zone they are in.
It's not like we take as much traffic as SO but would still be an idea going forward, in terms of diversity and availability I think.
What do you say? Would it contribute positively for the future elections?
I am going with the answer to this question is such an obvious yes, that you should just edit this question a little to give us/me a little more guidance about what you want.
@StrongBad ok, let me rephrase that: "Why do we not have a listing of the current moderator team on the election thread, together with their timezones and subjects of research/academia etc, so that voters can see how candidates relate to/complement/.. the existing mod team?"
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3290 | Is this question about dissertationwriting.com on topic?
I found a website, http://dissertationwriting.com/, that claims to be a service to help students write theses and dissertations without breaking academic integrity. I'm skeptical, largely because as a master's degree student, I don't have enough experience to determine whether this company really is above-board. With this background, would this be an on-topic question for Academia.SE?
Is http://dissertationwriting.com/ an ethical company? How can I tell for myself? How can I determine whether other, similar companies are honest or are paper mills for myself?
I'm not considering using this website's service one way or another, but they have some blog posts that I'm interested in. If the company isn't reputable, though, I'll look for advice elsewhere, which is why I'm interested in asking. I don't think my motivation for asking the question will affect its on-topicness, though.
Not an answer to whether it is on topic, but the schools listed in their about us page makes me think they are not legit.
Is http://dissertationwriting.com/ an ethical company?
See the help center article, section on "Can I ask questions about my specific situation?", where it says "As a general rule, if you're asking about a particular institution, course, or journal, it's likely your question is too limited in scope. Try to extract the fundamental question from the specific problem at hand."
You can, however, ask the general questions and give this company as an example:
How can I tell for myself? How can I determine whether other, similar companies are honest or are paper mills for myself?
Yes, that is on topic. That is exactly the "fundamental question from the specific problem at hand."
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610 | public school teaching grades 7-12 considered "academic"?
There are several questions with with the words "high school" and teaching on academia.
Can a public school teacher be considered an "academician"? I haven't found any other stackexchange site that is likely to allow for questions about teaching, much less at the secondary level. Has anyone found another site that allow such questions?
I have voted to close since the question is essentially: I know this isn't the correct site for me, but where should I go?
If your field is in mathematics education, you might want to look at The Mathematics Teaching Community. (But as of now, there is not much activity there.)
Although high school teaching is not on topic at this site, I completely agree that it could be considered "academic" under some interpretations of the word. "Academia" is used here as a single-word summary for the site's topic, and unfortunately it's impossible to find a single word that perfectly fits. No disrespect is meant towards high school teaching, and no implication that it's not really academic. It's just not a particularly natural match for the sort of grad student/professor questions this site is intended for.
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2216 | Is this an appropriate place to ask curriculum planning questions?
I'm planning the curriculum for my first graduate level computer science course. Are questions related to appropriate expectations for incoming knowledge and course coverage allowed here?
I believe that such a question could be entirely within scope. Some key information to include in order to make it clear enough to be answered would include:
What country you are in
What sort of graduate program (e.g., M.S., Ph.D.)
What level of institution (e.g., world-class research university, vocational college)
What the general goals of the course are
Thanks, glad to know I wouldn't be totally off track here.
Questions about how to plan curricula in general are fine: planning curricula is an important thing that happens in academia. Questions about what the curriculum for a particular course should be would be off-topic, since you'd be asking about (in this case) computer science, rather than about academia.
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1850 | Sites where I can ask academia-industry transfer questions
I know that this question is not be related to this site, but I just want to know the names of the sites where I can ask questions about academia-industry transfer. Questions like "example of companies using differential geometry and machine learning" is not fit for this site, for example. So I'd appreciate the names of the sites where I can ask them. Thank you!
That being said, I see two issues with your concrete question: 1) It is actually not about academia, but about subjects treated in academia. As such, it is unrelated to this site, and rather related to sites dealing with the topics you mention. 2) An "example of companies" is rather unspecific, and you should probably specified the intended purpose of the question. For instance, is the purpose finding out whether any such companies exist anywhere on the world? Is that actually interesting for the community to know?
I'm voting to close this question as off-topic because this question belongs on another site in the Stack Exchange network.
Depending on what you want to ask, it may be appropriate on this site, Workplace.SE, or not on any StackExchange site.
If you are looking for information about specific companies, that will not be appropriate on either site: "make me a list" questions are generally a poor fit for the SE format.
If you are looking for information about scientific careers in industry, it is likely to be appropriate for this site (e.g. this question)
If you are looking for information about the non-scientific aspects of industry, then Workplace.SE is the place to go.
'"make me a list" questions are generally a poor fit for the SE format.' --> I think OP acknowledges this and is asking for alternatives to SE
@BCLC Well, I've answered the part that I know how to answer, about which types of academia-industry transfer questions are good for SE. For the rest, I leave that to others, if they have any good suggestions.
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3828 | Is student-bashing acceptable/expected?
After reading some popular comments on this site it seems that many users consider students (students as a group, not individuals) to be irrational ***holes:
students cannot reasonably expect - I see you're applying logic to an illogical group, a common rookie mistake.
18 votes so far
@PsySp, you seem to be too much concerned with this student. Students are free to hate and bad mouth their lecturers. This is the modus operandi of a typical student: complaining and criticizing lecturers. I wouldn't think too much of this.
21 votes
As a former student I feel this is user hostile behaviour, by a more powerful group towards a less powerful group, more suitable at a gripe session in the pub than in a friendly public forum. As a thought experiment, try applying these comments to basically any minority or disadvantaged group and see how quickly that gets flagged and removed.
I'm not sure where this is going. Are these comments not considered rude? Is there a huge amount of popular lecturer-bashing which has passed me by? Obviously some part of the community will consider this too thin-skinned, but it seems this kind of behaviour
doesn't add anything positive or useful to the discussion and
could discourage some users from participating.
You examples are both rather difficult to assess. The first one requires the reader to follow a special line of thinking and was classified as a joke by its author afterwards. The second depends how exactly you read modus operandi, which is arguably misused anyway in this context (irrespective of the tone).
The two examples make broad statements about groups, and if that wasn't enough, they are also quite likely to be understood as hyperbolic. I think you're making a mountain of a molehill.
Those of us who now teach students were once ourselves students, and moreover may -- dare I suggest it -- have had friends who were not "students like ourselves".
Regarding student behaviour towards lecturers, and comments on this site on such: I'm not a fan of the sweeping statements in the comments you mention, but I would ask users/readers of this site who are not themselves practising teacher-academics to consider that the actual lived experiences we have may actually inform things we say or views we have.
Actually, let me strengthen one of my earlier statements: I think the 2nd comment is unhelpfully derogatory (the word "typical" is the one I take issue with) and were one able to downvote comments I would have downvoted this one. That said, I am loath to read too much into this site from this comment
I am having trouble answering this. At the heart of the issue is As a thought experiment, try applying these comments to basically any minority or disadvantaged group and see how quickly that gets flagged and removed students are not a minority or a disadvantaged group, they are the entire population of individuals being taught. The comments are not suggesting any sort of preferential treatment be given to one group of students at another groups expense.
For example, saying students (or any other group) make bad customers because they are illogical is inappropriate since it implies preferential treatment should be given to non-students. Saying jobs in sales are hard because customers are illogical, however, is fine. What the comments are essentially saying is that teaching is hard because students are illogical.
I disagree with your point that the comments don't add anything positive or useful to the discussion but I agree with your point that they could discourage some users from participating. It is important for new teachers to realize that some students are illogical/emotional and that others will complain and criticize. Therefore, I believe the comments add value. That said, the comments could have addressed the fact that not all students are illogical or prone to complaint and criticism, that students are not necessarily more emotional than any other group, and that each student should be treated as an individual. That is a lot to pack into a comment on the off chance that a student would be offended that students are stereotyped (fairly or unfairly) as emotional.
"students are not a minority or a disadvantaged group" Compared to the people making the jokes they are, which was my point.
@l0b0 there is a difference between groups of different power and being a minority or disadvantaged group.
@l0b0, are you saying students are a minority group? If so, then who is the majority group? The teachers? The administrators?
A few thoughts on this:
Are these comments not considered rude?
The second example you use is a bit rude, but the first is clearly a joke, and a pretty minor one at that.
Is there a huge amount of popular lecturer-bashing which has passed me
by?
If you mean on the site, there isn't much. But in life?
Consider the very existence of ratemyprofessor.com. Additionally, there's a lot of concerns about the quality and impact of student evaluations and complaints - there's some evidence of some pretty serious gender bias, these things are potentially used in hiring decisions, and there's a whole genre of essay recently that's essentially boils down to "Student complaints are out of control". I have my own issues with the conclusions of those essays, but they're definitely a thing.
As a thought experiment, try applying these comments to basically any
minority or disadvantaged group and see how quickly that gets flagged
and removed.
Students are neither a minority nor inherently disadvantaged, which makes this at best irrelevant.
doesn't add anything positive or useful to the discussion
This is where I think you're wrong. Some notes that student complaints are often fickle, make sweepingly ignorant assumptions about what a professor's job actually is, are often biased or needlessly cruel, and often outright insane are useful things for faculty to encounter. "Oh good, it's not just me" is a very powerful thing.
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5129 | modification date / date asked
I pay attention to the active question queue. Posts there are marked with the modification date, which is always essentially "now" since this is the active question queue. I would rather see the date when the question was asked. I could use that information to decide whether it was worth my time looking.
Implementing this would not use any screen real estate, since there is already a date there.
I think this feature makes equal sense for all the stackexchange sites.
Meta.stackexchange is the place to ask for changes to how the machinery of SE runs.
https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/261203/include-original-ask-date-on-active-tab for example...
@JonCuster Correct advice and a very useful link to an essential duplicate. Post as an answer (even though link only answers are discouraged) and I'll accept it.
Requests to change how the machinery of the site work are handled on Meta.stackexchange.
Now, not surprisingly, this has been requested before over there, such as this question. The answer there points to a user script that can be installed to add the 'asked' date. Now, whether that script still works or not I will leave up to others - I'm not a fan of downloading code on my work machine.
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5143 | Why is this particular question closed as rude?
Why was
https://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/184049
marked as spam or rude or abusive and is therefore not shown
I can see closing it as off topic for this stackexchange site but I think calling it "spam or rude or abusive" is rude to the OP.
See my answer here, the last paragraph: https://academia.meta.stackexchange.com/a/5139 Mods have a wider view of certain users' behaviour, and when we nuke as spam or rude, it's because there's more evidence.
@MassimoOrtolano I saw that other answer. Of course I couldn't (and shouldn't) know about the other evidence. Thanks.
Making Massimo's comment into an answer:
Mods have a wider view of certain users' behavior, and when we nuke as spam or rude, it's because there's more evidence.
We can't comment on this case in particular, but I will provide another data point in general. Just this morning, a few of us mods were discussing a different question that we felt should be closed as too broad, but we ended up not taking any action (even though 2+ moderators agreed!) because mod votes are binding, and we hesitate to take that sort of action unilaterally. You can imagine, therefore, that we apply a correspondingly greater degree of care when it comes to "nuking" questions entirely.
"We can't comment on this case in particular" really needs more explanation. I think you can make some kind of abstract statement that actually answers Ethan's question.
The "abstract statement" is that we do not nuke things for no reason; there must be more evidence. It is SO policy not to discuss this evidence, however.
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3731 | About "Preparation for a non-academic career"
I was just about to ask a question having to do with "Preparation for a non-academic career". Specifically, I was going to ask how an academic can tell what's the salary range for a potential research position in the hi-tech industry (generally or in some region). Noticing the interdiction in the tour, I didn't ask that - but is it really off-topic? I mean, it is a problem mostly unique to academic researches.
I don't see that you've asked it yet, so I'll comment here. There are sites that provide such information, e.g. glass door. You might find the information you need there.
That is intended to discourage people outside of academia from asking questions about "what's the best degree to become a sailboat repairman?" Historically, we have tended to allow questions about where academics can find employment other industries.
To that extent, ask away, says I.
I will also note the part in the "on topic" help page: "anyone in or interested in research-related or research-adjacent fields."
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3478 | I just got downvoted on 10 questions - why would that be?
I just got downvoted on 10 answers on this site with no comment added to any of them. I assume it's not a mere coincidence. Possible reasons as far as I can tell:
Something happened to a user who had upvoted me on all those questions.
Someone decided they don't like me and just downvoted a bunch of my answer.
It's probably not 1., since I haven't seen a "user removed" notice. If it's 2. - what do I do? And if it isn't - are there other possible causes?
It looks like it's been 24 hours, and it's not reversed yet. I'm going to wait a little bit longer (another 24 hours) just in case something changes and the script catches it on its next run, and then I'll get SE staff to look into it if it still hasn't been reversed.
Sometimes I provide what I think is a great answer, and get a downvote with no comment, or a useless comment like "off-topic" or "doesn't answer the question". Sometimes I need to go back and fix an answer and sometimes people are jerks.
@MikeP: And has this ever happened to you in 10 questions within about 30 minutes?
I see the votes have been corrected as of 3:00 UTC. Guess that script runs a little less frequently than 24 hours :) but looks like all is good now.
Something happened to a user who had upvoted me on all those questions.
If a user were deleted, you would lose their up votes, but the votes would not be transformed into down votes.
Someone decided they don't like me and just downvoted a bunch of my answer.
This is more likely: you might have been targeted by someone. Stack Exchange has a script that detects this kind of bad behaviour and reverts the down votes. You just have to wait a bit. For more information, read the following post on the main meta:
What is serial voting and how does it affect me?
Ok, I'll wait and see what happens in 24h.
Same boat, would kill for a "must comment in order to downvote" requirement, with minimum word count.
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4369 | I'm annoyed by what I feel is a farce of question
"Is it acceptable to shoot people if they annoy you?"
Well, that's not exactly what was asked, but it's pretty close. And then people write serious answers saying "No, that's not ok at all" - as if it's not trivial.
Is it just me or is that question and its answers kind of farcical?
It seems that at the very least, the professor who wrote the webpage that is the subject of that question thought it was OK...
@ff524: Are you hinting at what I think you're hinting? :-)
I wasn't hinting at anything. All I meant is that what is trivial to many, is not trivial to all.
@ff524: I thought you meant to suggest that maybe the poster of the question is the Professor who wrote the blog post, who was feeling some pangs of guilt...
@einpoklum Interesting you might entertain that, I had thought the opposite, that this person was disgusted with this professor for this or another reason and made the post to shame and draw attention to them...
This is a rather ironic post considering this question is a rant in disguise.
@tox123: On the contrary, that's part of what's annoying me about it.
@einpoklum I think 'this question' means 'your question'.
@henning: My question is a rant without a disguise. I did say "discussion" and "I'm annoyed". But point taken.
There is also a comment under StrongBad's answer by one Peter A. Schneider saying "I think making fun of students who are that stupid is entirely acceptable;". While I sincerely hope this user is joking, it may be not so clear to all that one should not mock their students (and not call them "stupid").
Is it just me or is that question and its answers kind of farcical?
It’s just you.
To wit, one of the posted answers, posted by a well-known professor from the US, actually tries to downplay the severity of the online shaming described in the question, saying it is in “bad taste” but very pointedly refusing to denounce it as anything to get excited or particularly upset about. That answer currently has 16 upvotes. So, it’s not just in countries in Europe where there’s a history of professors behaving in a condescending and bullying manner towards students, as Massimo explained in his answer, that there are people for whom the answer to the question “is it acceptable?” is very much not obvious.
The question is not just a valid question but in fact a good question, and StrongBad’s answer with its upwards of 300 votes, far from being farcical, does a good service to the community by making it clear (to those relatively few people who apparently need it to be made clear to them) where the vast majority of people stand on this.
In a comment now moved to chat, I wrote this:
It should be said, however, that in some countries this kind of public shaming happens sometimes during public oral exams. For instance my country is filled with horror stories of students publicly humiliated for a wrong answer, especially in certain fields like the humanities and medicine. And when I was a student I certainly witnessed a few episodes myself.
Maybe my short comment doesn't give enough idea of the level of shaming that happened, and probably still happens in some cases, but my main point is: There are professors who think that this is perfectly acceptable behaviour, and so the question is not a farce.
And, well, an excellent answer would be one capable of convincing that professor that such a behaviour is not ok.
Your county, meaning Italy? Also, while I realize the Professor who had published the blog hails from a culture where this is inappropriate, the question poster is targeting an international crowd, and I have the impression s/he knew full well that it is inappropriate.
@einpoklum Italy, but not only.
@einpoklum In fact, the example from the question is not from Italy.
@einpoklum That professor seems to be in France, a country which, as far as I know, had its share of "horror" stories in universities too.
Yes. When I answered the question it had a score of -1. When I read the question I thought it was pretty reasonable: I think this is inappropriate, but want to crowd source to make sure I am not crazy. My answer was basically a throw away answer of yeah, don't do that. Then it hit the HNQ and I now have a new highest upvoted answer.
Hopefully it will fall off the HNQ soon and it will disappear into obscurity and we will have another piece of evidence that the HNQ does not really promote good stuff.
The only real downside is a few users (including me) picked up 400 points of easy rep.
Overall I don't think the question, or my answer, or any of the other answers is a farce. I think it is simply the voting that got out of hand because of the HNQ.
Also a better answer would have addressed the legal issues and GDPR and the use of first name, last initial and providing the class year, and then probably concluded that it is not acceptable to shoot people.
I asdked "is it X or Y?" And your answer is "Yes"...
@einpoklum and I stand by my answer ;) It kind of is farcical and it kind of is not farcical.
The answer to the question is demonstrably not an obvious or trivial one, given the site that was referred to and the frequency with which one sees academics mocking the silly answers of their students.
Moreover, I'm not aware of any reason for which a question being a simple one justifies closing it.
Sure, it's not the best moment in the history of the site, but I don't see any reason to get worked up about getting rid of it.
I gues it must be the best moment in history if it gets a +309 upvote answer. I'm gonna go on math.stackexchange.com next and ask "My Professor said 2+2 = 5, is that wrong?" ...
@einpoklum as I said - the answer is demonstrably not obvious to all.
@einpoklum Well, Math.SE does have this highly upvoted question...
@Anyon Thanks, that question was a lot of fun :)
@einpoklum in certain forms of math, high values of two indeed would equal five.
| Stack Exchange | 2025-03-21T12:54:48.575101 | 2018-12-04T19:56:45 | {
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4729 | A user is pushing personal beliefs about legality without referencing debate
In accepted answer to this question:
A free papers search engine
@Allure states that:
Your friend is probably thinking of Sci-Hub. Warning: it's likely illegal, including to use the service (as opposed to uploading stuff onto it), in most jurisdictions. If it's not already illegal in your jurisdiction, the trend is towards illegality (i.e. lawsuit after lawsuit has been ruled on, and they are usually in favor of the copyright holder).
The first claim is qualified with "likely"; but - @Allure knows this not to be the case, since we've debated it before. He should, at least, have mentioned that his claim is contested (and not marginally; to my limited knowledge, the opposite of his claim is the truth - downloading from Sci-Hub for the purposes of research is likely legal in most places in the world).
The second claim is a factual one. I admit I have not made any sort of legal survey, but I have not seen evidence that this is the case; and given the other dispute, I doubt such evidence exists.
Now, I can comment on the answer, but it would be the 10th or 15th comment, while the answer itself - other than the claims of illegality - is useful, and is the accepted answer.
What should I / can I do, seeing how I believe readers are being misinformed?
Frankly, I think this question just reduces to "What do I do if I think an accepted answer is wrong", and cag51's answer is the standard response. I don't think it was necessary to include all the details or your arguments; it comes across as an attempt to provoke Allure and continue your debate here on meta, with more attention. (And as we see from their answer below, it worked).
@NateEldredge: There's being wrong, and there's misrepresentation of an argument; and it's more significant when it comes to what's legal; and even more significant when even a reference is not given to a previous argument. I think it's not the same situation. I actually didn't think Allure would dignify me with an answer - after all, he completely ignored me and my position in the linked-to question. You'll also note I have not continued my debate with him (i.e. not commented on his answer here nor in chat etc.)
What should I / can I do, seeing how I believe readers are being misinformed?
You could post a competing, self-contained answer that includes your point of view and references. I realize that late answers are at a huge disadvantage in the voting, but they can still be useful.
Your other option, which you mention, is to add a comment. Readers are more likely to keep reading if they know that the first answer is controversial.
Beyond that:
Moderators do not delete bad answers. We generally delete answers and comments for procedural reasons, not substantive reasons. And mechanically, there is no way for us to change the answers' order or score.
In this case, once the debate reached a certain length, a flag was automatically triggered (this happened after you created this post). For this procedural reason, I moved the discussion to chat and added a comment summarizing the debate (and linking this post).
My personal opinion:
I have no problem with this answer. I appreciated the "likely" caveat, and it seems self-evident that there might be legal issues associated with accessing copyrighted, non-free information without paying.
Indeed, there are so many jurisdictions, and things are changing so quickly, that I don't think anyone could say with any confidence that it is definitely legal or illegal generally. Perhaps it may have been better for OP to say that it "may" be illegal rather than "likely" being illegal, but this is starting to split hairs.
My only quibble about the answer is that the statement about the alleged "trend" toward illegality is unsubstantiated.
Agree that the alleged trend is the more serious issue. But he's still hiding that fact that his view is contested, and that's also inappropriate. Anyway, posting essentially the same answer but just changing the legality claim seems too "foaming at the mouth" IMO; I have posted a comment, but few people will notice it.
... well, I like what you did with the comments on the answer. That's useful and satisfactory (in my view). But - why not put it in your answer?
@einpoklum Note that there are many unsubstantiated claims around this site. Too bad, because one wouldn't expect this from a site of academics, but that's it. Other sites, like Skeptics SE are more strict about missing references, and answers with unsubstantiated claims are usually deleted. We don't have such a strict policy and we usually don't delete such kind of answers. Whether we should have a stricter policy may be debated.
I try to remember to qualify my answers with "in my experience" or "Having worked in places X Y and Z I can say", but I think I often fail to do that.
@einpoklum Anyway, I've also added a "needs citations" post notice.
@einpoklum - glad that you found my solution satisfactory. Not sure what you mean by "why not put it in your answer" -- my second bullet does describe what I did with the comments (if that's what you meant).
@cag51: I meant, "getting a moderator to move the comments to chat and say something about it" is something a user can do about this situation.
You should vote on the answer.
Is this a joke or just a massive troll? einpoklum knows very well that his answer has been refuted, yet he's trying to claim that there's a debate.
Analyze einpoklum's answer for a moment. There are two points. The first says section 60 (c) allows the use of SciHub, which was explicitly treated and refuted by phoog in the Law SE question. Plus it ignores the other articles of law referenced in DPenner1's answer. Just because X doesn't break one law doesn't make it legal if it breaks other laws. The other point is an outright appeal to emotion. Wikipedia puts it very well, appeals to emotion "[are] a logical fallacy characterized by the manipulation of the recipient's emotions in order to win an argument, especially in the absence of factual evidence." einpoklum knows the evidence is against him, hence he's appealing to emotion.
einpoklum further goes to claim that the trend towards illegality is only "alleged", when DPenner's answer explicitly cites two examples that illustrate the trend: ACI Adam and Filmspeler. ACI Adam ruled that the private copying exception must only apply to lawful sources, which SciHub is not. Filmspeler ruled that streaming copyrighted content is no more legal than downloading it, which means that even if one could view SciHub papers without downloading them, it is still illegal. Both these rulings closed loopholes that could've been used to argue that SciHub is legal.
This entire affair is very much like evolution vs. intelligent design. It's well-established that evolution is a much better explanation than ID, but ID defenders try to claim that there is debate and so we should be fair and "teach the controversy".
I am disappointed the mods are not deleting einpoklum's attempts at misinformation. Yes, mods do not delete bad answers, but by attempting to make an illegal act seem legal, einpoklum goes beyond "bad answer" to being actively dangerous.
As always, you mis-quote and misrepresent.
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4694 | Should one post two (conflicting) answers to a question?
In answer to a recent question, a user has posted two different (conflicting and quite short) answers. I'm wondering if this is recommended behavior.
The question has the form
What is the best way to X?
and the two answers are distinct suggestions. When asked about this, the user's explanation is:
They're incompatible: The OP asked for the best. I have two candidates, so I gave them both.
I would have expected that if one has different ideas or possible suggestions, these should be combined into a single answer. The possible problems that I see with posting two answers are:
It's confusing. If I am a reader or the OP, I wonder, "these answers seem really different -- which one does the answerer really agree with? Which one is right?"
It could be used to farm reputation. I highly doubt this is the intention in this case, and this is probably not a very effective way to farm reputation, but I feel weird about upvoting both answers, even though I may agree with both, because that is double the amount of reputation that would normally be given to an answer that I agree with.
Question: What does the community think?
1. Is it recommended to post two answers in a situation like this?
2. If I agree with both should I upvote both?
For reference, here is the post I am referring to.
I don't post this an answer because I haven't yet given much thought to the problem. As far as I recall, there's no official guidance on this kind of situation, but I agree with you that it's suboptimal and potentially confusing. For what concerns how to vote, recall that voting is a personal choice: if you think that both are useful, you can certainly vote both if this is your wish.
For what it's worth, I flagged both as Not An Answer (up to the mods to decide on that one..) and downvoted them both. Not so much because they are different distinct answers from the same person, but because neither of them explains the thought process or even bothers to help OP distinguish between them. I upvoted the third answer because it does.
I don't see a problem. Reputation is useless and random anyway and a comment takes away the confusion people could or could not gave the answers
An upvote to the question means yea and a downvote no, right?
Where is the duplicate question?
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913 | Font weight for votes/answers/views on question list is too light
I really like the new design, but I think the font weight for the vote/answer/view counts in the question list is a little light. This is particularly pronounced when the question is marked as answered. Here’s a screenshot:
Maybe it’s just me, but I find that “1” quite difficult to read. I think a slightly heavier font weight (at least for answered questions, if nothing else) is in order.
For comparison, here’s a similar screenshot from TeX.sx:
I find those counts much easier to read at a glance.
It also looks like that green box is supposed to be a bit taller, to add a bit of padding on the top of the “1”, like the three other sides.
Safari and Chrome, OS X
IE has the same issue.
I would add to this, the contrast is not so great for the scores of related questions on the right hand pane ->.
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4056 | 2018 Community Moderator Election Results
Academia's second moderator election has come to a close, the votes have been tallied, and the moderator is:
They'll be joining the existing crew shortly — please thank them for volunteering, and share your assistance and advice with them as they learn the ropes!
For details on how the voting played out, you can download the election results here, or view a summary report online.
Congratulations, @Wrzlprmftl. Next time I hope to see Massimo as moderator too.
why can't more candidates become mod, and why don't old ones be replaced? (I just ask about the system, not saying who deserves who don't)
@Ooker: We don't require moderators to run for re-election because moderators sometimes need to make unpopular decisions. Generally we run elections as needed when the site grows or an existing mod steps down. It's not unusual for excellent candidates to not get elected. However, it's not unusual for them to get elected the next time we select moderators.
@JonEricson so the election doesn't run annually? And it's the algorithm to select which candidates success, not because only one can be chosen at a time, is that correct?
@Ooker No, elections are not run annually. In fact, the previous one here was in 2014. If you look at the election page you can see (on the right) that there was just one position available, and that's why only one moderator was selected.
Non c'è due senza tre (poor man's translation: from two follows three): An Italian saying that welcomes your well-deserved third moderator appointment Wrzlprmft! Congratulations and keep up the good work!
Congrats Wrzlprmft. It’s well deserved and I think Academia is in excellent hands.
Congratulations! I wish you a good moderatorship.
Congrats Wrzlprmft.
Welcome to Academia cleanup zone. Academians are waiting for....
It’s not that bad. This is a very orderly community.
@Wrzlprmft so we hire you for nothing? :P
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4381 | On-topicness of the content of research when the subject of research is academia itself
This question asks about studies about peer reviewing. It was voted to close as off-topic and one of the close voters gave the argument:
This reads as if you want people here to do your research on a particular topic. That would put it out of bounds.
I understand this to refer to closure about the content of research – which we usually consider off-topic here. However, here the content of research is academia itself.
My question is: Should such questions about sociological or other research whose subject is academia be off-topic or do we make an exception for them?
That's a good way to frame the issue. I now understand better why my question could be seen as off-topic.
Note that if the question was about how long it takes, on average, to review a typical article, I would consider it on topic, though, of course, answers would differ by field. But answers to that question can actually be useful guidance.
Not on the same topic, but I don't understand closure of this question:https://academia.stackexchange.com/q/121976/75368
They should be on-topic.
At the end of the day we exclude questions about the content of research because academics in general (i.e., the community of this site) are not interested in such questions or able to evaluate answers to them – this is better done by subject experts who most often have their own sites. Also these sites taken together receive far more questions per day than we do; the questions this community is about would drown in others.
However, in the case about research about academia, we also are the subject-specific community (maybe together with others like History of Science and Mathematics, Psychology and Neuroscience, a hypothetical Sociology SE, etc.). Therefore the above issues do not arise. Therefore, such questions should be an exception of the rule that the content of research is off-topic.
I generally agree, but it only goes so far. I think at some point questions about the nuances of the field of Education (the academic field that produces a lot of the research about academia) eventually become off-topic once they are no longer directly relevant to academics in general.
My general concern with this is that while we are the community, we are a biased subset of it. Representation from bioscience and the humanities tends to be somewhat sparse here, so I think there remains some question as "Are we qualified to answer this for the broader concept of academia?"
@Fomite: But that’s in an issue that goes beyond this question, isn’t it? (Also, the biosciences do not seem to be so badly represented here; humanities on the other hand clearly are.)
@Wrzlprmft It definitely goes beyond this question, but I think it does touch on it, and our justifications for if this is on or off topic.
I agree with @Wrzlprmft, but I would distinguish between "content of research" meaning results and "content of research" meaning methodology/approach/the process of research. I think the opposition to the question linked in the OP wrongly conflates the prohibition on the "content of research" meaning methodology with asking for a referenced answer (i.e., "results").
I think questions about methodology etc related to academic research should still be off-topic and think this is consistent with @StrongBad's comment:
I think at some point questions about the nuances of the field of Education (the academic field that produces a lot of the research about academia) eventually become off-topic once they are no longer directly relevant to academics in general.
Asking for results of academic research should be on-topic and has a tag reference-request. Asking about how you should do research into academia, looking for topics to research within academia, etc, should remain off-topic as it relates to the process of doing research.
I didn't want to go as far as your last sentence. I think a question like how do I evaluate if my new teaching technique works, straddles the line between result and how to. I also think it should probably be on topic.
@StrongBad Thanks for the clarification of what you intended. I could see my opinion wavering depending on the specific question. The types of questions I mostly had in mind were questions about e.g. statistics or survey methodology that could certainly be applied to questions about academia but still don't fit here. I think a question about how to evaluate a teaching technique is at best a gray area unless it's closely related to peculiarities about academia.
Actually, you are not correct about whether I "conflated" the two aspects about research, or not.
Unfortunately the tag wiki for reference-request isn't very helpful. How "specific" is the query here? The question reads as if the OP is looking for a few lines in a literature search on a topic. Whether the topic has to do with academia or not is, to me, irrelevant. The question seems to be trying to avoid closure for being "opinion based" the earlier one was. However, the question isn't based on a problem that someone in academia has. Answers will solve no problem.
A good question (or answer) on this site is, IMO, one that a reader can return to in three years and say "Yes, I can use that.". That isn't the case at all here unless you are researching a specific topic and need that lit search.
The question at hand, and sadly others on the current active list, are without such consequence or future usability. On learning that the "average" academic spends, say, three hours per week doing reviewing, my response would be (a) "That's interesting." and (b) "So what?". The standard deviation of such a result would be so large as to make any "average" meaningless. For myself, I either don't do any reviewing at all for months on end, or do it extensively for many hours over the course of a month depending on conference scheduling. But that is about the specifics of this question, not the general situation.
The help center says: "You should only ask practical, answerable questions based on actual problems that you face." I don't see any problem here other than a specific research question.
I still think it should be closed.
About the tag itself.
If I write a question of the form "I once saw some research on the significance about Mumbly-Peg among pre teen boys, but lost the reference. Can you help?", it would be a valid reference-request. If I ask for "I'm interested in the significance of Mumbly-Peg among pre teen boys. Is there research on that?" it would be, in my view something else. Specifically, it would read like asking others to do my research for me.
The reference-request tag wiki needs some work and its problems have been discussed before: https://academia.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/3441/how-should-the-reference-request-tag-be-used
Given that the question was A) seemingly motivated by some more poorly-constructed questions from other people, indicating that there is some broad interest in this topic rather than just individual curiosity, and given that the question was B) self-answered with a community wiki answer by the OP, I think most of these criticisms are misplaced.
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4322 | Revamping the on-topic section of the help centre
What happened
I reworked the on-topic section of the help centre to make it more helpful for its intended audience (new users), more specifically:
I referred to FAQs or other relevant Meta discussions where appropriate.
I added more guidance for some cases.
I moved some things around and included headings for better readability.
I mentioned some common off-topic and on-topic cases about which there seems to be a clear consensus.
I removed some convoluted wording around undergraduate and graduate students that are obsolete since one year or longer.
In my opinion, none of these changes should disagree with our definition of scope (as elaborated on Meta).
This question
Please have a look and post an answer if you disagree with any changes or to suggest improvements.
Previous version (for reference)
What topics can I ask about here?
This site is for academics of all levels—from aspiring graduate and professional students to senior researchers—as well as anyone in or interested in research-related or research-adjacent fields.
If you have a question about...
Life as a graduate student, postdoctoral researcher, university professor
Transitioning from undergraduate to graduate researcher
Inner workings of research departments
Requirements and expectations of academicians
University-level pedagogy
... then you're in the right place!
However, please do not ask questions about
Undergraduate admissions
Undergraduate life and culture (sports, nightlife, dorms, leaving the nest, etc.)
Suggestions or recommendations for a university, journal, or research topic (a "shopping question")
Preparation for a non-academic career ("What graduate degree will help me get a job as X?")
The content of your research, rather than the process of doing research
Please also see: What types of questions should I avoid asking?
New users (even users familiar with the Stack Exchange format) are invited to read our introduction to the site before posting.
Academic customs and procedures vary greatly across countries, universities, fields, subfields, workgroups and so on. Please state your question with as much context as you can to help ensure that you’ll receive a directed, relevant answer.
Can I ask questions about my specific situation?
You should not ask a question that will help only you, but rather a question that will help people like you. If your question is so limited as to be useful only to you, consider broadening the scope so others can learn from your question as well. As a general rule, if you’re asking about a particular institution, course, or journal, it’s likely your question is too limited in scope. Try to extract the fundamental question from the specific problem at hand.
Please look around to see if your question has been asked before. It’s also okay to ask and answer your own question.
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Looks very good to me!
the new version is orders of magnitude better.
The phrase "studying and teaching on the academic level" is not grammatical. I suggest "studying and teaching at the university level."
To nitpick, academic level is clearly grammatical; it may not be idiomatic though. Still, the Internet yields many examples of this term. I deliberately did not use university level because it excludes other institutions of higher learning (hence academic, because it can mean pertaining to an institution of higher learning), like colleges or the German Fachhochschulen. I could be precise by saying studying and teaching at institutions of higher learning, but I would guess that this can be easily misinterpreted (“How is a high school not an institution of *higher learning?”).
@Wrzlprmft "I deliberately did not use university level because it excludes other institutions of higher learning" That's not a sensible interpretation. But you could say "tertiary" instead. You missed the main point, which is that teaching is performed "at" a level, not "on" a level.
That's not a sensible interpretation. – I am not sure I agree, but most importantly, this is a relevant interpretation by readers we have to consider, be it correct or not. — But you could say "tertiary" instead. – Tertiary can include vocational training (like training to be a barber) depending on whom you ask. — You missed the main point, which is that teaching is performed "at" a level, not "on" a level. – indeed.
I changed the respective point to “studying and teaching at institutions of higher education (universities, colleges, …)”. I hope this is sufficiently clear. I am still open for better suggestions though.
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4706 | Can we reopen “Is this statement on doing a PhD in Germany as a foreigner accurate for mathematics?”?
Is this statement on doing a PhD in Germany as a foreigner accurate for mathematics? was closed for being primarily opinion-based. It actually failed to be closed in the close queue, receiving three leave open votes, and was only closed from votes cast outside the queue.
While this question is on a series of claims, which would make an opinionated answer, it asks for their correctness, which is mostly objective. Most answers to this question (including one by me) do focus on this factual correctness and why such anecdotal claims are problematic. While there is still some subjectivity left, I would consider this a case of good subjective and it the question and most of its answers are arguably less subjective than many on this site.
I therefore propose to reopen it. (I cannot push this question to the reopen queue, because my vote would immediately reopen it.)
My view is that the OP ostensibly asked "Is this really the case for the mathematics PhD programs in Germany as a foreign national?" when the quora rant/venting makes sweeping general statements some of which are clearly not applicable to mathematics program(me)s. I am not sure what the valuable question would be, that the reopened question should be edited to become
I would suggest that we edit and reopen.
I suspect some of the close votes may have been induced by the vague title and long quote. It seems almost like a "writing prompt," which may have rubbed people the wrong way. Editing may address this concern.
But it is clearly an interesting question. While there are subjective elements (and German academia is a big place), I think academics familiar with the German system could provide "expert analysis" of the claims. So, it seems at least as answerable as many of our questions.
Edit: I have taken a stab at editing the question.
I'm mostly ambivalent about it, but yes, the long quote is a bit of an issue...I really don't want this site or any other SE site to start to become a "let's fact-check Quora and Reddit" venue. Though I'm a bit torn because at least it's sourced rather than "I've heard this rumor, is it true?"
@BryanKrause I personally feel like +100 upvotes in the original post also speaks some volume. Unlike a rumor, it is on a public forum and is recieved mostly positively.
@Boaty That probably reflects the HNQ so it's the reception of the broader SE community not the local Academia one (and the broader one can only upvote not downvote or close). The local one chose to close.
@BoatyMcboatface Did you not see that many of those points are probably not applicable to mathematics which is what you seemed to be asking about?
@BryanKrause Isn't Boaty referring to the Quora post? Personally I have no knowledge of and no interest in Quora so I cannot speak to the voting dynamics or how seriously one should judge the rating of questions
@YemonChoi Oh oops, you're probably right
And I think students who experienced the German system can also provide useful information
@BoatyMcboatface Is my point making sense? I apologize if I am repeating myself but I brought this up several times in comments to your original question or on the answers to it, and you still seem much more preoccupied with the high score this Quora post received than with the maths-specific issues I was pointing out
@YemonChoi your tone felt condesending and I didn't want to engage. Here is what I think. Your comments in OP seem to imply I believe the statement. I don't. Yet I am willing to give the benefit of the doubt and ask other people for perspective. I am not going to brush off someone's comment especially when it is well recieved in its own bubble. Afterall, every place does things differently. Some places do very stupid things. I can very easily be unaware of certain aspects of academia in Germany. And although some aspects might not apply to mathematics in literal sense it can apply in spirit.
@BoatyMcboatface In that case I wish you well and I will not attempt to persuade you to approach that Quora post more critically. I will only point out that it was you yourself who asked how much of it applied to mathematics, and the point about professors acting as exploitative lab managers was clearly not applicable to mathematics, not because mathematicians are somehow more virtuous, but because they don't act as lab managers
I lean towards thinking that the question should remain closed, though I could see it going either way.
The question has some positives and some negatives. On the positive side, it inspired answers with excellent information. On the negative side, it is fairly broad, argumentative, and calls for opinions.
In an ideal world, I would suggest that it remain closed (as too broad), and replaced by multiple separate questions, where each question asks about the accuracy of one factual claim.
Currently, the question comes off to me as "here's a long rant I read, is it really true?". The text we're asked to respond to contains both factual claims and judgements/conclusions/opinions, without separating the two out. Because of the mix of the two, I don't know how to answer the question ("is this really the case?") objectively. One can respond to the factual claims objectively, but responding to the opinions and conclusions seems like it calls for opinions.
Ideally, I think it would be more constructive to separate out the specific factual claims made in that argument, and then ask specifically about each of those in a separate question, and leave judgements and advice and opinions out of it, and then ask people who answered with concrete evidence to answer those individual questions. That's in an ideal world where doing all of that work is feasible and successfully leads to all the information being preserved in separate questions. I don't know whether that will actually happen.
I should also share a personal bias: I tend to be wary of posts with a strongly-expressed argumentative position, that ask us to respond to that position; I'm not sure they make a great prompt for a great question. So, it's possible I might be reacting to that aspect of the question as much as anything. It probably shouldn't affect the decision of whether to close or not, but it probably does affect me.
That's just my view. I don't see this as clear-cut. I can understand how people would come to different views. For instance, given the outstanding information contained in the answers, I could appreciate a view that the positives outweigh the negatives. I could also appreciate a view that says that Academia.SE regularly deals with calls for opinions and advice, and as long as they are supported by evidence, that is acceptable.
+1: I agree with most of this, especially because I don't think we should encourage any trend of "here's a long rant I read, is it really true?".
The question is about someone's opinion, but the answer (which is no, the opinion overgeneralizes) is not opinion. So technically it is not off-topic.
I suggest down-voting the question for trolling. It is implausible that someone experienced with PhD programs in Germany would make the claims stated in the question, that overgeneralizes that severely, unless they were trolling, immature, or excessively angry.
No, it actually isn't implausible. If a person has had those experiences, as the last answer to the post suggests at least two have, then they actually are even more likely to overgeneralize. After all, one person often has only one PhD experience from one prospective, and if they've seen a few others with similar experiences, they may very well overgeneralize.
An I guess "excessive" anger is completely understandable. Imagine one has turned down other opportunities to start a fruitless PhD that puts them through the hardships described in the post. They deserve every bit of that anger!
I don't agree. Someone experienced with PhD programs would have critical thinking skills, and therefore be aware that their experience is not the same as everyone's experience in all of Germany. It's a troll or immature.
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1967 | Do we want a canonical question for general journal workflows?
We often get questions from people who are not aware how a journal works and do not understand some step in the editiorial process¹, think some step takes too long² or are just very worried³. We also get some questions where a step in the editorial process took ridiculously long⁴. (e.g., a month for initial quality check) or questions asking for expected times for each step for a specific journal⁴ (10 k only link).
The problem with these questions is that we can answer most of them only by reiterating one of the following:
We cannot possibly predict the editorial decision.
Depending on the field, publisher and journal, that’s normal / outrageously long.
The status message probably means that [the editor has to evaluate the reviews].
As different journals or editorial systems use different status messages, and review times vary greatly across fields, this leads to questions that aren’t exactly duplicates of each other but could all be duplicates of a non-existing master question. I here propose to create such a canonical question.
We may use it as a duplicate for questions such as the above, which does not only avoid us dealing with such questions but also helps the asker. It may keep some askers from asking in the first place or help them to focus their question on what is not covered by the canonical question.
This question and answer shall be a community wiki and cover:
What is the typical workflow of a journal?
How are the individual steps of this workflow named in different editiorial systems?
What are the typical durations of individual steps, if they can be given at all? How do they roughly depend on the field?
This is a feature-request, i.e., you can indicate approval or opposition by voting on the question.
I upvoted this, but don't you really propose 3 questions here? I think all three need canonical answers we can point to since we see versions of them frequently, but I think you might have to split them into 3 different questions.
@BillBarth: Technically you are right. But grouping the respective information by these three questions separates the information in a way that I consider very difficult to read and not helpful. For example, the reader should be able to have the following information in close proximity: There is a step in which the journal staff controls whether the manuscript is not a total mess; this step is called initial quality check or technical check or …; this step is usually finished in a few work days.
Yeah, I understood the point. We just might have to violate one of our own rules in order to post the question. Seems a little misleading or likely to be thrown back at us by people who get their questions closed for asking multiple questions. I thought I'd bring it up before we committed.
@BillBarth: It’s totally acceptable to ask closely related questions at once, where it can be expected that those who answer one question also answer the other ones. The problem arises if the questions are so distinct that it becomes expected that people answer only one of them and thus answers are not comparable anymore.
Agreed. Just wanted to be careful. We close a fair number of questions for asking too many questions. :)
@Wrzlprmft - I'll rewrite the comment. If someone is interested in reading canonical answers, how would they go about finding them?
@aparente001: You can search for questions that are a community wiki (not all of them are canonical questions); you can use this data-explorer query to find popular targets of duplicates or you can ask a meta question to collect them and generate an overview.
@Wrzlprmft - Thanks for the community wiki suggestion. That is something I have not explored at all yet. Searching for duplicates does not, emphatically appeal to me personally, but thanks for posting the tool for others. Your meta question idea -- I tried that and and fared miserably -- maybe I didn't do it right? See http://meta.english.stackexchange.com/questions/7090/what-are-the-commonly-accepted-guidelines-specific-to-this-site-2015
I created the question and an answer as proposed:
What does the typical workflow of a journal look like?
I think that this actual realisation demonstrates that splitting this question would not be beneficial as it does not increase the additional information on alternative names and durations do not diminish the readability and can be easily skipped by readers who are not interested in them.
Please contribute by improving question and answer and in particular by filling the list of alternative names of steps in the journal workflow.
I agree with the comments that there are multiple topics in the proposed question. In this case, I think this is not only fine, but actually desirable.
Because this question will deviate from our general "policies" in a number of ways, that is why having a meta discussion first is helpful. There is nothing wrong with breaking our own rules when we as a group want.
People will always point to exceptions and use it to justify why their question is a good fit. Hopefully we will be able to steer then to meta posts that will explain how things work.
We can also put a small disclaimer in the question explaining that it is a “special question”.
I am also in favor of separate questions with links to one another, as suggested by Energy Numbers, but for a different reason.
I think pointing a user to a canonical question whose answer is very long, with many parts, is confusing for users. It's a little bit like if a student asks me a question about the Fourier transform, and in answer, I hand them the signal processing textbook. I would prefer to hand them a copy of just the relevant chapter, possibly with an additional comment noting the most relevant subsection...
I always feel a little bad pointing a user with a very focused graduate admissions question to the lengthy canonical "admissions process" question, for this reason.
Put them as three separate questions. Put links in each, to the others.
Then go through old, related questions, and where appropriate ruthlessly close them as duplicates of the new canonical questions.
Creating a triple-question in one would create a broken window. It would linger and create problems from then on, until we relented and broke it up into separate questions. So let's just start with separate questions in the first place, and cut out all of the intervening nonsense.
No amount of disclaimers about "special questions" or "unique exemptions" will prevent a multi-question question from being cited by others as a precedent. And they'd be absolutely right to do so: a precedent is exactly what it would be.
We already frequently get multiple questions in one. Let's not encourage it, and let's not justify it.
I do not see this triple question as a broken window, rather, I see it as a round ornate decorative window that we are calling attention to via the CW designation.
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4493 | How far should we go when editing somebody else’s question to prevent closure?
This is a follow-up to Should we reject an edit that fundamentally changes an off topic question on translating books?, where Buffy remarked:
Let me note that there have been other questions here that have been edited to change (IMO) the intent as it seemed to be expressed by the OP. I think that such things need to be handled consistently. […]
I concur that it would be good to establish a guideline regarding this to obtain consistency and thus I am asking:
How far should we go when editing a question to prevent closure?
This is not about removing surplus questions when multiple questions are asked at once. (If desired, this could be addressed in yet another meta question.)
This is about questions that have received (on-topic) answers already. We already discussed this case here:
Preserving 'original intent' in closed questions?
Should we edit questions to match how they were answered?
Proposed Guideline
I think two good lines to draw are:
Answers to the edited question must still be potentially useful for the asker.
The context of the question should not be distorted, i.e., no information should be added or changed. (Removing irrelevant details and including information from comments by the asker is fine though.)
Rationale
The main thing that distinguishes the asker from other users is that they can accept an answer that helped them and provide further information if needed. If the edit is so drastic that this cannot be expected anymore, it is going too far. In this case the editor should ask a new question instead, since they are the master of the new question rather than the original asker.
Another take on this is that the author’s underlying intent should be preserved, by which I mean the problem that the asker wants to solve and not the question they are asking about it.
Examples
If somebody asks a question shopping for a thing, it is fine to edit it to ask about how to find the thing (if the resulting question is sufficiently focused, no duplicate, etc.). Answers to this question still help the asker. The underlying intent (“I want help finding a thing.”) is preserved.
If the asker describes a situation, but fails to ask an actual question about it, it is acceptable to make an educated guess about what the asker wants to know and edit it in.
Changing the situation of a question on workplace etiquette in industry to an analogous one about etiquette in academia is not acceptable. Answers to the latter cannot be expected to help the asker and can be even misleading since academia is different from industry. (Instead flag such questions for migration to The Workplace, if they are otherwise fine.)
It is not acceptable to “build a boat” from a question, i.e., to add “in academia” (or equivalent), if we have reason to believe that the asker is not in academia.
That's a good guideline, and also agrees with what's been discussed on the main meta in the past: "can you turn the post into a useful question that will get the answer the author wants?"
I broadly agree, but I see "take an educated guess about what the asker wants to know" as too low a bar. If it is clear what the intent of a question is (even if that's not strictly what was asked) then I support editing to clarify. IMHO if there's some level of guesswork involved then it should be put on hold and the OP asked to clarify.
@Flyto: I have no problem with writing instead: “if you can reasonably sure what the asker wants to know, edit it in”. However, I do not see think this is a big difference. Every edit we talk about here is inevitably a guess to some extent and educated guesswork is the best we have.
Let me comment on my actions in editing a question that started this conversation. The OP of the question asked about facilitating the translation of a popular, but non-academic, book. The question was closed - rightly so. Perhaps the OP asked the question thinking that academics could probably provide answers about getting translations done.
This is the current version of the question:I want a book to be translated into my native language?
I then changed the question to one specifying the translation of an important academic book (but unnamed). My purpose was less to "save" the question, but to elicit answers (such as my own) which would actually help the OP with his/her question as well as those with a more on-topic issue of translation. My thought at the time was that any answer to the new question would probably also be valid as an answer to the question originally posed.
What I did wan't exactly a generalization so as to cover academia, but a question whose answers would likely be broader than either specific question.
But, I doubt that my edits would have been rolled back had I just done a pure generalization that covered both the OP's concern and typical academic concerns. Or at least, not rolled back as readily. I might, I suppose, just have removed the specific series title mentioned by the OP and left it at "book" or "book that I consider important". Would the same objection be made, I wonder?
So, in some ways, it may be more important to ask "What is useful here?" rather than to be too "picky" about details. If my question was useful, both to the OP and to others, then it might have been ok to leave it. Or at least have a conversation in the Ivory Tower first.
But note that I'm not arguing with the decisions made, but am interested in guidance for the future.
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5146 | Rename [errors-erratum] to [errata] with respective synonyms
Currently we have a tag errors-erratum with erratum being the sole synonym.
I see no reason to have tag with such a convoluted name and not use the synonym system for this.
I thus propose to:
Rename the tag to errata.
Create synonyms errors or maybe erratum pointing to errata.
Is there any problem or better solution I am missing?
I think the only potential problem is that “errors” might be misused for other types of mistakes, rather than for mistakes in publishing. Your solution of errata with the synonym erratum (no mention of “errors”) avoids this potential problem.
Mind that (at least in what I proposed), [errors] would still be a synonym pointing to [errata]. However, when entering tags, the asker will only see [errata], pretty much as they always see [errors-erratum] now.
@Wrzlprmft Isn't the way synonyms work that someone will start writing "errors" and tag their question with it, and then that will silently convert to "errata"? That might not work well if they had a different type of error in mind.
It’s not really silent. Assuming the proposed change, if you type in errors, you get offered/shown [errata] with a note “also: errors”. If you ignore this, and leave errors standing, it would get converted once you submit the question. (Except for the last step, best test it yourself.) This slightly lowers the threshold in comparison to the existing situation where just leaving errors in the tag field would alert you that you are about to create a new tag (and, if applicable, that you lack the reputation for that).
@Wrzlprmft Got it; as I very rarely ask questions I've mostly encountered this through users who have been very confused at why a tag they didn't think they added ended up on their question.
@BryanKrause: Those must be really typing without looking (or without Internet connection).
@Wrzlprmft I just tested this out, and it seems clear to me where people would get confused. Let's say you are writing "errors" because that's the word that came to mind when you're thinking about mistakes on an exam, you see "errata" appear below but you don't select that tag, after all, your question isn't about "errata", so you don't click it. Then you'll see "[errors x]" as the tag, so it seems great, you've got the errors tag you wanted. Except...then you submit, and it will later say "errata". Yet you never chose that tag; it may have showed up, but you specifically did not select it.
@BryanKrause: I see. I made a feature request on this.
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1495 | Create a predefined closing reason for questions about the contents of an academic discipline?
Since I obtained closing priviledges and can thus use custom close reasons, I find myself typing the following sentence on a daily basis (and before, I flagged questions to which this would have applied regularly):
This question appears to be off-topic because it is about the content of an academic discipline and not about academia itself.
It thus seems to be useful to me to have a predefined close reason for such cases which then can also be used to give the askers some help at hand where to ask their question (if at all).
Personally, I am in favor of rethinking all of our close reasons. Some are underutilized, some are badly misutilized, and there are some that I think are conspicuously missing.
I think we should start a CW thread here on meta in which each answer has:
proposed text of a custom close reason
a description of the kind of questions it would apply to
some examples to demonstrate the need for this close reason
links to any discussion threads on meta relevant to this close reason.
We can post the existing current close reasons, as well as any new ones that people would like to propose. Upvotes on the answers (after a sufficiently long period for discussion) could indicate which close reasons the community currently finds most important and applicable.
Also, if we want to request an additional custom close reason, the meta thread I'm proposing would position us to do so. The SE team likes to see discussion on site meta and demonstrated need before approving such requests.
I think such a CW question would be useful, but it might be cleaner if each answer/close reason had an associated discussion question to hash out issues.
@StrongBad The existing ones (and some proposed new ones) already have such one or more discussion threads that could link to, new threads could be raised for brand new close reasons as needed.
@StrongBad see edit :)
We can only have 3 custom off-topic close reasons. They are currently:
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?
Questions about problems facing undergraduate students are off-topic unless they can also apply to graduate or post-graduate academicians as described in What topics can I ask about here?
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.
So if you want a new reasons, it comes at the cost of deleting one of the current reasons (or begging the SE team to create more for us). The first and third close reasons are similar, but a previous discussion suggested we liked it that way. At that time, there was no proposed third custom reason, so it might be worth revisiting that discussion. While it would be desirable to know the usage of the custom close reasons, usage data are unavailable.
I see, I thought that restriction only applied to Betas.
The first and third reason seem somewhat redundant, though. But that’s indeed another topic altogether.
I agree... I don't think I use #1 very frequently. @StrongBad, can you supply statistics on how often the three custom reasons are used?
As I stated in StrongBad's post, I'd happily ditch the "undergraduate-specific" tag. Make people who want to close enter it in manually.
Rethinking the situation, custom close reasons do not only serve to have more informative messages and making closing easier; they also reduce unnecessary discussion by saying “Look, we have a predefined close reason and a discussion thread etc.” Therefore, as the closures of the questions we are talking about here are rarely disputed, I would not prefer to ditch any of the existing close reasons for the proposed one. (I am fine with a fourth reason, however.)
"We can only have 3 custom off-topic close reasons." Well, until we get more: according to the links you provided, some other sites have more than 3. (YMMV, but I am of the opinion that if a site about ubuntu is broad enough to have 4, a site about academia certainly should be.) I don't think it's a question of "begging": why not just ask for it?
@PeteL.Clark that is an interesting point. I think you are right that there may be an easy argument to make based on breadth. I was thinking in terms of number of questions where we are clearly small.
I suggest for the text of the close reason:
Questions about the content of an academic discipline are off-topic here. They may be on-topic on a Stack Exchange site pertaining to that discipline, though.
There are SE sites relevant to academic disciplines besides for the ones in the science section, e.g. Quantitative Finance, History, Signal Processing and Data Science, etc. I think it would be better to just link to http://stackexchange.com/sites
I chose all science sites as some sort of trade-off, because it is applicable to most such questions in my experience and at the same time not overwhelming the user with 300 sites to find the right one from.
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1689 | Burninate the [study] tag
The tag wiki excerprt for study reads:
Selecting a field of study, preparing for exams or assignments, or pertaining to designing research studies
With other words, the creator of this excerpt wanted the tag to be applied to three different topics, which is the total opposite of what tags should be like and renders the tag very useless.
I thus request to burninate this tag. There are only 16 questions in this tag, which could all do with more specific tags.
+1 for burnination. But what are the replacements?
@aeismail: The very problem of this tag is that it is too broad, so there is no ubiquitous replacement. Also, there are only three questions which have no other tag than study. If it helps, I can retag these questions myself (or perform the entire burnination manually). I do not know about the requirements of a burnination.
How can we burninate without a Trogdor?
@StrongBad I believe that you should be in a good position to sketch the necessary dragon-man...
@aeismail research-studies is the only one from that list I'd feel appropriate. Preparing for exams or assignments might be more appropriate for workplace.SE, and you will be hard-pressed to find people who are experts on a tag known as field-of-study versus something as concrete as computer-science.
@Compass: Research studies are already covered by [tag:research], albeit this tag being heavily overused. That is unless you are talking about studies which investigate research itself, in which case I wouldn’t know a tag for it but also neither of the questions tagged study is about this, IIRC.
@Wrzlprmft maybe a sub-tag called study-design then.
@Compass: What for? Skimming through the questions tagged study, I found only one question touching the topic of study design and this is not in dire need of a new tag. Also, all but the most general questions on study design (such as the linked one) would be off-topic here, as they relate to the individual field.
What's the difference between [tag:study] and [tag:education] tags? Cannot [tag:study] be synonym of [tag:education]?
@EnthusiasticStudent: Not all the questions currently under [tag:study] fit under [tag:education]. (Also, [tag:education] is horribly broad in my opinion.)
I'd support burning this tag to the ground. Suggested replacements:
Some unholy hybrid of changing-fields, career-path etc. Just "selecting a field of study" is almost broad enough to be useless.
exams (which we already have) or if we really felt like we needed a new one, exam-prep?
study-design, which in my mind should also pretty much auto-flag a question as potentially needing to be shuffled to a subject-specific SE or CrossValidated.
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2058 | Rename [research] to [researching]
research is frequently used for almost all sorts of questions only marginally related to research, such as publishing a research paper.
In hope to reduce this misuse, I suggest to rename it to researching, which has the advantage of excluding the product of research, but still includes performing research, which the tag is about.
This should happen without synonymising research, because the change would be pointless otherwise.
The problem with researching is that it uses a word form that is rarely used in standard American English. (That is, not many people would say "I am researching. . . ." Instead, they'd likely say: "My research does X. . . " or something similar.
I agree with the need for a split tag, but perhaps research-process would convey what you're after better?
Sounds good by me. Note though, that I am not proposing to split the tag, but to rename it. There is no need for a tag research in the world I am proposing.
Looking at the current body of questions tagged research, it does seem like the tag needs to be split, not just renamed. Most of the questions currently tagged research are not about the research process. Most of them already have tags that classify them well, so I suggest creating synonyms starting with "research-", for all the people who believe they need to tag their questions with "research" and starts typing it into the tag input field.
I suggest (based on the types of existing questions currently tagged research):
research-process - for questions about the process of doing research.
research-experience - for questions about research experience on a CV, impact of research experience on graduate admissions, etc.
research-workplace - for Workplace.SE-like questions about working in an academic environment, what is the work of a researcher like, etc. Should be made as a synonym of workplace.
research-topic - (already exists) for questions about choosing a research topic, etc.
research-misconduct - (already exists) for questions about fraud and other misconduct
research-publication - should be created as a synonym of publications.
research-supervision - as a synonym of supervision.
I may be missing some, that will come up as we attempt to re-tag all the mis-tagged questions in research.
I proposed something like this a while back: http://meta.academia.stackexchange.com/a/863/929. Your list is better and the problem is bigger now.
@StrongBad Thanks for pointing that out, I had forgotten about that. I think most of the objection to your suggestion was because you seemed to indicate that [tag:research-undergraduate] wasn't needed as a separate tag. (At least, I downvoted it for that reason.)
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4177 | How to continue with the “political attitudes of academics” question?
The question What research explains political attitudes of academics? has attracted a lot of debate and undergone quite some change since it was posted. In particular, some of the answers do not fit the question (anymore). How shall we proceed with it?
This Question
In an answer, please propose how we should proceed with this question:
Should it be closed?
Should it stay open?
Should it be changed in a specific manner?
How shall we deal with answers that do not address the question in its current form?
How shall we deal with opinionated answers (and comments)?
How do you feel about moving it to [Skeptics.SE]? They're much better suited for dealing with controversial topics like this, as they have much stricter expectations on the form and content of answers, and are more heavily moderated to enforce it. I'm a little conflicted on exactly how on-topic they would receive it as being. Even in its current form it is not particularly specific, but it is decidedly notable, and there do appear to be serious scientific studies regarding the extent of liberal attitudes in academia and the reasons for it.
@zibadawatimmy: For Skeptics, it would need to have a specific claim (e.g., “academics are more liberal because of asbestos in university buildings”). This question, however, asks for reasons.
I think the question is a good fit for this site in its current state as it does not solicit mere opinions and tries not to incite political debates.
However, given the inevitable attraction of political debate, the question shall be equipped with a notice that all answers not providing a reference will be deleted without warning (and are fair game for not-an-answer flags) and the same applies to political discussion in the comments. As a rule of thumb, it should not be possible to deduce the political opinion of the author from a post.
This means that some existing answers, including upvoted ones, need to be deleted, but they are not valid answers to any question that is suited for our site (and thus “had it coming”). Regarding Maarten Buis’ highly upvoted answer in particular, it mainly builds upon the clarification of liberalism, which may be interesting, but not the point of our site.
I agree with this; my rather extensive edits were meant to refocus the question on facts and depoliticize it. However, is there precedence for a notice that all answers not providing a reference will be deleted or would that be a first?
@henning: Well, technically these are answers not addressing the question (in its current state) even without specific meta consensus. It may very well be a first for this site, but I remember several questions from other Stack Exchange sites with a similar notice, not to mention [skeptics.se], where this is the essence of the site. If there weren’t any existing answers, I wouldn’t hesitate to slap such a notice on a post that asks specifically for reference but is prone to get answers without references.
I also agree. I think it's a tough question though that will not have one answer unless there is some synthesis of the literature on this topic. Hence I think Maarten Buis' answer is part of an answer and should remain.
I think it should be de-genericized and explicitly focused on the US and on Democrats/Republicans, rather than using vague terms that are confusing.
@AzorAhai: That already happened, didn’t it?
The new version of the question is clearer and probably more closely represents the original intend of the OP. That makes my answer an ill fit, and I am fine with that.
@Wrzlprmft It hasn't, as I understand, the research had to do with registered Democrats vs. Republicans, not self-identified liberals/conservatives. Focusing on party registration would remove the arguing over liberalism in the answers/comments (and I don't really agree with the OPs brief description of the two ideologies anyway).
As a lurker, I don't have a right to post an answer to this. It's a shame because I had gathered causal evidence from three different strands. I'm not going to try to gain reputation because other questions here are so different from this one. Perhaps I can comment the references I had in mind there, and someone builds an answer out of that?
The question, as it is currently phrased, just wants to know about the existence of "serious" research into the (alleged) phenomenon. Such a question is easily resolved with a google search, as there is an entire wiki page dedicated to the topic. This page is heavily sourced with thirty references. This includes several analyses of why the phenomenon occurs. This is more than sufficient for anyone to resolve the question immediately at hand.
I don't think questions which boil down to "provide me a list of things readily obtained by googling or even just wikipedia" is a suitable question anywhere on the Stack Exchange. It definitely demonstrates a lack of research effort, which is one of the default reasons for down-voting a question.
The attention the question has received is not because it asks a good question which admits a quality answer, but because it asks a trivially answered question on a contentious topic.
Just that something can be easily found on Google or so doesn’t make a question unsuited for this site, after all, we aspire to be what is found on Google. It’s a valid reason to downvote. Also, at first glance, distilling the references on reason from that Wikipedia article may involve some effort.
I think that whether or not a search engine returns any pertinent information is less useful as a metric than whether the answer to a question requires compiling that information in a way which is nonintuitive.
Another possibility is the following:
Revert the question to the original state and keep it closed with the initial answers.
Invite the OP to ask a new question according to the latest edited version.
If the OP is not interested in asking the edited question, someone who edited it can go on asking.
There is an additional problem with this question. If you follow the citations to the base article, it is poorly done. I do not believe it was peer reviewed and the editor is a co-author. While it may be factually true, there was much about it that was concerning. I had sufficient concerns to be unsure of the veracity of the article itself. It read as a disguised tool for polemics.
If the question is reopened, there should be a direct link to the underlying article so that others could read it. I would tend not to reopen the question because the underlying article is suspect.
It is true from other research that academics are more liberal than others, but it also matters to be careful as to what material is cited to begin the discussion.
And what do you conclude from this for the question at hand?
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923 | Disappearing question?
I vaguely remember answering a question along the lines of "What can you get from university that you cannot get elsewhere?". The question didn't seem particularly well expressed and probably a candidate for closure, but I gave a glib answer along the lines of "A university degree.".
In any case, the question disappeared and my activity on the question likewise disappeared from my profile.
I guess a moderator took some action or maybe the OP deleted their own question, but is there any way for me to find out what happened to the question?
(I'm more interested in the system itself rather than the specific question ... I find the precedent of my contributions being able to vanish without any way(?) to find out why just a little disconcerting. Of course, maybe there is a way to find out what happened but I just haven't found it yet.)
For the question at hand, the user deleted his own question. A deleted question means that the answers aren't visible as well.
The process for finding this info out is to do exactly what you did here - post in meta and a mod can check for you. Here's a link to the question you're discussing, it's only visible to >10k users (and diamond mods).
Okay, thanks for explaining! I guess it's quite a rare occurrence anyways.
@badroit Note that the user would not have been able to delete the question if it has had an answer with positive score (or maybe an upvoted one, I forgot the precise details). So while it is possible to have your content disappear without knowing about it, usually this can only happen to the less "good" content.
I can see it from your link and I don't have 20k.
@StrongBad >10k, then? I never really understood the difference between 10 and 20 permissions.
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872 | Academia community: representation per field?
I wonder if there has been or could be a survey of the different academic fields amongst users on this site? I don't see that the necessary data exist at the moment, but I would be curious to see how broad a coverage of various academic disciplines we have.
I suspect that otherwise-small fields like Computer Science are over-represented (since StackExchange sites have historically referred to these fields).
I thus wonder if there's an inherent bias on this site towards the culture and norms present in certain academic disciplines (as well of course as the geographical bias towards US norms).
This is not to say that if such a bias exists, it is necessarily a problem. But nonetheless, the data would be interesting.
otherwise-small fields like Computer Science — Say what now? Working in a department with 60 faculty and 1700 students, I find the characterization "small" rather incredible. (But your point about overrepresentation is well taken.)
@JeffE, according to the NSF statistics, 2.4% of PhD holders in STEM fields (with full time employment) are classified under Computer Science. 4.6% are in Mathematics. 25.1% are in biological sciences. 17.7% are in physical sciences. 15.2% are in Psychology. Computer Science ain't that huge in the bigger picture, even if that bigger picture is limited to STEM.
We do have a poll question here on meta (see my take on what it is worth). I think you could cull some useful info from the data explorer if you were motivated enough. Geographic data can come from self report in people's bios (clearly non-English speaking places are underrepresented). You could try to link user profiles to other sites for a count of comp-sci vs. other individuals (which would take the data dump I believe).
For a quick check of the geo. distribution you can select the Academia site for Stack Maps. For some reason people with no place addresses are geocoded nearby the Strait of Gibraltar. See this Q on the Stats meta for some other idiosyncrasies of google maps geocoding.
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1324 | Are questions about national scholarships allowed?
In my country a large portion of PhD students are funded by the APA (Australia Post Graduate Award).
I have a question about it's rules that I can't work out by just reading them (They are bound up into the federal government legislation that created the scholarship, and it is a bit legalise)
Would I be on topic?
I think perhaps it is off topic because, because it may be too localised?
I know we don't offically have that reason anymore,
but I suspect if I asked a question about a scholarship only available at my university, it would be closed or at least downvoted.
A National scholarship on the other hand could be useful.
I'm sure I can chase this information down by other means, like talking to the scholarships office at my univeristy.
(Which I would do so, if I asked here and failed to get a answer -- and then make it a self answered question.)
But having it online on this site would make it googleable for anyone else with the same question.
As per the help center,
You should not ask "a question that will help only me," but rather "a question that will help people like me." If your question is so limited as to be useful only to you, consider broadening the scope so others can learn from your question as well. As a general rule, if you're asking about a particular institution, course, or journal, it's likely your question is too limited in scope. Try to extract the fundamental question from the specific problem at hand.
A question about a scholarship that cannot be generalized beyond your university is too localized, and would be closed.
A question about a national scholarship is probably OK if it's a large-scale program (i.e. not something that funds one student a year.) As an example, we've had acceptable questions about the NSF Graduate Research Fellowship Program, which is US-specific.
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4289 | Do more to encourage questions tagged with [conference] to tell us if they are in CS
On some large portion of all questions about conferences,
it becomes important to know if the
conference is in Computer Science, or one of the other fields, that takes conferences seriously as a publication venue.
I was thus thinking we should put something in the tag wiki,
to recommend to users of the conference tag, that it is often a good idea to specify their field in the question.
Or something like that.
If people think this is a good idea, could someone suggest appropriate wording?
If not, follow Meta practices and downvote this question. :-)
Related to this question
Questions about Computer Science - please, make it explicit
Also related: Is there a name to define “conferences are publications” fields?
My feeling is that the tag wiki excerpt won't be particularly effective at transmitting this information, since they're hardly ever read. By the time the user gets to tagging the post they've already finished writing it and they're just trying to get it up and running; reading each tag description in detail is simply not something that's going to happen very often.
However, this is precisely the situation where a tag warning could really help. They look like this:
(source) and they show up when the user adds the tag. The procedure for requesting them is here.
As a starting point for that discussion, I would propose wording of the form:
Tip: different fields treat conferences differently, from primary publication venues (as in computer science) to optional extras.
Questions about conferences get better answers if they specify what field you're working in, so people have enough context to answer well.
We probably already have tag warnings activated here: https://academia.meta.stackexchange.com/q/1886/20058
@MassimoOrtolano Ah. Well, then add one for this, then. (Though, from what I can tell, only the graduate-admissions one is currently active.)
For many of the questions that we receive here it's important to specify the field of interest (not to mention the country). Indeed, Computer Science has some specificities (e.g. importance of conferences), Mathematics has other specificities (e.g. author order, long revision times), the Humanities have others (e.g. books may be more important than journal papers) and so on.
Thus, generally speaking, I don't think Computer Science should be singled out in tags, because otherwise we would have to go through all tags to add the specifities of all other fields.
What we should do is to encourage through comments the questioners to add information about the field whenever we feel that that piece of information is relevant, whether it's a question about conferences, publications, hiring etc.
I agree -there is so much variation from field to field that we couldn't keep up with tags. One might find that there are several competing groups in Old English that have different norms and would need separate tags, for example.
I disagree. The trope "we need to know what field you're in to fully answer your question" happens all over tag-space but in my experience there is a significant concentration in the conference tag, so a warning here would be a good way to use a targeted intervention.
Suggestion: Add something to the tag wiki encouraging askers to describe the type of conference: e.g. is it one with peer-reviewed proceedings, and so forth.
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5422 | Deciphering time
In August 24, 2022 I asked a question on the main site, https://academia.stackexchange.com/q/188081/8575, that was summarized as
Do you know of other scientific journals (in any field) that "forbid"
(discourage) judgement on importance/significance/impact to be used as
criterion in the recommendation/decision process for publication?
It was closed because
<< We don't allow questions asking for individual or lists of journals, schools, etc.>> –
Bryan Krause
I was also directed to the post about "shopping questions", https://academia.meta.stackexchange.com/a/3658/8575. that <<explains the reasons we don't want to have these sorts of questions.>>
OK. Can then somebody please explain why the question What opportunities are there to write casual articles in math?, was not summarily closed,
even though it explicitly ends by asking
Are there any prominent mathematics magazines whose target audience is
on the younger side (e.g. 16–25)?
Can then somebody please explain why the question...was not summarily closed...
Because no one flagged it? Mods don't really summarily review questions; rather, we respond to flags or sometimes we stumble across things ourselves. This is the SE model; the pro is that it's community driven, the con is that it's sometimes uneven.
even though it explicitly ends by asking...
The last sentence might arguably be a shopping question, but the title question seems answerable to me. While we can't (shouldn't) recommend specific venues, there may be a general answer that about how to publish results that are more formal than a blog but more accessible than an actual paper. So I personally wouldn't hammer this one, would leave it up to the community.
I wish to add that the asker has the privilege to cast close votes.
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671 | If I do not have enough reputation yet and need to add an important tag, what to do?
I tried adding the tag: 'proposal' or 'research-proposal' but could not as I do not have enough reputation yet.
What should I do?
You could provide a link to the question and someone with higher might do it.
You can ask about it here on Meta, or you might comment below the question so someone with higher rep can retag it for you, if they think it is appropriate.
In the case of research-proposal, we do not have it yet, but we do have grants and funding, which might cover some of it.
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4426 | Why is this question about bullying still on hold?
I have tried to re-cast this question to make it more general, and less related to my own experience. Do I need to do something further to trigger a 're-evaluation'?
What can be done about the problem of bullying in post-PhD academia?
I still think your question, per my comment, is more of a rant and prompt for discussion than a question; I don't feel any edits have addressed that and I don't see any easy path to do so, either.
Hi Bryan. Do you think bullying in post-PhD academia is a topic that can be discussed?
Yes, but SE is not a discussion forum.
Interesting. Telling that in many months of being here that had not become clear to me; I had seen this place as one to discuss the answers to questions. I see how hard you must have to work to achieve even what is out there. Nonetheless, I accept it is true; I'll interact accordingly.
The edited question has two two related parts that make it broad
What unique aspects of post- PhD academic culture allow bullies to persist?
What can be done to end this?
Even if you split the questions, it is still very broad. A much better, but less general question, would focus on a particular type of bullying, or even single incidence of bullying, and ask something like, how/why did this happen, or how to avoid it in the future, or how to deal with the consequences. We have a lot of good questions about sexism and advisors "stealing" ideas that probably constitute bullying.
As it stands now, the question seems to be inviting discussion and is not a good fit for the SE format.
Interesting. So am I to understand that SE does not allow broad questions? If so, that might fit well at https://academia.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/1203/welcome-to-academia-se
Although two questions is not acceptable, two questions along the path of a single answer is something I see regularly here. Do I understand that correctly?
To be clear, I'm not simply nitpicking here; I'm going to try to reformulate this question into one that can be asked here. I do think there is an interesting, fairly general question available in this space.
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2083 | Are visa and study permits considered off topic?
Would it be considered off topic if I ask questions about F1, J1 visas and study permits?
From my experience the travel stackexchange community frowns upon such questions.
I'd go for the expats route. Give those guys some traffic. :)
Not off topic at all, but you could also ask at expats.se.
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2055 | How to fix the "lecturer" tag?
The lecturer tag is supposed to be for questions about the job of lecturer, a specific academic job title that exists in some parts of the world.
However, users keep applying this tag to questions about lecturing, in the sense of "continuous exposition by the teacher."
What can we do to clarify the use of this tag?
We could create another tag that is about "continuous exposition by the teacher," but I don't know how to name the tags so that the distinction will be clear to taggers.
Maybe use "adjunct" and/or "instructor" instead? // Also, the exposition idea could be expressed with "lecturing" instead of "lecture".
@aparente001 The role of [tag:lecturer] is a specific job title that is distinct from both of those words you suggested.
Based on experiences with the "music" tag on SE computer sites (to deal with music specific sound as separate from "audio"), the best thing that can be done is let more people know about this distinction and have more people who are vigilant about protecting it.
@aparente001 In the UK, the position of "lecturer" is essentially what would be called an "assistant professor" in the US. Using alternative names doesn't make sense.
@DavidRicherby - perhaps the ambiguity could be cleared up somewhat by using a prefix or suffix. How about replacing "lecturer" with "UK-lecturer"? In the fine print it could be explained that here, "UK" includes those countries that use the word "lecturer" in the same way that it is used in the UK.
@aparente001 That would be a bad idea if any other country uses "lecturer" in that way or if any non-English-speaking country uses a term whose most natural translation would be "lecturer". People would imagine that the tag only applies to the UK.
@DavidRicherby - I suppose so, if they can't or won't read the fine print....
Some ideas that come to mind:
Replace the second sentence of the tag-wiki excerpt with:
Do not use this tag for questions about lecturing.
Install a tag warning.
Remove all wrong uses of the tag and regularly monitor it for new mistagged questions, hoping to better exemplify the usage of this tag. I have did this for some time with research and had the feeling that the number of new mistagged questions was reduced (but I have no solid numbers on this). However, I guess that this effect was only due to people seeing this tag less often on the front page.
I think we should also add a "lecturing" tag,
… and synonymise it to teaching.
I think it might be better to not synonymise, thereby allowing the tag to point to one particular high-importance aspect of teaching.
@jakebeal I named it [tag:lecture-teaching-method] instead, to make its intended use extra-clear.
In my view, it would be better to include a "lecturing" tag as suggested by @jakebeal.
As discussed, this would be different from the sense of the teaching tag in the sense that it covers only the classroom lecturing aspect, while the description of the tag states
This tag is related to the role and duties of a teacher, an academic instructor, tutor or a teaching assistant.
Although the description of a "lecturing" tag may be a subset of the teaching tag, it would have a more specific aspect rather than a synonym.
The lecturer tag is supposed to be for questions about the job of lecturer, a specific academic job title that exists in some parts of the world.
Does it even make sense to have a tag for a specific job title when the meaning of the job title varies from country to country? I suggest that renaming the tag to junior-faculty would give it a more cohesive identity (i.e. one which is more likely to interpreted uniformly by people from different academic cultures) as well as removing the ambiguity.
Except that a lecturer is not Junior position in the UK....
@BrianTompsett-汤莱恩, that's my point! The current tag means different things to people from different cultures, so it's not a useful tag.
I think it is useful to have specific tags about job titles that do have a specific meaning in parts of the world that use that title. [tag:lecturer] is not ambiguous to people in systems where that's a job title, just as [tag:assistant-professor] is not ambiguous to people in the US. On the other hand, [tag:junior-faculty] is not a clearly defined job title and is ambiguous (look at the current state of [tag:early-career] to see what I mean by this...)
@ff524, where the term is unambiguous I agree. The problem here is that lecturer unambiguously means one thing to one subset of the site's users, and unambiguously means something different to a different subset, so that for the community as a whole it is ambiguous.
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