Timeline for Whither the duplicate?
Current License: CC BY-SA 3.0
19 events
| when toggle format | what | by | license | comment | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Apr 13, 2017 at 12:22 | history | edited | CommunityBot | replaced http://math.stackexchange.com/ with https://math.stackexchange.com/ | |
| Jun 18, 2016 at 8:55 | comment | added | Ron Gordon | Thanks @MartinSleziak. | |
| Jun 18, 2016 at 4:26 | review | Close votes | |||
| Jun 18, 2016 at 11:39 | |||||
| Jun 18, 2016 at 4:02 | comment | added | Martin Sleziak | There is a new discussion on meta with rather similar focus: How close a match we need to close a recurring question as a duplicate? | |
| Jan 3, 2015 at 20:28 | comment | added | Hans Lundmark | Even thought the equivalence of these two particular questions is not immediately obvious, the necessary steps to connect the two are explained at the beginning of the accepted answer to the first one (in fact the method of solution there is to go back from the sum to the original integral), so that answer also contains an answer to the second question. In my opinion, this ought to be enough to consider the questions as duplicates, but apparently some people feel strongly different, and I'm not going to enter into a fight about this. | |
| Dec 29, 2014 at 14:51 | vote | accept | Ron Gordon | ||
| Dec 28, 2014 at 10:45 | comment | added | Najib Idrissi | @BrianM.Scott I don't expect the students to make the connection themselves; the length requirement is there so that a short comment is enough to explain the connection. | |
| Dec 28, 2014 at 8:02 | comment | added | Brian M. Scott | If I can easily envision a student having trouble making the connection, I don’t consider it a duplicate. For a fair number of students @Najib’s questions are, sadly, not duplicates, for the reason that Thomas gives in his answer. | |
| Dec 27, 2014 at 19:33 | answer | added | Thomas | timeline score: 14 | |
| Dec 26, 2014 at 17:12 | comment | added | Lord_Farin | For my two cents, I agree with @Najib. I also think that the "abstract duplicates initiative" should be continued as a means to point to the broader picture. Closing after some period of time could be seen as a kind of third option in my opinion, to enhance the value of MSE as a knowledge repository. | |
| Dec 26, 2014 at 15:26 | comment | added | Najib Idrissi | If I can envision my explanation to why answer to question A also answers question B taking more than a single line, or requiring the use of the word theorem/lemma/... (as in "by ...'s theorem", "by the ... lemma") or some other advanced notion, I don't vote to close as a duplicate. I think it's a reasonable criterion. Though I agree it's very subjective, and I'm not sure I apply that consistently. | |
| Dec 26, 2014 at 15:21 | comment | added | Ron Gordon | @NajibIdrissi: I didn't notice, and I appreciate that you agree with me there. | |
| Dec 26, 2014 at 15:20 | comment | added | Ron Gordon | @NajibIdrissi: Not to be extreme, but I'm not so sure. It depends on the answers generated, IMO. Anyway, at what point do you not mark as a duplicate? Because in the case I showed, I disagreed strongly because...how many other questions on the site could be marked as duplicates under that criteria? | |
| Dec 26, 2014 at 15:19 | comment | added | Najib Idrissi | (BTW, maybe you didn't notice, but I was the one who complained first in the comments of the question you linked that I didn't believe it was a duplicate... I'm not disagreeing with you about this particular case, I'm saying that it can happen sometimes) | |
| Dec 26, 2014 at 15:13 | comment | added | Najib Idrissi | No, there definitely should be some amount of wiggle... Suppose someone asks how to compute $\sum_{k={\color{red} 0}}^n k^3$ and then someone asks how to compute $\sum_{k={\color{red} 1}}^n k^3$... Wouldn't you be tempted to close as a duplicate? But it's not the exact same question. In this particular case the questions are unrelated enough that closing is not warranted. But it can happen that a trivial, obvious step can make an answer to question A also an answer to question B. When this happens, I'm in favor of closing. | |
| Dec 26, 2014 at 15:09 | comment | added | Ron Gordon | @NajibIdrissi: Thanks, I appreciate the input, even if I disagree strongly. I think that, in a site like this with an extremely high volume of questions, it would take the community way too much effort to draw a necessarily subjective line between duplicate/not. In the case I outlined, the expressions of the questions were vastly different and motivated different approaches. I am of the opinion that duplicate should be a real duplicate, and leave it at that. | |
| Dec 26, 2014 at 15:07 | comment | added | Najib Idrissi | For some perspective, the FAQ says one should vote to close questions as duplicates when "they are sufficiently similar to existing questions and would be answered identically to them." Something else to consider: unregistered users get automatically redirected when they look up a question that was closed as a duplicate. I doubt someone looking up how to compute $\int x \cos x / (1 \sin^2 x) dx$ would be happy to get redirected to the computation of this sum. | |
| Dec 26, 2014 at 15:04 | comment | added | Najib Idrissi | Ideally, I'd say that two questions are duplicate if you can take any answer for the old question and post it verbatim as an answer for the new question (maybe with a few changes in notation). In practice I think it's also common (and desirable) to close as duplicate when one or two trivial steps are necessary to go from one question to the other -- for a stupid example, one question might ask about rings whose all prime ideals are maximal while the other asks about rings of Krull dimension zero... That's not the case here: going from one to the other is not a trivial computation. | |
| Dec 26, 2014 at 14:58 | history | asked | Ron Gordon | CC BY-SA 3.0 |