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The context

I think, you have played enough. Now the stats, as we know, are really not the best, and contrary the popular belief, it is not only because the LLMs. The decrease started already around 2014, far before the appearance of the LLMs, while the internet has grown.

My opinion is that it happened because the general attitude of the community moderation. The concept of the reputation based moderation privileges is not bad et all, actually it is the best I could imagine without AI. However, the highly hostile stand of the most active reviewers made the stats decreasing already far before the LLMs.

I believe, the situation was/is far enough serious for an intervention from the upper levels. Why it did not happen, is a good question. My best bet is that the company might have had a gamification concept, in which they have considered this behavior normal and acceptable.

However, the world changed

And now the primary focus of the community should be to stabilize its stats. The source of the problem is not only the AI competition, but also the irresponsibly and insanely antagonistic moderation mechanism. The removal of the "no context" close reason, which is in essence a blank cheque to destroy anything, should be only a beginning.

Just an example

I played LEGO with my son and I wanted to show him tricky brick structures. Pythagoras' Theorem was a nice beginning. Then I have thought a little bit more, and the formalized problem have appeared in my mind.

I asked it on the MathSE.

My previous experience made it clear that you will downvote and close it, but I thought, you will do the same even if I write the "context" there; and that made me to focus to the real quality of the question, and not on trying to avoid the unavoidable.

But, now think a little bit: had the context improve the quality of the question or not? I think, it had been irrelevant personal matter there.

The site is simply not in the position any more to do this, beside that, this close reason was not ever useful.

Thanks.

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  • $\begingroup$ @Nij I understand the rule and I disagree it. However, I think your activities around my posts for both of us reason very clearly, why our discussion ends here. $\endgroup$ Commented Nov 12 at 4:23
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    $\begingroup$ @peterh Your job, when you post a question, is to convince the community that you're question is worth adding to the repository here. You need to sell it to other people, and convince them that it is interesting. You failed to do so, hence the question was closed. Everything else is a distraction. $\endgroup$ Commented Nov 12 at 4:26
  • $\begingroup$ @XanderHenderson Expecting me to explain that the question appeared while I played LEGO with my son, is obviously a hilarious expectation and not a "distraction". Well, and creating "blank cheque"-like close reasons is a very sectacular source of the widespread power misuses here; the only what is simply beyond my comprehension, how would it be good for you. The explanation, that some oldboys strongly dislike the homework-like questions, that is rational. What is not rational, having a math.SE without math problems. $\endgroup$ Commented Nov 12 at 4:29
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    $\begingroup$ Basically no context is a neutral term created around 2012-2014, when we had a long debate about what to do with homework questions. Hopefully you can understand why a large group of users had serious issues with the idea that anyone could get their homework done here. So a blunt translation of the closure reason of your question is that you failed to make it look like "not a homework problem". Whether that is an accurate assessment of the background of your question is rather irrelevant. $\endgroup$ Commented Nov 12 at 6:14
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    $\begingroup$ (cont'd) I am not going to attempt to rehash the old discussions for your benefit here. Whenever I try to do that what invariably happens that an understandably agitated user begins to raise isolated objections at selected points where my choice of phrase was less than optimal. So my suggestion is that you revisit those decade old discussions here in meta. Should be easy to find. If you think of something that wasn't considered back in the day, do add your point, and raise it for a discussion. By and large the crowd here is very reasonable. $\endgroup$ Commented Nov 12 at 6:21
  • $\begingroup$ (cont'd) A basic weakness with your argument is that it really is about how the rule was applied to a single question. Bringing up LLMs seems unmotivated. Care to elaborate why that has anything to do with this policy? $\endgroup$ Commented Nov 12 at 6:24
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    $\begingroup$ One thing you need to keep in mind: while doing reviews, regularly old questions are asked for closure and in quite some cases, the old closure request reasons already were "no context" and as a current reviewer, I often agree on that. If you remove that reason, how should a current reviewer, wanting to close such an old question, behave? $\endgroup$ Commented Nov 12 at 8:01
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    $\begingroup$ What are these "stats" to which you refer, repeatedly, peterh? $\endgroup$ Commented Nov 12 at 11:15
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    $\begingroup$ @peterh "Expecting me to explain that the question appeared while I played LEGO with my son..." Nobody has suggested that is what you needed to do. At least, I have not suggested that. $\endgroup$ Commented Nov 12 at 12:03
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    $\begingroup$ The text of the question does not even have a question. It has exactly this content: "Intuitively, I think yes, but again I have no idea, how. If yes, which is the smallest one?" Only the title of the post seems to show the actual question. The post is tagged "galois theory" but there is no explanation why the poster feels that is relevant. So this post, for better or worse, is the epitome of a post that could be significantly improved. For the guidelines on this site, we have "How to ask a good question", math.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/9959/… $\endgroup$ Commented Nov 14 at 19:06
  • $\begingroup$ @peterh I was referring to this post, which I quoted in my comment: math.stackexchange.com/questions/5107679/… $\endgroup$ Commented Nov 14 at 20:55
  • $\begingroup$ @CarlMummert Sorry, okay! That I can easily fix. Moment. But I think it is not a really major problem. Done. $\endgroup$ Commented Nov 14 at 20:56

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The "lacks context" close reason is a compromise between users who wish to allow students to post their homework questions on the site and receive help, and users who do not want to entertain homework questions. Noöne is particularly happy with this compromise, which is what makes it such a great compromise. Personally, I dislike the "context" requirements on this site, and would more than happy to do away with them.

However, I am only willing to do away with context requirements if we institute a "no homework problems" policy in its place.

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    $\begingroup$ The context stuff can be particularly headache-inducing when one thinks enough context is already there, and even worse in that case when it's one's own question under attack. But how do we help with homework ethically if we do away with context? Could we change what we mean by it, in keeping with the compromise you mentioned? I don't know. $\endgroup$ Commented Nov 11 at 23:15
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    $\begingroup$ @Shaun Note that my preference would be to get rid of the context requirements, and ban homework questions. So there is no need for use to "help with homework ethically". It isn't a question of ethics. Homework just wouldn't be permitted on the site. I am not really seriously suggesting that we do this, as I think that there is a very large portion of the community against banning homework questions, but I want to make it clear that this is the reason that the context requirements exist, and that removing these requirements has knock-on effects. $\endgroup$ Commented Nov 11 at 23:46
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    $\begingroup$ ok but how would one know if it's homework problem or not (except some trivial cases) and does homework problem also includes problems present in a Maths book ? $\endgroup$ Commented Nov 12 at 0:48
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    $\begingroup$ @T﹏T It is not too hard to come up with a workable definition of what makes a problem a "homework problem". Typically, homework problems are exercises which are designed to help students/readers/whatever understand an idea, so the answer is not really as important as the techniques used to get to that answer. But because I don't believe that the community really wants a homework ban, I am not going to invest a ton of time into trying to bang out a rigorous definition---it just isn't worth the time. $\endgroup$ Commented Nov 12 at 0:54
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    $\begingroup$ That is fine, and so we have a more serious problem, however not that is what the close reason means. The close reason wants unneeded and unrelated details, actually violating even the SE model. It is also widely used as blank cheque. Already the fact, that I as an experienced SE user, do not count that my question could avoid the closure, means that lesser experienced users will go away. $\endgroup$ Commented Nov 12 at 4:16
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    $\begingroup$ Even if no context was required with a ban on homework questions being strongly enforced, this particular question read like homework and would have been dismissed as so. For context, it's literally the same question I received in a 11th class olympiad contest a few years ago, with the technique later being emphasised as positioning of figures , high-dimensional visualization and angle calculations (more important than the answer). What I'm trying to say is, the omitted information, in either the present or your hypothetical scenario, would have been helpful. $\endgroup$ Commented Nov 12 at 6:33

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