Questions tagged [discussion]
The question you're asking is designed to solicit opinions or best-practices on a particular topic, with the goal of reaching community consensus.
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Do we need MathJax?
On other SE sites like Physics, Math, MathOverflow, we have the possibility to write equations in what is called 'MathJax'. This allows you to write equations the way you would write them in LaTeX, ...
DanuMod
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Are questions about mathematicians and scientists' lives on topic?
Are questions about history behind a scientist or mathematicians life on topic? For example personal life, death etc.
This is motivated by my recent question Why was Évariste Galois killed?
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Make some community ads!
I discovered this site by happy accident while browsing Twitter and saw a question shared by the StackExchange account.
Perhaps you should reach out a bit more and get some people from other ...
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Very impressive
Just reading and re-reading our questions and answers (and even some of the more in-depth comment discussions) - there are some truly impressive and substantial contributions made by an array of ...
user22
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Please welcome your moderators pro tempore
Throughout the beta, we need members from the site whose focus is to engage the community, both in community-building issues and site management. That's why we select a few members from each community ...
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What should we name our chatroom?
Currently, it is the generic name of the site.
What should we name our chatroom? Perhaps give your suggestions here and the popularity could be gauged by how many votes each suggestion gets.
user22
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Proposal: A tentative tagging scheme
One of the most important questions to be settled is: How are we supposed to tag questions on this site? I happen to have some opinions on this matter, and I will use this meta post to lay out my '...
DanuMod
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Who should our moderators be?
From The 7 Essential Questions of Every Beta:
Discussing the criteria of a great moderator is important and picking out potential candidates is a great way to introduce outstanding contributors to ...
user22
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Writing history posts for the math.SE blog
The Mathematics stackexchange has a blog featuring short expository articles about interesting pieces of mathematics. The articles are user-written. Now, I think part of our mission as a community, ...
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How should we celebrate our birthday?
In three weeks, History of Science and Mathematics Stack Exchange will turn one year old. Congratulations on everyone who worked hard to make our first year in beta a success.
How should we mark the ...
HDE 226868Mod
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Why do we have 'history' and 'history-of-terminology' tags?
As noted above, we have a history tag and a history-of-terminology tag. These seem a little redundant, given the name of the site. I just re-tagged a question from history to history-of-terminology, ...
HDE 226868Mod
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Does HSM also include the history of technology?
I want to ask why the V-2 rocket was made with ethanol and liquid oxygen, which had a specific impulse of 215 seconds at sea level, when a solid rocket using APCP gets 237 seconds. In addition, a ...
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Those who do not know [history] are doomed to recreate it
Six months ago, the history tag was burninated as useless.
The tag was supposedly blacklisted as early as 2014, but has come back repeatedly, including in 2020.
The tag (at the time of posting of this ...
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Do we need the mhchem MathJax extension?
Assuming that we get the MathJax support, do we need the mhchem extension? We have this enabled on the Chemistry site, and it's incredibly helpful there in showing anything more complicated than a ...
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Tagging of names
How should we tag names?
I've just gone for thomas-digges for the astronomer, but this got me thinking about how we should standardise it. digges might be acceptable in this context but what if there ...
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Are history of engineering/invention questions on topic?
For example, a question about the invention of gliders/aircraft by George Cayley, or a question about the development of high pressure steam by Watt et al.
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Make questions about counter-factual history off-topic
I propose making questions about counterfactual history (e.g questions of type "Suppose that such-and-such development in the history of science and math did not happen. What would be the ...
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Our #1 target community: Those who teach, study, write or read about the history of science and math
If we want more participation, we're going to need to find those people who are interested and even enthusiastic in this subject. That's a very niche audience.
I suggest we/someone make an effort/...
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How do we handle the recent 'Ramanujan question'?
This recent question has gotten a surprising response. As it turns out, it is a cross-post from this question on Math.SE. There are currently two answers, one by Adhvaitha and one by Tito Piezas III.
...
DanuMod
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Reference for the answers wherever required
To make the answers acceptable I think there should be references to all the answers (atleast wherever required) provided to really believe in the history. Since our site is about the HISTORY of math ...
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What should we do about cross-posting?
In two days, I've twice merged questions, because we've had two instances of cross postings (one involved three sites, and is still being dealt with). This has also happened before in many cases, many ...
HDE 226868Mod
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How is our distribution of science and mathematics questions?
Congratulations (belatedly) to Alexandre Eremenko and Conifold on receiving the first tag badges (both in mathematics) on HSM! You guys have been at the forefront of our mathematics branch, and ...
HDE 226868Mod
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What should our 'Tour' and 'Help' documentation contain?
It may be a little early, but no harm in putting this out there now and open this up for discussion.
Specifically, what should our 'Ask about' and 'Do not ask about' on the Tour page contain? ...
user22
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Let's make our own site promotion ad!
This is a spin-off of ManishEarth's earlier meta post,
Make some community ads!
What are Community Promotion Ads?
Community Promotion Ads are community-vetted advertisements that will
show ...
HDE 226868Mod
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Almost half of the questions so far are about math
I counted earlier and found that 23 of 48 questions were about either mathematics or mathematicians. While I am probably most interested in the history of mathematics, I am hoping this site will ...
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Is Economics on Topic Here?
This question inspired by this question, which has several close votes.
Economics is a "social" science. But it is considered a "science" by the Nobel Prize Committee. Moreover, the question is about ...
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Our totally unofficial 30-day checkup
Today, the site turned 30 days old. Congratulations!
Okay, enough celebrating. 30 days means that the Area 51 stats for the site are visible, and the results are in (in the form of our number/good ...
HDE 226868Mod
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Should Math SE seed HSM with some history of mathematics questions?
As discussed here. SE is capable of migrating a large amount of questions from Math.StackExchange to History of Science and Math. The main culprit would be to go for questions under the tag math-...
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Are questions about science-related linguistics on-topic?
Today, we had this question:
Is "de" in "de Morgan" supposed to be capitalized or not?
A couple days ago, we had this question:
History of the term innovation and its difference ...
HDE 226868Mod
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Books vs. Websites
This is related to my other recent question.
As I wrote there, it is hard to check book sources, especially if they are old and/or out-of-print. Occasionally, they can be found on Google Books, but ...
HDE 226868Mod
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Argument for keeping the "base 10" question open?
This question about past cultures using non-base-10 systems is quite popular. The meat of the question was:
Have any non decimal numbering systems been used frequently in the past? If so, what were ...
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On the history-of-science tag
I recently got rid of the history-of-science tag from How far can history of science be traced back?, and then another question which had just been posted. Typically, I wouldn't do something like this,...
HDE 226868Mod
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Can we get a site name change implemented?
Ironic note: The question I'm referencing did not show up in the "Questions that may already have your answer" drop down menu while I was writing this.
I looked back on this question a couple of ...
HDE 226868Mod
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What to do with questions that are interesting but easily looked up?
Throughout the week I come up with a number of questions about the history of this or that. Most often Wikipedia authors on the subject some of the hard work for me, so it's not really necessary for ...
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Should 'big list' type questions be put on hold?
The question Which scientists (mathematicians, philosophers) who voluntarily served Nazi had large contributions to human knowledge? seems like it is requiring a list of notable Nazi scientists (the ...
user22
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Voting on the meta
This is an announcement/notice about the meaning of voting on the meta.
Up generally means I agree
Down generally means I disagree
This is a subtle difference with the main site. One should not be ...
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What to do about pseudoscientific answers
Recently I came about this answer which, in my opinion, is completely based on pseudoscientific books. This is not like math.se, or physics.se where good and bad answers can easily be discerned, so ...
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What fields of study are on topic here?
According to Wikipedia,
The history of science is the study of the historical development of science and scientific knowledge, including both the natural sciences and social sciences.
There have ...
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Lessons for the future.
Today, we had this question posted. In its original form, it read
Why do we see things?
Yes. That seems unquestionably obvious. But, when i try to think about it in my way. I find it as a mystery. ...
HDE 226868Mod
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Is the xkcd feed in the chat really necessary?
At this point, given the low activity of the chatroom, it actually posts more often than actual users: this year so far, it posted 16 links versus 1 single user discussing questions.
This makes ...
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Two tags for the 18th century
At the moment, we have tag 18c and tag 18th-century. Would it be wise to merge them?
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Is history of Computer science on topic?
Is the history of Computer science on topic? I can see that you could argue that it falls under mathematical logic and therefore is on topic. Questions with this focus would include questions about ...
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Request to let [reference] reference [reference-request]
Currently, there is a reference tag with 9 questions tagged so. However, not only the tag has no tag wiki/excerpt but also is being used similarly to the reference-request tag. Therefore, let the tags ...
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2021: a year in moderation
As we say goodbye to the old year and welcome the new one, we have a tradition of sharing moderation stats for the preceding calendar year.
As most of you here are aware, sites on the Stack Exchange ...
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What should we do about "Who was first" or "When was [_____] first done/discovered/etc." questions?
There are a lot of questions on the site that have the format "Who first [____]?" or "When was [____] discovered/created?". Some examples:
Who created topology, and when, and what problems lead to ...
HDE 226868Mod
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Do we want to change the link about MathJax help?
Stack Exchange sites with MathJax enabled have a section in the editing help page on how to use LaTeX. This section contains a "MathJax help" link at the end.
By default, this "MathJax ...
HDE 226868Mod
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Do we want hats?
It's December, and once again, Winter Bash is almost upon us.
For anyone not familiar with it, Winter Bash is an end-of-the-year celebration on Stack Exchange, where users can earn "hats" to wear on ...
HDE 226868Mod
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On questions that do not refer to a specific discipline
There has already been some discussion about how to tag questions that are (explicitly) not specific to some discipline (e.g. this one or this one). The author of the first example question I just ...
DanuMod
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What is HSMSE policy on ChatGPT?
Are we allowed to answer by asking ChatGPT? even if given credit, it can lead to partial answers but without any citations see https://hsm.stackexchange.com/a/15268/6609
Edit: the example above has ...
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Tag Wiki's - Write them!
We currently have a good 5 pages or so of tags at this time. It would help if users were proactive in trying to edit tag Wikis so we can build up quality in our tags.
This serves out as a reminder ...
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