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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How do I ask homework questions on Physics Stack Exchange?
What is the policy on asking homework questions on Physics Stack Exchange?
What kinds of questions are considered homework questions?
Are homework questions allowed?
What should I include in a ...
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Should any check-my-work questions be made on topic?
It's long overdue that I make this post revisiting our policy on "check-my-work" questions. These are questions, often (but not necessarily) homework-like, that present a complete mathematical or ...
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Are resource recommendations allowed?
What is the policy on asking for recommendations of books or resources on Physics Stack Exchange?
What is a resource recommendation question?
What sort of resource recommendation questions are ...
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My question was closed on Phys.SE. Can you recommend me another Internet site where my question might be on-topic?
My question was closed1 on Phys.SE. Can you recommend me another Internet site where my question might be on-topic?
Here we keep a list of other Internet sites that might help students2 of physics. ...
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Are engineering questions appropriate for this site?
Often we get questions of the form
"How do I build this particular device?" or
"Why was this design implemented in such-and-such product?"
Are these questions appropriate for the Physics Stack ...
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Good list, bad list
The Stack Exchange model does not work well for "big list" questions, and these are banned network-wide for good reason. However, many of the other Stack Exchange sites allow or even ...
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What counts as sufficient prior research when asking a question?
On Physics Stack Exchange, people asking questions are expected to demonstrate that they've put a certain amount of effort into answering the question themselves. What exactly counts as sufficient ...
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Bite-sizing homework
Well, meta posts about "homework" keep on coming, but we still don't seem to have a solution that sticks, so I'll give it another shot. For what it's worth I think the current system isn't so bad that ...
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Should pure math questions be on topic?
We've previously had some discussion about the suitability of pure math questions for this site. Currently, pure math questions - by which I mean those that have no physics content, even if they arise ...
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We seem to be over-eager to downvote
Take this question:
Dark matter clumping
This is an excellent question and the answer is not at all obvious. I assume it was downvoted just because it's a duplicate, but is this really appropriate? ...
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Why don't we just ban homework altogether?
This site gets a lot of low-quality homework questions. Since I ignored the homework tag a few months ago, my experience of the site has been much more pleasant.
The current homework policy is nice, ...
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If it's possible, do we want to expand the scope of this site to include astronomy?
It was recently announced that several SE sites are closing, including Theoretical Physics and Astronomy. Given that our scope here is basically a superset of the scope of Theoretical Physics and that ...
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Experimental Physics & Engineering
I know that most of us are "paper theorists," but I think we need to remember that experimental physics is physics too! We have several tags for experimental physics (with tag excerpts):
...
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Discouraging the use of textual screenshots in questions
[This was originally posted as an answer to another question and was transformed into a question following a comment to this effect.]
To discourage rapid postings of the type alluded to in another ...
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Tag synonyms for voting
Post here tag synonym proposals for voting.
For example: what tags should by synonyms of "quantum-mechanics"? See also this meta post.
This post can also be used to suggest minor changes to a tag, ...
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Is Physics SE an appropriate location for peer review?
What peer review style questions are acceptable to ask on Physics SE and what actions, if any, should be taken against unacceptable questions?
When I originally encountered this question and its ...
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What is Physics Overflow and how is it linked to Physics.SE?
A community ad caught my eye, and I visited http://www.physicsoverflow.org. What are the links between Physics SE and Physics Overflow and how are they different from each other?
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Should we rename the homework policy?
The homework policy is a constant source of confusion for new (and sometimes established) users.
We see this confusion, for example, when users respond to closures based on the homework policy by ...
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The site toolbar looks broken in Chrome. How can I fix it?
Since earlier this month, the main toolbar of the site (with links to Questions, Tags, Users, Badges, Unanswered and Ask Question) has changed, distinctly for the worse:
The font looks blocky and ...
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Should downvoters have to comment on why they did it?
Inspired by the fact I got downvoted for this answer and cannot tell exactly why given the question was pretty vague and I don't think the OP was the one doing it either.
I am starting to think that ...
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Have we lost the necessary critical mass of professional physicists?
A while back, we had this discussion in which we tried to measure quantitatively whether the site was gaining or losing non-novice users. Since then, I've had the distinct subjective impression that ...
user4552
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How do we write good question titles?
Writing a good title can require some thought.
A title, while short, must help other users get an idea of what your question will ask so they can decide whether or not to click and read the entire ...
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Are questions about mathematics used in physics always off topic?
This question looks in imminent danger of being closed on the grounds that it's a pure mathematics question. This is something that happened a lot when I was more active on the site, and is one of the ...
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Banning homework: vote and documentation
It was proposed recently on meta that, as part of a broader programme of increasing the site quality, we ban homework questions altogether. This proposal seems to have really quite strong support. On ...
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Do we want and need a set of canonical questions with canonical answers?
This is a proposal that has been discussed to some extent in the h bar chat (especially with @ACuriousMind and @alemi), and a meta post to gauge the response of the rest of the community is long ...
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Getting rid of the popular science tag
Related: What is the purpose of the popular-science tag?, Can we encourage the "research-level" meta tag? What about a "popular" tag?
We currently have a tag called popular-...
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Tag burninate & blacklist requests for voting
As suggested by Natheniel in Redundant tags I, I'll make a single question and let people vote on the answers (containing redundant tags to burninate.).
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Physics Stack Exchange "Ask me anything" (AMA)
Purpose
The user base of Physics Stack Exchange is rather diverse in terms of cultural background, career progress, field of expertise, and personality.
While the discussion in hbar is lively, it is ...
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Should history of physics questions be on topic?
When we last visited the issue of history questions, the dedicated History of Science and Mathematics Stack Exchange was in its early stages. At that time, we decided against closing questions for ...
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Consider supporting proposals of other SE science sites
Science proposals need your help! Consider committing to these, to make them successful & scientific:
See also the long list of science and technology proposals on Area 51.
Committers needed
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Ultimately, what will the Physics Stack Exchange Become? Are there long term goals?
It was sometime back that I realized what we are synthesizing here (possibly) is an archive for an expert system. Put the Physics Stack Exchange together with an AI machine and you have a super-...
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Closing "Insufficient Effort" questions
Some time ago, John Rennie asked,
...in many cases it looks as if the OP simply can't be bothered to put any effort in. Do we have a policy for closing (or not closing) such questions?
The Meta ...
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How do you cite yourself?
In this answer I cited some work I did a while ago.
To what extent should we allow self-linking? I have noticed in some cases there is self-linking that is only tangentially related to the ...
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Community Promotion Ads - 2015 [duplicate]
The dawn of a new year, 2015, now approaches, or has already approached, either way it means that it is now time to reset our Community Promotion Ads!
What are Community Promotion Ads?
Community ...
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Generalizing the homework policy
In our last chat session two weeks ago (sorry for the delay), we had a discussion about updating the homework policy and homework close reason. I'm making this post to summarize that discussion and ...
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Asking math questions
I understand that asking pure math questions on the physics site is discouraged and I've seen many questions moved over to math. However, often times such questions are more suited for physicists to ...
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Best-of PSE 2016: description, categories, and results
As suggested in another meta post, let's do a Physics Stack Exchange "best of 2016".
There's a nice precedent for this in the Puzzles and Code Golf site.
Objective
Reward and draw attention to some ...
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Question self-destruction: why don't experts ask more questions?
I've been kicking around this site for a little while now and I've realized that I'm very rarely even tempted to post a question. I'm an astronomy grad student with a background in physics, so ...
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Capturing theoretical-physics crowd with Research Level Tag
Well, theoretical physics has failed (the site, not the discipline). We should make some effort to recapture whatever interest and audience it had. The easiest way to do that would be to introduce a "...
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Design for Physics-SE
Hi all. I'm Jin, and I'll be working on the designs for the Stack Exchange sites as they graduate from the beta phase. Each site will have its own unique theme that will reflect its topic. However, ...
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Replacing the homework policy 1: what existing questions should be on/off topic?
TL;DR: post examples of current questions which are edge cases for the new policy, look through the list, and
vote answers UP if you think they should be ON TOPIC
vote answers DOWN if you think they ...
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Opt-in to be always pingable to answer questions
Original idea: List of users with specialities who are willing to be pinged--should we do this?
This is a place where users can opt in to be pinged by other users regardless of their chat status.
...
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Book recommendations: On-topic, on-topic but community wiki, or off-topic?
Yes, we've had this debate before. Unfortunately, there's no definite consensus to be found about their community wiki status:
Good list, bad list (from July 2013) has the top voted answer (with a ...
ACuriousMindMod
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What are good examples of narrowing a homework question down to a conceptual question?
It is obvious that Physics SE community aren't here to solve specific physics problems. Homework policy, however, states that a question can be narrowed down to a conceptual question. To reinforce ...
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What is the Physics SE logo supposed to be?
What is the favicon of the site supposed to represent? My initial impressions are that it looks like a partially unrolled condom. I'm not trying to be a troll, but I just don't see it making a good ...
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What can be done about the (current) ongoing flood of homework and very basic questions overwhelming our site?
Since quite some time, the amount of new incoming higher level questions is decaying and the number of very basic ones is increasing, but the current inflood of bad homeworks (the good ones I ...
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How did mathematics end up with two Stack Exchange sites, while Physics only got one?
I'm prompted to start this thread by a comment on a recent question about why this site has the homework policy that it does. As I said in that answer, the ecological niche that this site occupies is ...
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Correcting incorrect answers
I have a strong aversion to having edits applied to my work without my approval. Because of that, I don't do that to what others have written.
So what should be done with obviously wrong answers? I ...
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Can we encourage the "research-level" meta tag? What about a "popular" tag?
I have been reading a bit of the meta discussion going on about the question quality here at the Physics StackExchange (SE). Especially in the wake of the demise of the TheoreticalPhysics SE, there ...
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What is engineering and what is experimental design?
So we have a close reason for engineering questions because selection of materials for building that ultralight in the garage are off-topic. But where is the line drawn between engineering and ...
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