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I think it is a waste of time to put material on an arbitrary web page and relying on a trackback to a link which will like cease after several years. When one contributed a paper to the arXiv it gets a number, it is permanently there in uniform and well known format and it can be stably cited. Unless comment contributions can get the same level of stable and uniform arXiving I consider it waste of time. It is like a difference between street discussion and contributing to real proceedings. It is like difference between forums and wikis, but even stronger.
@Alexander #3: Zoran is using it. So are you. It is this very forum.
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btw — we actually have some statistics on trackbacks, and it’s more than 0% of papers which are receiving trackbacks. Look at http://arxiv.org/tb/recent, show the last 100 trackbacks, and observe that (at least at the time of writing) we’re averaging about 10 new trackbacks per day. (Actually, that’s counting webpages, many of which link to multiple arXiv papers.) Now that list is across the whole arXiv, but most are actually math papers (hooray Terry Tao and MathOverflow, essentially :-). So maybe there’s 5 new trackbacks a day. There’s less than 100 new math papers each day, I think, so we’re already significantly above 0%. Perhaps even 5%?
3: I would, yes. But perfection (besides stability) is more in the goals, mission, suggested content and function than about software, interface and so on. Closer the format and mission of a comment is to a mini-version of a paper, I will be more enthusiastic about it. Closer the format to the popularity contest or chat group, I will be less enthusiastic about it.
Alexander 10: While I sympathise and appreciate many contributors to science who have little time and other resources, or education to do major contribution, so far the opposite problem has been much more the problem. So much of irrelevant output just to fill various publication numbers, small national agencies and so on. In some marginal areas, the criteria are so much lower than in principal parts of mathematics that it is easy for graduate students to publish several papers quickly and learn almost nothing. So the bosses of such groups get their projects full of “successful” thesis and so on, and get more and more space as local agencies like their “success”. In my country, for example, a quickly growing (by number of researchers) area is producing new inequalities and making this production into proliferate publication; in the same time some major areas like topology are shrinking by fast pace. Because it is easier to get a new class of inequalities than publish a paper in homotopy theory. Who cares the importance, motivation, difficulty, width of the work.
Alexander, I am not talking “rapidly expanding system”. I am saying that the permission to fund a graduate student a, say, homotopy theorist will not get because his portfolio is not as successful as from groups massively publishing something more trivial. I am talking about the whose profile of the scientific community in those small countries which do not distinguish trivial from important changing in a direction of triviality. I am talking about some great schools disappearing because of wrong funding criteria. I do not need somebody filling the need. There are students who have a talent for a world class research and end up in such a niche because of the attitude that anything publishable is equally OK. in communities not having authorities or good standards telling what is important and what not, the massive producers of trivial papers set the standards to those working on more difficult or important problems.
@15, a side note, but at MathOverflow we do identify links to PDF files at the arXiv, and properly generate the trackback to the abstract page. We even unmangle the strange caching URLs some of the arxiv mirrors use…
If you write a comment which is “mini-version of paper” - I think it is of value to put it in arXiv as a separate paper ! So no need for new site.
No, it isn’t. First, such are not attached to some past papers. Second, socially writing non-important comments and so on, is not accepted – people will then judge that your real papers are about the same low quality as those, and one will loose that little attention to his more important paper which does exist currently. Effective learned community needs to be carefully stratified with meaning, not to mislead the readers, colleagues, reviewers and so on. That is the point. One can not just carelessly say I have a technology and will go orthogonal to building a trusted system of competence! On the other hand, wikipedia by definition does not give you a freedom to be opinionated.
The thing about iteration is not against what I said. Exactly putting the contribution in a series of small comments, but those integrated into citation system etc. is a good way of splitting. For questions you have other sites like MO and forums, this is different thing. If you have a personal question to the AUTHOR and not community, and you anyway do not care of firm record and serious articles posted than one can still write more openly to the author privately. All of this exists, and what I propose does not. So why would I be enthusiast about a system of forums if those already exist ? I am interested in serious commenting. This existed in history, e.g. upanishads were created toward understanding vedas. One needs a format in which one knows something is accomplished, recorded, not a food for the vanity but for creativity. The rest is there in multiple forums.
What does not exist in math forums what you then need ? I am disappointed. Out of all new and nonexistent formats you ask back to go to plain online discussion.
(Sasha, about your last question: I added the paragraph to the above comment in the meantime)
“socially writing non-important comments and so on, is not accepted …..” Agree… But the same works against everything. Many people still do not submit papers to arXiv, cause they think it is below their level of socially respected behavior.
Sasha, do you REALLY want that a very minor improvement of a proof appears in a listing of arxiv papers ? Do you really want not to be able to see if the paper from is a new research or a minor rewriting of known stuff for teaching an honors course in Alabama ? I do not think that it is desirable to OVERALL abandon the standards and usages, manners of learned community. It is impossible to radically change people in less than a generation, but it is not that impossible to make them accept that NEW categories are used with different attitude.
If there is a minor category which is ASSUMED and INVITED by design to be below the level of a new research article and I publish a minor extension of a proof there this is socially radically more acceptable than writing the same proof in the same category as the research article (or arXiv paper). So we need to stratify carefully and not say, well everything has social obstacle. Social obstacles are solved by careful internal transformation, not by careless neglect. Posting under the umbrella of a new comment category makes me less likely to get wet from the rain of the author’s misunderstanding and reaction. Chat will not do for my needs and arxiv article may be an offensive mode, so I need an umbrella!
Voting is similarly more oppressive and rude than allowing authors to preclassify (by design) the supposed role/category of their contribution. The latter is a female method: avoid the unwanted conflict by listening for the needs in advance.
P.S. my favorite reading for classification and nurture of literature: Pollock
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