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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A guide for asking "Identify this rock" questions?
Spurred on by the discussion on my earlier question about whether or not 'identify this rock' questions should be on topic and the appearance of our first such question; I propose that we make a guide ...
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Rock identification questions are now off topic. Old questions will be deleted. Should we retain any?
On July 16, the proposal a ban on rock ID questions was proposed. After two weeks, this proposal has 15 upvotes and 0 downvotes. The answers are supportive of the ban. Clearly, there is a community ...
gerritMod
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Is planetary science on-topic?
The title of the site is Earth Science, which implies questions should be limited to, well, Earth. But the term Geosciences may be considered a synonym, and the European Geosciences Union (EGU) does ...
gerritMod
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I've had enough. Let's ban rock id questions
Let's completely ban rock id questions, and delete the old ones.
Here's why:
These rocks are of interest only to the person who opened them. They can rarely be used as a reference point, which is ...
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Idea - make identification request posts off topic
I think we should not allow identification-request any more. Here's why:
People do not use the guide. Even when referring to the guide, people ignore it. I stopped bothering referring to the guide on ...
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Are we aiming to be an expert site?
There have been a number of assertions that this site is aspiring to be an "expert site". I take that to mean that it is catering for experts in the fields covered, to the exclusion (to some extent) ...
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Earth Science: Biweekly Topic Challenge
Jon Ericson has come up with a wonderful way to boost the amount of questions on the site, and promote activity in topics that may otherwise receive only minimal attention. And it will be a lot of fun....
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Level of the questions so far
I've been delighted to look in very early in the private beta and see lots of questions. However, I'm a little concerned about the nature of these questions.
The majority seem to be at a "popular ...
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Proposing to add a custom close reason for rock-identification questions that are lacking in sufficient detail to be useful and answerable
Out of 29 questions closed in the past month, 23 were rock-identification questions. All of them were closed because the asker did not follow this very good guide on how to ask them. Those questions ...
gerritMod
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Subdiscipline tag convention
Do we prefer tags like this:
volcanology
speleology
glaciology
or like this:
volcanoes
caves
glaciers
?
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Shall we have a "cite your sources" policy for answers?
I want this site to succeed. I want a site that attracts experts. Real experts. Not people like me, but scientists with 25 years of experience in a sub-field of atmospheric science.
I'm seeing ...
gerritMod
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How do I ask homework questions on Earth Science Stack Exchange?
Consensus was reached on using the Physics.SE model for homework questions, so I am creating this question to formulate out specific policy. This will serve as the FAQ for this topic and is CW, so ...
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Are questions such as "Can you identify this rock?" on-topic
Here is an example of the style of question which I am referring to from outdoors.SE.
Are questions such as these on-topic here? What difficulties might this type of question present?
One major ...
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Should we clean up the tags on this site?
I am an active user on chemistry.SE and I've recently become interested in Earth Science and have started to participate over here as well. One of things I noticed whilst browsing around the site was ...
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Rock-identification tag: Notification warning
Creating a tag notification warning for the identification-request tag was suggested as a measure to reduce the number of bad quality "identify my rock" questions. I think that is indeed a ...
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Asking for help to +500 rep users to close id-request questions [Update: all are closed]
Ok, so to stop receiving those question, we should not appear firsts at Google common searches from users that want to know what is the stone they found. For that the 450 questions we have should be ...
user12525
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How can I format math and chemistry expressions here?
The site supports mathjax for mathematical equations and the mhchem extension for describing chemical reactions. What is the markdown syntax to add these to my own posts?
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MathJax request
Although we are only on day 1 of the private beta, I figure we might as well get this request out there. Being a science Stack Exchange site, no doubt math is going to spring up in both questions and ...
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Should we discourage wildly hypothetical questions?
The question Can we really travel through earth's core? is wildly hypothetical - basically asking how plausible "movie science" is, from a position of ignorance - but kinda fun. Right now it has ...
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Should pseudoscience questions be closed on sight?
A comment on a recent question:
I'm voting to close this question as off-topic because it's about pseudoscience.
received numerous votes and noting we have no "official" policy on this I am ...
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Do we need to be stricter on enforcing citations?
Earth Science Stack Exchange is a science site, and, in principle, we require or strongly encourage sources for answers.
It's been nearly six years since the linked meta post, which was in fact ...
gerritMod
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When rocks are identified can we put the name of it in the title?
When I searched for an identification the title reads like "Can someone identify these rocks?" There is many of them. The ones that have a solid identification should also include the name of the rock ...
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Is agriculture on-topic?
Agriculture, or at least horticulture, is a field that closely interacts with various fields of Earth Science such as soil science and meteorology. Are questions about agriculture in general on-topic ...
gerritMod
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Homework questions
UPDATE: This is a historical discussion. Here is the adopted homework questions policy.
We don't have this problem yet, but given time I'm sure that we will. Do we want to allow homework questions ...
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Would geosciences-specific software support be on-topic here?
Would questions asking for help performing a given task with a geosciences-specific software or library such as GPlates, PmagPy, PaSt or any stratigraphic tool such as RASC/CASC, CONOP9, UAGraph be on-...
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Standard comment text when VTC ID questions as 'unclear'
As suggested in my comment under Spencer's answer in the Idea - make identification request posts off topic topic, what could be a 'default' comment text that we can quickly cut and paste a question ...
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Tackling the unanswered list
This is similar to the thread 90 unanswered questions and counting, I have just tackled and answered 4 unanswered questions - it took a bit of research, but was doable and I think the answers are of a ...
user889
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Are questions about exoplanets and planetary formation on topic?
In response to this question: 'Late Veneer' on other planets
Few have brought up the point that it may or may not be on topic. Is it?
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Should we include a suggestion for a displacement test in the rock identification guide?
Part 1: We want them to do science, right?
People asking rock-identification questions occasionally say things like "it feels heavy for its size", and when that happens I usually think "shouldn't we ...
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Should [atmosphere] be a synonym of [meteorology]?
Should atmosphere be a synonym of meteorology?
The AMS defines meteorology as:
The study of the physics, chemistry, and dynamics of the earth's atmosphere, including the related effects at the air–...
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2019: a year in moderation
It's New Year's Day in Stack Exchange land...
A distinguishing characteristic of these sites is how they are moderated:
We designed the Stack Exchange network engine to be mostly self-regulating, ...
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what is a reasonable reputation count
We have all heard of our reputation count, and how it's constantly changing. I've been on StackExchange for only two days, and I currently have 23 reputation.
all I'm asking for in this post is ...
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Vote early and vote often!
This is copied from Scott Morrison's post on meta.latexSE:
I'm a moderator from MathOverflow, and this "question" is actually unsolicited advice, based on our experience from the initial launch of ...
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Moderator Pro Tem Announcement
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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Site statistics
This meta post will track our stats on Area 51, fortnightly (14 days) or a bit longer if I forget and someone else updates it:
Here's the Quantcast estimate of site traffic, with the mean number of ...
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Are Earth Science related programming questions on topic?
I'm asking this because of the closing of this question asking how to plot wind barbs in python. The reception from the community seems to be split. One one hand it was upvoted to +7, and on the ...
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Introduce yourselves here
So I'm curious: what area of geoscience do you study, and where do you study it? What is your background and what is your general story?
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Please vote for quality content
When we started this site in 2014, we encouraged everyone to vote early and often, and people did. Now this site is not young anymore. In the past 5 years, we have seen a steady increase in the ...
gerritMod
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Tag for global Earth: do not use “earth”?
Some questions* already use the tag earth.
(*) edit: ignore the previous link, see the first comment by plannapus following naught101 answer below.
I'm wondering if it is meaningful on Earth Science ...
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Should we have the mhchem MathJax extension enabled?
Biology and Chemistry have the mhchem MathJax extension enabled, which makes it easier to write chemical species and reactions. Should this extension be enabled here? I imagine that it will be useful ...
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Are ecology questions on topic?
There's certainly a lot of interaction between the interactions between organisms and the environment - that's what ecology is all about.
As for where ecologists interact: some certainly interact ...
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Let's clean-up those rock identification questions
We now have more than 200 rock-identification questions. Here on meta, we have a very good guide on what it takes to write a good rock ID question. It doesn't take a geologist to recognise that many ...
gerritMod
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Should we allow requests for references?
Prompted by seeing References for moving and nested grids in models. The asker is after information on "concepts such as moving grids and nested grids in models", which if asked as such would probably ...
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Is expert level the same as difficult?
There have been some discussions as to whether we want to be a site for experts, or a site for all.
There have also been discussions if some questions are too basic.
Are those two discussions ...
gerritMod
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Biweekly topic challenge: antarctic [completed]
I made a post asking for topic ideas for the challenge, and the highest scoring suggestion is for antarctic.
Please use the tag antarctic when posting questions for this challenge, and remember to ...
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Should we add a "not mainstream science" close reason?
As a science-based stack, we do and will inevitable get questions that are, to put it mildly, not based on "mainstream science". Some examples:
https://earthscience.stackexchange.com/q/6928/6
Why ...
gerritMod
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Is telling jokes good marketing?
The OP of the question
https://earthscience.stackexchange.com/questions/2376/what-is-your-favorite-earth-science-joke
argues that a fun question would help to attract user to come to our site. Is ...
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Economic geography -- on topic?
I've been thinking about asking this question for a while.
But I saw a good example that made me go ahead and ask it now.
Recently, this History SE question was (rightly) closed as off-topic for ...
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Are software-requests on-topic?
We have questions like Does anyone know of a DBMS with global geospatial search? on the site.
Personally, I'm not sure if these are off-topic or on-topic. It seems to me like that question isn't ...
hichris123Mod
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Should we define an ESSE AI-use policy?
ChatGPT-generated questions and answers are temporary banned on Stack Overflow. The reason is that the AI does not solve correctly all code problems and gives bad answers.
In Meta there was a proposal ...
user28185