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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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Provisional Moderator Nominations
How do you become a provisional moderator for this site?
Soon after the site launches into "public beta," the Community Team will appoint provisional moderators from this community until the ...
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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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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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Let's change our favicon to 🌍
I propose we request for our favicon to be changed to 🌍, a globe.
Credit for this proposal goes to WBT but it's on this meta site we need to decide whether to adopt this. Please share your thoughts....
gerritMod
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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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What should our about page contain?
Moderators can edit the tour page (formerly called the about page) of a site. We can change the "ask about" and "don't ask about" sections of the page.
Here's the current content:
Ask about...
...
hichris123Mod
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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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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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Is the imperial measurement system still used in the geosciences?
There are a bunch of questions on this site with measurements in miles, feet, etc. I'm an imperial system hater, so it annoys me. I'm wondering if this measurement system is still used anywhere in the ...
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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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Can the misspelled [meateorology] tag be deleted?
meaterology is obviously a misspelling and so should be deleted (unless Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs actually has a scientific basis ☺) and not made a synonym of the correct spelling.
user26
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Stack Exchange Inc. fired two popular community team employees
Stack Exchange Inc. has fired Shog9 and Robert Cartaino, who were both employed as liaisons between the company and the various Stack Exchange communities. For details, see this post on Meta Stack ...
gerritMod
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How are we doing as a community and a site?
We have been in beta now for a little over 430 days and we've been slowly but steadily growing. I am curious about how we collectively feel about this site and if we are happy with the direction it ...
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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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Should I stop asking questions on private beta?
I'm interested in Earth science but I am far from an expert. I'm have many questions in my mind about the Earth that I think are interesting, and I have asked some questions such as "Why is the Earth ...
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Addressing climate change denial
It seems to me that SE is potentially an ideal format to challenge some of the climate change denial blogs and journalism (names withheld to protect the innocent). Should we have a tag under which ...
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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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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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Why do we have so few accepted answers?
Most questions get at least one answer, and some of these answers get plenty of upvotes, but there seem to be fewer than I (at least) would expect that get the accepted answer tick. Why is this, and ...
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Community promotion ad
It is 2016 now and we can submit our site ad to this years community ad rotation on relevant graduated sites. However, the image size and guidelines have changed, and the current image below is not ...
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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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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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Do we want weekly topic challenges?
A great suggestion from Jon Ericson is to have Weekly Topic Challenges, these would involve 4 steps:
Step 1: Ask for topic ideas.
Select underrepresented topics, or topics we feel need a boost.
...
user889
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Boilerplate text to invite domain experts not familiar with Stack Exchange
Suppose I send an e-mail to invite an expert in an Earth Science domain, unfamiliar with Stack Exchange, to come to the site. How can I best formulate the e-mail?
Let's have CW answers in different ...
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Please *use* our new rock-identification custom close reason
Following this discussion, we now have a custom close reason that says,
Please review our rock identification guidelines to provide the
missing information so that your question is both ...
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Congratulations to our Sheriff - Jan Doggen
Not many of you may notice necessarily but we have a Sheriff at ES SE. He is probably first to notice every question and comment on it's quality- wall of text,etc. So many times have I had to accept ...
user1066
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Merging Ocean Modelling proposal?
Back in A51, there was a discussion on merging "Earth, Ocean & Atmospheric modelling" with Earth Science. Now that ES is in beta (and that one isn't), should this be revisited?
I see that ...
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What should our chatroom be called?
Every Stack Exchange site has an official chat room which can be reached by clicking the "Stack Exchange" logo on the upper left corner.
Each site chooses a nickname for its chat room to put some ...
gerritMod
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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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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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Should we have the [homework] tag?
I realize that our homework policy states that when asking a homework question, one should include the homework tag. However, it seems to me that the homework tag is a meta tag and thus should be ...
hichris123Mod
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Guidance for references behind paywall
It seems likely that provided references could be from books, journals, or lectures that are behind a so-called "pay wall". That is, the reader must pay to access the full material. (For an example ...
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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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How should we handle questions that are valid and focussed, but not answerable without unreasonably large efforts?
How should we handle questions that are valid and focussed, but not answerable without large efforts? Many climate-related questions fall in this category. For example, one could consider the ...
gerritMod
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What can we do to increase the number of questions on the site
This stat is shown at area51:
I wonder what can I or others do to revert this.
I upvote most of questions that appear at the home page.
I think even the question is poor or difficult to answer, we ...
user18590
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2021 Community Moderator Election Results
Earth Science's moderator election has come to a close. Since there were not enough candidates, we simply appointed the sole candidate:
They'll be joining the existing crew shortly—please thank them ...
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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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What are our best Q&As to show off this site?
I'm looking to promote this site and want to hear from our domain experts what our best questions in each discipline are. I'm interested in both questions with great answers and also great questions ...