FAQ and About - its high time to change it

Question

If there is anyone in power (Joe?) to change FAQ and About - I think it is the right time to do it. As new users are joining it is good to provide information on rules, with the particular emphasis on:

• scope of this page, especially on/off-topic questions (see this post),
• guidelines on using tags (with a few words on soft-question),
• encouragement to provide arXiv (i.e [arXiv:9999.9999](http://arxiv.org/abs/9999.9999)) (or DOI) links to cited papers,
• some other rules, e.g. encouragement to use real names.

EDIT:

Now Joe and Moshe are the moderators.

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Comments

Piotr: I have absolutely no power. I'm not a mod, so I only have the power obtained from having high rep, and since we went into public beta I have lost access to mod tools as well (you need 2000 rep in public beta rather than 1000 in private beta).

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I'm also slightly worried by the fact that we have a user using the name of another physicist (albeit a dead one). While pseudonyms are discouraged but acceptable, I think we may need to consider explicitly banning using other peoples names.

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@JoeFitzsimons: Banning using other peoples names - agreed (though a meta post on it will be useful). When it comes to mod tools - is there a way to ask SE team to lower reputation limits for our site (i.e. rescale them for our traffic). No moderator is a bad thing...

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@Joe Maybe we should make it a strict policy that only real names or single-word pseudonyms are acceptable. Or hope for a SE feature to verify identities (Surprisingly I didn't find a feature-request for that on meta.SO) like appending an exclusive symbol (like Φ) to verified scientist's names

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@Piotr I'd rather hope we'll soon get some [Pro Tem Moderators](http://blog.stackoverflow.com/2010/07/moderator-pro-tempore/) than lowering the rep-requirements in general

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@PiotrMigdal: We should have moderators pro tem soon enough, so its not a big deal. I think the SE people say it occurs about a week into public beta.

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@Joe I'll contribute a few votes on your posts to help you get up to 2k if you want ;-)

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@Joe: Banning names sounds impossible to enforce ("My name really is Alan Turing, honest") and in general I agree with David Eppstein's position on the Nymwars at Google+ right now, so I would rather not see this site get into something similar. (He cancelled his G+ account because they are requiring Western-style non-pseudonyms, which, all questions of racism aside, is potentially dangerous for people in many countries, including perhaps women and children in the United States, given the violent anti-female trolling that has appeared on some computer science blogs.)

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That said, I left a comment on "dickfeynmann"'s question, asking why he chose that name, because I consider it a poor career move for a physics graduate student to post using a nick like that. I would rather see the FAQ be expressed in the positive -- you will build real-life reputation, more people will know you, if you participate non-anonymously.

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@Aaron: yes, I know. My worry isn't so much when people pick names corresponding to dead scientists, but what happens if someone decides to start calling themselves after living scientists. What happens if someone started posting under Peter Shor's name, for example?

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@JoeFitzsimons, as you are now a moderator, could you change the FAQ?

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@Piotr: I'll look into it.

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Answer 1

I modified the FAQ. There is still a lot of room for the improvement, I just made the first step to adopt it to our needs.

In particular, I think it would be good to provide a list of exemplary questions (if you have some in your mind, here is a dedicated thread).

Comments are welcome.

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