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

@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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@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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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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