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Nobody knows how to cite 4chan mathematicians who solved an interesting problem

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Re: Nobody knows how to cite 4chan mathematicians who solved an interesting problem

#61

Post by thrmsforbfast »

UncleMeat wrote: post #48
kop316 wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I actually feel that the response here is a great one: "I feel like you should be able (forced even!) to cite things that aren't journal articles- even blog posts- if they contributed to your body of work. But citing things that aren't prestigious reduces the perceived prestige of your own, which is a perverse incentive not to cite." EDIT: I can't seem to figure out how to link to specific tweets, so this is the guy…

Is that actually true? I have no experience in grad level math but in my field (security) people frequently cite all sorts of non academic content. I've personally done it a lot of times and never heard anything about it from reviewers.

No, it's not. People cite "informal" sources all the time.

This only really matters on the receiving end of the citation. I.e., if lots of people are citing your blog or forum post, then it can be a good idea to take your content and put it in arxiv or similar. Just so that the citations "count" for you in the academic setting.

And similarly, it's a bit rude (or at least odd) to cite someone's blog post when there's an accompanying published paper that describes the same work.

But citing informal sources where no formal source exists is not (and afaik never has been) a problem.

Re: Nobody knows how to cite 4chan mathematicians who solved an interesting problem

#62

Post by huntie »

izzydata wrote: post #54

One problem with linking to anything on 4chan is that it will be purged within the day and no longer available.

You can always make use of the various archive sites. The thread referred to is from 2011, and is available on warosu[1]. It is worth noting that 4chan keeps its own 2 week archive now as well.

[1] https://warosu.org/sci/thread/S3751105#p3751197

Re: Nobody knows how to cite 4chan mathematicians who solved an interesting problem

#63

Post by wanderfowl »

_mtkq wrote: post #7

An "academically correct" solution (i.e., not to taint the prestige of a scholar who cites the solution) would be to cite a real, proxy scholar who checks the solution, but gives all credit to the anonymous 4chan user. Scientists often abhor citing from blogs, forums, and Wikipedia, as those publications "are not peer-reviewed by trustworthy professionals".

I agree that this is probably the cultural solution, provided the author can't be coerced to post on Arxiv, but it's an ugly one, which reeks of an ivory tower and gatekeeping ("nobody who isn't an established scholar in our tradition is truly capable of our work").

Perhaps this is better seen as a substantial defect in the fact that the academic web-of-trust model implemented in publication is based on quality of source (e.g. journal's prestige, or the submitting scholar's prestige) rather than quality of scholarship (e.g. whether a critical mass of researchers, rather than 1-3 anonymous reviewers, find it compelling and 'sign off' on it being good work).

I hope (and suspect) that whatever emerges or is developed to replace the paid journal model of academic trust is designed to handle these situations gracefully.

Re: Nobody knows how to cite 4chan mathematicians who solved an interesting problem

#64

Post by djsumdog »

dorfsmay wrote: post #41
_mtkq wrote: post #7

An "academically correct" solution (i.e., not to taint the prestige of a scholar who cites the solution) would be to cite a real, proxy scholar who checks the solution, but gives all credit to the anonymous 4chan user. Scientists often abhor citing from blogs, forums, and Wikipedia, as those publications "are not peer-reviewed by trustworthy professionals".

The problems with blogs and wikipedia is that they can be changed, or in the case of blogs disappear. For wikipedia, you should reference the specific version of the article, which will never change. For blogs, or wikipedia articles you feel might get deleted, you can reference a specific version from archive.org.

You can archive it through various services and save an exact screenshot/html snippet/text that can be cited. In the sources you add "Retrieved on.." and "Archived link... Secondary archived link.." .. and some journals are allowing artifacts these days too. Typically this is used for code or data sets, but it could also be used for copies of the anonymous source material.

Re: Nobody knows how to cite 4chan mathematicians who solved an interesting problem

#65

Post by huntie »

CPLX wrote: post #6

Also lending strong support for the infinite number of monkeys theorem.

Not at all, 4chan has* quite a few very smart people who for various reasons might not have "made it" in life. This type of thing used to be called "weaponized autism" or "autism" on site. This usage of autism really means something closer to "extreme obsession".

* or at least had. I think that a lot of people left the site over the last few years as the site changed quite dramatically.

Re: Nobody knows how to cite 4chan mathematicians who solved an interesting problem

#67

Post by maze-le »

This might be a ghost discussion. I have worked in scientific publishing for quite some time and have seen citations in the form of:

* personal correspondence

* emails

* facebook profile pages

and my personal highlight

* google search queries (I kid you not)

All of these citations actually occured in scientific journals. I assume Nicolas Bourbaki was also cited several times, without anyone caring about "academically correct" citation rules.

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nicolas_Bourbaki

Re: Nobody knows how to cite 4chan mathematicians who solved an interesting problem

#68

Post by huntie »

gfosco wrote: post #55
huntie wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What do you mean by hash? 4chan posts use an incrementing id per board, so if you put >>>/sci/3751197 you have a unique identifier for the post (sci being the board and 3751197 being the post number). For convenience you could link to an archive site as well, but they're known to die every few years.

Some boards like /pol/ have a user hash, unique per user-session, stable across posts.

Ah I forgot about that. It would certainly be a good idea to include it if available. Do you know if it is necessary for a unique id? I've never browsed any of the boards with user hashes.

Re: Nobody knows how to cite 4chan mathematicians who solved an interesting problem

#69

Post by PurpleRamen »

dijhrykl wrote: post #57

For those not familiar with the series in question, there's a reason why, if you're going to choose a TV series to discuss permutations, you'd choose Haruhi. "The Melancholy of Haruhi Suzumiya" is a 14-episode anime adaptation which aired in 2006. Unusually, it broadcast its episodes not in chronological order, but in a mixed order, but for good theatrical reason; the series comprises a main plot arc, and various sel…

> "The Melancholy of Haruhi Suzumiya" is a 14-episode anime adaptation which aired in 2006.

The first version to be correctly. They later added another 14 episodes, but instead of calling it a new season, they mixed in the new episodes between the old episodes and rebroadcasted it as one complete series.

As a special "joke", they also had a timeloop-story spanning multiple episodes, with each episodes telling the same story with slight changes in the story, and individual art-style, meaniung each episodes was produced new not just recycled from the first episode. The "joke" with this story was, that of the 14 new episodes, the timeloop-story filled 8(!) episodes and went under the funny name "Endless Eight". I think someone was fired himself for this.

Re: Nobody knows how to cite 4chan mathematicians who solved an interesting problem

#70

Post by jhallenworld »

Back in the 90s there was the same discussion involving citing USENET news postings. I would suggest that some of the news postings were better peer reviewed than Journal articles. There was certainly a time when the top academics of certain fields were USENET junkies.

I suppose hacker news is the most recent equivalent.

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