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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

#141

Post by swebs »

krustyburger wrote: post #60
mohammedbin wrote: post #59

Something I somehow doubt too many of you would know but 4chan, despite being considered an unsavoury place because of certain subsections of it (which I'm not proud to admit I visit to learn what "the other side" is talking about), has a lot of great communities as well and I usually find the discussion quality there better than reddit. Also, in the context of this thread, 4chan is an ephemeral site so there is no s…

What are some of the worthwhile communities?

/diy/ is really great. Generally post quality is inversely proportional to board popularity. Also avoid any board related to entertainment if you want rational discussion.

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

#142

Post by jessriedel »

rspeer wrote: post #123
jessriedel wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Instead they put a link to a webpage in a footnote, which does nothing for assigning credit. Why would a footnote be considered less credit than something in the list of references? It's pretty common in my field to use footnotes to give credit to other researchers for ideas that arose in an informal context, e.g., "I thank A. Zee for pointing this out". Indeed, the question of whether prose footnotes are at the bo…

Crediting a web page in a footnote is almost no credit at all. The web page didn't compile the data. A person did. Sometimes the person is inconveniently pseudonymous, but other times they should be credited by name. I added the Google Books Ngrams example slightly later, but: People _do_ publish papers about their data, and their citation counts are often extremely low, because research users continue to use footnot…

Are you talking about someone crediting a webpage without attempting to attach the name of the author? I have never seen this in academic research, ever. Can you link to an example?

In the OP case, the 4chan author was anonymous.

EDIT:

> People _do_ publish papers about their data, and their citation counts are often extremely low, because research users continue to use footnotes instead.

Are you talking about researchers not giving credit for pure data sets? That is a really very different topic.

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

#143

Post by shittyadmin »

strictnein wrote: post #95
ortusdux wrote: post #46

The Haruhi problem reminds me of De Bruijn sequences, aka why I don't trust 5 button keyless car entry systems. Fords keypads do not have return keys, delays, or attempt limits. A 3125 button sequence can guarantee you will unlock the door. It would take about 10-20 minutes for someone who has practiced to break in. Someone this year made a bot that did it in about 5 minutes. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/De_Bruijn_s…

You're worried about someone standing next to your car for 10-20 minutes pushing buttons and not messing up a 3125 number combo on a keypad with almost no tactile feedback?

Yeah, this is nowhere near as bad as the proximity remote attacks where a simple amplifier is enough to trigger the key to open the door - or even to drive away with the car if you do a bit more serious engineering.

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

#144

Post by setr »

throwawaymath wrote: post #112
rspeer wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not that nobody knows how to cite it, it's that nobody wants to cite things from outside of academia, perhaps because it lowers their own perceived prestige. I have seen this in computational linguistics where people frequently don't cite their data sources, which often come from outside of the field or outside academia altogether. Instead they put a link to a webpage in a footnote, which does nothing for assign…

To give you a counterpoint, I've read plenty of computer science and mathematics papers where someone cited an arXiv paper by an obscure or unknown researcher. I've even seen blog posts and email correspondence cited. In fact, in one of my own papers I cited an unpublished manuscript which you can't even find on the internet - you have to personally contact the author, who hasn't touched the thing in the last 25 year…

I vaguely remember reading a paper on three-coloring a graph, where the gadget was cited as coming from a children’s puzzles book

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

#145

Post by marmaduke »

tokai wrote: post #73

It is a fun little event that something posted on 4chan is used in a research paper. But that nobody knows how it should be cited is just plain wrong. They should maybe contact their research library and get a introduction to citing. All citation styles I know of can handle web citations. Anonymous authors is nothing new either. And you have things like the internet archive or Webcite[0] to make sure the web document…

I don’t see any mention of Zenodo but it is a potential solution for, in their words, the long tail of science. One could post some extract from the 4chan page, post it on Zenodo and have a DOI to work with.

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

#146

Post by Beldin »

rspeer wrote: post #123
jessriedel wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Instead they put a link to a webpage in a footnote, which does nothing for assigning credit. Why would a footnote be considered less credit than something in the list of references? It's pretty common in my field to use footnotes to give credit to other researchers for ideas that arose in an informal context, e.g., "I thank A. Zee for pointing this out". Indeed, the question of whether prose footnotes are at the bo…

Crediting a web page in a footnote is almost no credit at all. The web page didn't compile the data. A person did. Sometimes the person is inconveniently pseudonymous, but other times they should be credited by name. I added the Google Books Ngrams example slightly later, but: People _do_ publish papers about their data, and their citation counts are often extremely low, because research users continue to use footnot…

If the persons who compiled a data set (or made a latex package or or or) published a paper on that thing, by all means, cite it.

If they didn't, but they do have a web page on the thing, then give them credits in the currency of the web: links.

GP has a point: if the creators want scientific credit, they can easily get that via ArXiv (or, of course, a peer-reviewed publication). If not: increase their PageRank.

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

#147

Post by setr »

komali2 wrote: post #131
strictnein wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is directly addressed in the comment you're responding to. > "And you have things like the internet archive or Webcite[0] to make sure the web document doesn't disappear."

Does that even work on 4chan? On /b/ threads can vanish in less than an hour. There used to be specialized sites such as 4chanarchive to fill the gap, but last I checked most are dead.

Afaik there are various ones still existing, but dunno how ephemeral they are (eg archive.moe supports /b/), and how much they miss

And then you just webarchive archive the archive sites instead of 4chan directly :-)

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

#150

Post by andrioni »

throwawaymath wrote: post #112
rspeer wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not that nobody knows how to cite it, it's that nobody wants to cite things from outside of academia, perhaps because it lowers their own perceived prestige. I have seen this in computational linguistics where people frequently don't cite their data sources, which often come from outside of the field or outside academia altogether. Instead they put a link to a webpage in a footnote, which does nothing for assign…

To give you a counterpoint, I've read plenty of computer science and mathematics papers where someone cited an arXiv paper by an obscure or unknown researcher. I've even seen blog posts and email correspondence cited. In fact, in one of my own papers I cited an unpublished manuscript which you can't even find on the internet - you have to personally contact the author, who hasn't touched the thing in the last 25 year…

It's not entirely uncommon in mathematics to see citations to "personal communication with [insert name of other mathematician here]".
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