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Earlier quoted context omitted.
Bill Thurston cited personal communication with himself, which is a pretty unusual source.
I will reject a paper if it references a private communication with author oneself. Just tell the truth, undisclosed prior work .
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 doesn't disappear. Else it could be cited as personal communication, which usually covers direct communication, but can also be used for nonarchived discussion groups.
The reluctance to cite a source because it's not a peer reviewed research paper, is bordering on cargo cult science. As if going through the motions of scientific publishing should somehow elevate arguments to truth.
These should absolutely be cited if you as a researcher are convinced they are correct. There is no good reason not to.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Ethically do you even have to cite something properly when the person who solved it was intentionally anonymous? If the concern is that people will think the person writing solved it, they can just write a sentence where it came from.
Academia has no problem with pseudonymous publication. See "Student" of "Student's T distribution" fame. [1] [1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Sealy_Gosset
another great example is Bitcoin paper.
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?
It's funny, when a community pretends to be stupid for the funnies, it's not too soon before the actual stupid people move in.
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 used to think it was because as a quasiscientific community we highly value peer review but ML people are totally fine with citing papers on arxiv that haven't been accepted anywhere as long as you can replicate the results - I think perceived prestige nails it[1]
Peer reviewed citations are excellent, and unstable citations like Wikipedia are obviously concerning. (At bare minimum, you'd want to link to the page history instead of the page.) But the willingness to cite arXiv content without hesitation definitely suggests that peer review is only part of what's going on there.
[1]https://twitter.com/adversariel/status/1054836640307392512
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.
This is fantastic. Imagine having to cite "Anonymous user on 4chan" on your paper. I'd probably just do it for the novelty (who else can say they have a more unusual source??)
citing "anonymous", if it is unclear who the author is, is nothing new. I did that a long time ago when I a cited something from the nmap man page in a paper for university . Back then it was unclear - at least to me - who the author is. This is a very common practice. I do not see, where the novelty is.
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".
They are also prone to disappearing, post-citation editing, etc.
There's probably no great answer here, it just feels like authors and editors sometimes use "it was reputably published once" to shrug off disappearing sources.