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The author has left a message. This however is not the place to put that question.
(deleted)
I have added a pointer to an example and some hints on how/where to ask questions.
This is evidently from a student asking for help with maths, and implicitly asking how the Lab works. There is no need, certainly not for regulars here, to intentionally proliferate unintentional noise, or to add ridicule, of all things. The question asked may be elementary, but it is a completely reasonable question, and a question that our Lab entry on the matter had indeed forgotten to answer.
When we feel that the OP has either seen my reply or else has forgotten about their question, then let’s remove this entry here, but for the moment let’s keep it up. It doesn’t hurt anyone.
I agree completely with encouraging people; however, in this case, I am not completely sure that this is not a semi-sophisticated form of spam. It is not that easy to create a page with a title like this on the nLab if one doesn’t know what one is doing, and I don’t see anything in ’Latest revisions’ which indicates that a page edit was made which would allow for the link creation. In that case, the page must have been created by an API call, which almost certainly would mean it was spam/automated.
I see. Though what would be the purpose of such “spam”?
But I think my point holds nonetheless: We don’t want to be making the public appearance of being jerks towards newbies.
When this comes up again (and it will): Let’s either produce some productive reaction (answer a question and/or improve the relevant Lab entry) or else, if it does look decidedly suspicious, let’s not proliferate the noise by adding pointless comments, but just wait for you, Richard, to delete it.
I’m not sure what the purpose would be in this case, but we have seen similar things before.
I completely agree regarding your point; there is never anything to be lost from being courteous and respectful.
I have now done some digging through the nginx logs, and I was in fact wrong. The author had tried to search for ’Regular axiom is stronger than hausdroff axiom’ in the search bar at the top of the page regular space. When one does this and a page with that title or containing that exact text does not exist, a link is made at the bottom of the page that is returned which allows one to create a page with the same title as one searched for. Thus Urs was correct, and this was someone genuinely asking a question.
We should improve things here in some way. The search functionality is not great and could be improved, but as a first step I can at least remove (later) the link suggesting creation of a new page with the title of the search. Maybe we should actually replace the search bar with something that says ’Question or request?’ or something, which could either do the same as ’Discuss this page’, or else maybe allow a question to be asked in a textbox, with a link to the relevant nForum thread where an answer would be given.
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