What is the incentive to use MathJax

manpreet Best Answer 2 years ago

I've been wondering about MathJax and the site's policy towards it recently. I am talking about questions which are otherwise good and up to site standards, but are formatted either without MathJax or with a limited amount of it.

I understand that new users usually do not know how to use MathJax, meaning that when a user posts a good, but poorly formatted question, the correct response is (1) edit his question and (2) mention the MathJax tutorial in the comments.

But what about experienced users which asked a lot of questions (say, more than 2020)? Should the community still have the same response?

I feel that users like that show an amount of laziness that damages the site, but at the moment, I completely understand why they do not bother with MathJax: there is no motive in doing so. I can ask a poorly formatted question and it will either get edited or even answered in a while.

So why do we even bother with warning people about using MathJax if we have no way to actually force them to use it?

manpreet 2 years ago

For short/trivial to understand and edit posts, I can see how one might say that there is no incentive to learn MathJax, as indeed someone will likely fix it. However, in that case, the amount of effort an editor has to make to A: Understand the original question, and B: Fix it, are both minimal and therefore not really damaging to the site.

Once a question increases in complexity, the difficulty to parse the intent and fix it both go up in a more than linear fashion. At that b.com/tag/point">point, the problem should be self correcting, in that people will see more negative votes and less useful b.com/tag/answers">answers with comments to the sort of "If you want more useful b.com/tag/answers">answers, learn MathJax so we can understand what you're asking!"

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answered Jan 12 '15 at 0:09

Alan

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