up vote 19 down vote favorite

This is to ask if there is and if there should be an official position of math.SE about the inclusion, as images, of pages and pages of printed documents in questions. For a recent example of the practice I have in mind, see this question.

Such a modus operandi seems to me to go against the principle that some work should be put into the question. Furthermore, those of us who teach know it is often helpful to ask the student to state the definition and to state the question to be solved in her/his own words (this remark is due to Willie Wong in a comment to this post).

To me, the inclusion of printed-pages-of text-converted-to-images in questions is mainly a sign of laziness. I feel the practice appeared recently on math.SE and is spreading now, and I would like it to be specifically discouraged.

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Note: We shouldn't universally exclude scanned image input since it may be the only feasible method for some folks that have physical disabilities (which could be any of us with extreme RSI at a future date). – Gone Mar 17 '11 at 22:01
@Bill: that's a very good point. In a community like this, there will certainly be edge cases. Of course, most "rules" are more like general guidelines here, and their proper wording should be discussed. Right now I think Didier is just trying to poll the community to see whether other people also have strong opinions on this issue. – Willie Wong♦ Mar 17 '11 at 22:41
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Along similar lines are the questions which just link to an image containing the real question without even including it in the post. For example, this math.stackexchange.com/questions/27684/… (until I edited it). – George Lowther Mar 18 '11 at 1:22
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@George: That's typically done by users who don't have enough rep to embed the image. Having a higher-rep user edit the image in-line (or otherwise edit the question to a better state) is probably the best option in that case. – Isaac Mar 18 '11 at 13:43

2 Answers

up vote 18 down vote

It is quite important that questions contain enough stand-alone context to be answerable with the text alone.

Therefore, I would strongly discourage questions where critical or important context is ..

  • off-site at another hyperlink, which can go dark or become unavailable at any time
  • in an image file that is not searchable or easily parseable as text

It is probably OK to use images (or any other form of information at an external link) as a "nice to have" or "see here for even more detail", so long as the question itself contains sufficient context to be answered without the external content.

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up vote 11 down vote

I don't think a scanned image is the culprit. If somebody wants to scan a page of text (copyright issues aside) and say "I don't see how equation 2 follows from equation 1-I think this is a counterexample, can you help?" the criteria of giving some thought and showing some work can be satisfied and I would be happy to see it. On the other hand, if the page scanned were a homework assignment and OP didn't even type it up, I would be even harsher. There is a lot of room in between.

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