Suggested change to "Ask Question" page for new users

Question

This is the page first-time posters see:

On the right it says,

Is your question about Mathematica?

Can we change this to the following?

Is your question about Wolfram Mathematica?

Or maybe

Is your question about the software Wolfram Mathematica?

^{(Including emphasis on Wolfram Mathematica to highlight it as the software's name.)}

My hope is that this small change will reduce the number of off topic questions which are really about math. Currently we have several such questions every day. Many of them are of low enough quality that they don't even get migrated over to https://math.stackexchange.com/

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Will this change have any effect? I don't know, but I think it doesn't hurt and even a little improvement would be useful. It is clear that many new posters completely ignore much of the information given in the first-time asking screen I showed above, so it probably won't have a large effect. But every little bit helps.

The idea was brought up by Chris K in chat.

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As a side note, there was a Meta.SE post about the great need to guide new users better: https://meta.stackexchange.com/a/285903/164803 Hopefully that project will bring better results.

Answer 1

I think this is a very good idea. To add to this, a new user will also see the following banner above the list of questions.

Here, "users of Mathematica" can also be changed to "users of Wolfram Mathematica". This banner is another example of where new users only see the word Mathematica, without further explanation or failsafes against thinking Mathematica == mathematics, so that even if we do not change this (that might be overdoing it), it is an argument in favor of Szabolcs's suggestion.

On the rest of the site, I think we do a good job of making this distinction clear. The tour and the page /help/on-topic do a good job of making the distinction. The page /help mainly points to the tour and /help/on-topic, so that is good as well.

Answer 2

Reading the commentary here, it kinda sounds like this might be a good idea across the board - that is, to change "Mathematica" to "Wolfram Mathematica" everywhere the site topic is used. This includes the sidebar, the prompt (grey text that appears in the title entry before a title is entered), and various other places (default close reasons, the help center).

...Which then suggests we may want to adjust the "audience" string as well. That's the term for the folks who this site is aimed at: it appears in a few places here, but more importantly it also appears on other sites when references to this one are made:

So I guess what I'm asking is... Are y'all trying this as a simple experiment to see if using the full name on the /ask page helps with off-topic questions, or is this something you'd actually prefer to see everywhere?

Related: Change site description to include Wolfram Language

Answer 3

This is my first meta post here, and it seems I'm a bit late, but there is something I'd like to add.

I think this is a very good idea, but I would recommend that we explicitly include the word "software" instead of "Wolfram". The reason is that, to us regular users of Mathematica, the word "Wolfram" has a clear meaning, but not quite so to someone that has never used Mathematica. Therefore, adding the word "Wolfram" might mean nothing to someone who's not familiar with Mathematica.

Or put it another way: imagine that there was a graphical design software called "Platinum Biologica", and you are a student of biology that wants to ask something about mitochondrias. If you found an online forum called "Platinum Biologica", you might want to try to ask it there, and the word Platinum won't be enough to warn you that you are in the wrong place. But if the forum was about the software Biologica, then it should become much more clear that it's not about biology, and you should try somewhere else.

In the end, the word Wolfram means a lot to us, but it means nothing to someone that isn't familiar with the software. But the word Software has a clear meaning for everyone. Therefore, I think this is the word that should be included, while "Wolfram" is unnecessary for our purposes.

Answer 4

I think this is a good idea, but even this late in the game it's worth bringing up one of the Jeff Atwood classics that's maybe less seen nowadays, Treating User Myopia. This is how the Ask A Question page looks to a designer:

but this is what it looks like to a new user:

Just sayin' :-).