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Our dearest SO "ToolBag" question has been closed.

Should we migrate it here for re-openning and caressing?

Edit

Yesterday I accepted rcollyer's answer, but after that this answer on SO meta made me rethink the whole issue. Perhaps the bag question is a mess ... but I surely don't want it deleted!

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    Why not? ${}{}$
    – J. M.'s missing motivation Mod
    Commented Feb 16, 2012 at 16:05
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    @J.M. Because it's a messy messy big-list thing. But it contains a huge amount of very good information (I find myself going back to it again and again). One suggestion was to gradually ask individual questions to which individual tool-bag posts could be answers (e.g. this). I don't know what's the best solution, just mentioning this idea as it was previously brought up in chat.
    – Szabolcs
    Commented Feb 16, 2012 at 16:43
  • I think it will be deleted eventually, anyway. It will require a larger than normal votes because of how many votes it has, but it will probably go away at some point. At this point, it has a total of 278 votes (62 itself, 216 on the answers) which gives it a 13.9 deletion vote boost, for a total of 16 votes (truncated) to delete from 10+k users. Mods, though, can delete it at their leisure. So, it will go away at some point, it is only a matter of time.
    – rcollyer
    Commented Feb 23, 2012 at 2:55

2 Answers 2

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As Szabolcs mentioned in his comment, the question contains a lot of good stuff to reference. But, I hesitate to suggest migrating it because it is poorly focused and difficult to find the information you are looking for. There is little to no opportunity for competing answers in its current state, so that different ways of doing things cannot easily be expressed. This cuts across one of the time honored traditions in this community: posting the 15 and 1 ways of doing something as answers. Yes, there does exist at least one example of competing methods (first answer, second answer), but it took me months to notice the second answer as it is buried among everything else, including in the second answer.

I think the better option is to ask focused questions where the answers could be reproduced here.

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    I fully agree. Also, I must note that it is impossible to curate and manage lists when everyone is free to add what they feel is a "nifty trick", when others might not. In fact, the tool bag post came into the general SO community's spotlight when Mike Bantegui added Heike's Waldo answer as a "general where is Waldo function" and left a comment under her viral answer.
    – rm -rf Mod
    Commented Feb 16, 2012 at 17:06
  • @R.M and rcollyer: please see my answer (well, comment, but it's too long for a comment)
    – Szabolcs
    Commented Feb 17, 2012 at 10:22
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This is too long for a comment, so I'm writing it as an answer.

Before deciding something, let us also see how migrating posts one-by-one (my comment and @rcollyer's answer) would work in practice. I'll take my own two tool-bag posts as an example.

I had two tool bag posts: a general collection of little tools and the image uploader. The image uploader was moved to meta.Mma, and that's very fine. What about the others?

I wanted to list these so people can take a look and decide if they like this format of migrating or not. Is this better than having all the tool bag posts collected together or worse? It was never my explicit intention to move these posts over to Mma.SE, it just happened naturally while posting answers and questions.

For some of the very good tool bag posts, such as the function wrapping trick, this natural migration is unlikely to happen. To have them migrated in a useful way, we would need to make some effort and migrate in a coordinated way.

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  • Re: function wrapping trick, it did make at least one appearance but without an explanation. I figured if people were curious they would ask.
    – Mr.Wizard Mod
    Commented Feb 17, 2012 at 10:57
  • @Mr.Wizard More than one in fact: mathematica.stackexchange.com/a/1513/12 I still think it's useful to spell it out explicitly.
    – Szabolcs
    Commented Feb 17, 2012 at 11:03
  • I expected as much but I was too lazy to find it. (seeing a pattern? :^)
    – Mr.Wizard Mod
    Commented Feb 17, 2012 at 11:06

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