+307 As I was scrolling down the forum, I've noticed that there were many questions answered by Guest(s) (I can't prove whether it was one person or many), and noticed that either my mathematics skills have deteriorated significantly, or that they got many, many questions wrong, often appearing deliberate. You can scroll down from to prior posts to see what I mean.
It can be expected that humans will make mistakes every once in a while, but with such a high rate of answering things incorrectly, it doesn't seem natural. On top of that, work is not shown and I can therefore not confirm whether there was an earnest attempt at the problems and help them find and correct the error; rather, a numerical answer is simply given, many of them are obviously wrong just by looking at it.
So I must posit a few questions:
a. Is there any way to show that this was done in malice? For all I know, this aforementioned Guest could really be just making simple arithmetic errors and getting a slew of things wrong that way. Improbable, yes, but not impossible.
b. Has this been going on for a long time? I haven't been active in this forum much. Is this normal?
c. If malice can be shown without a reasonable doubt, what can be done to stem deliberate attempts at screwing people up? If this is really malice then people who have come here to learn will come and learn the wrong things, which is unacceptable for me. I as the average user have no idea how much control the moderators can assert over Guests while still allowing them to exist, so I am unaware if there is anything that can be done to combat this with a simple block, or something such as that. Even if that cannot be done, surely there is something that the more general public can do? I am not exactly the most... imaginative of all people, so I really can't think of anything other than the standard I follow, which is to ignore guests who don't show work.
I might be blowing this out of proportion (nevermind, I certainly am), but something irks me whenever I think that anybody looking to the solution to a question that they've spent a period of time scrutinizing over could walk away with the wrong one because of a troll.
I hope that this is just my imagination and that those answers were actually right, and that I'm hallucinating, or that they were earnest mistakes, but I remain doubtful.
a. If it can be shown that it's the same person, or handful of people,
posting incorrect answers, I would think that'd be pretty conclusive.
See commment at https://web2.0calc.com/questions/geometry_51958
b. It has been going on for a long time, but I believe that lately the incidents
seem to have significantly increased.
c. I don't know if the moderators can detect these posters by their IPA number(s).
They're able to identify them that way at eBay, and sometimes eBay bans them.
+288 This is a public site that can even be accessed by users who remain anonymous under the name, "Guest". You should very much expxect people to post answers that are intentionally wrong to misguide you in your learning. As for those asking questions on this site, I would like to clear up some things.
1. If the person who answered has not provided ANY explanation to their answer or missed a significant amount of steps in their steps, do not even bother using those answers or solutions to do whatever you have to do.
2. It is your responsibility to make sure all calculations are correct. Moderators and users who provide solutions to questions are not going to take their precious time away from their to thorougly check everything. You have to read the explanations and if you point out a mistake, great! Try to fix it.
Users should not expect:
- All users to give them an answer
- To gain learning from simply reading through the answers AND solutions.
Please keep these disclaimers in mind as you go through the whole forum.
Thank you. :)
