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My recent question LaTeX template collection for scientific conferences has been put on hold for being too broad. Apparently, there has been a discussion about whether "big-list questions" (1, 2) are desired or should be avoided.

What I asked myself and probably should have asked first here, is:

  1. Does the question suit better to Tex SE or Academia SE?
  2. Whether it should be a community wiki like: The variance of peer-review types across research disciplines.

As to 1, I found that it is rather on the application side, i.e., it should be posted where academics discuss things. Regarding 2, I decided to just ask a regular question and see how it goes from there.

So here we are. (The question should be still available to read, right?) My goal is to provide LaTeX templates for conferences and make sure that work is not duplicated. Users can add answers where they specify a certain conference. Probably they wanted to submit something there and did not find a suitable template. They can discuss in comments whether a template is available on the web. They can update the answers and add the new information.

Can we do this on Academia SE? Or, alternatively, what would be your suggestions to accomplish this?

Edit: The collection idea has not really found supporters so far. What do you think about questions like "Is there a LaTeX template for the International Conference of Plum Pudding?" instead? Such questions could lead to answers like A1: "There is one on the website of the last conference, but with questionable quality" and/or A2: "I found a repository on github, here is the address.". Then, A2 could be voted up if users find it useful.

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  • It seems like if you think this would be sufficiently useful, you should create your own website repository of this type of information. If that seems to you to be too much work, then that is probably a good indicator that it is not sufficiently useful.
    – Bryan Krause Mod
    Commented Mar 15, 2019 at 21:54
  • @BryanKrause According to that logic, all users here should create websites repository for their answers. Otherwise they would not be useful. The point is that interaction can take place here that reaches a larger amount of people and possible collaborators.
    – carlosvalderrama
    Commented Mar 15, 2019 at 22:08
  • 2
    No, this site itself is a repository for Q&A (which, given its popularity, I would say has been worth the effort of creating). What you are proposing isn't Q&A anymore, in my opinion. It's another type of repository that you are asking to sneak in to a Q&A format.
    – Bryan Krause Mod
    Commented Mar 15, 2019 at 22:11
  • @BryanKrause Maybe I should clarify that not the templates itself are collected but rather links to their repositories. But anyway, the solution marked with Edit in the updated question seems more appropriate. What do you think of this one?
    – carlosvalderrama
    Commented Mar 15, 2019 at 22:55
  • Please see the edit of my answer in response to your edit. Also, the question still stands: What problem are you actually trying to solve here?
    – Wrzlprmft Mod
    Commented Mar 17, 2019 at 12:13

1 Answer 1

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Is this suited for this site?

I see several problems with the proposed question:

  • If we go for one conference per answer, there are hundreds of possible answers, neither of which is better than another. How would you say that the template linked for the Conference of Definite Articles is better than the one for the International Symposium on Theoretical Lepidopterology? Also, the answers will be difficult to search.

  • If we go for a single answer, it will be a huge difficult-to-edit wasteland.

  • If we go for one question per conference and this actually catches on, we have a huge number of questions that are highly individual and can only be evaluated by a very low number of people in the world. For many conferences, you will likely not have more than one user on this site who actually cares about the template.

  • The answer(s) will essentially be a database that needs to be maintained. Information can be outdated very easily. Essentially, each conference would need a dedicated maintainer. This site is not really suited for this.

  • This site is not really suited for discussions, though I am not really sure what discussion one would have on templates in the first place: Either they exist or they don’t.

What problem does this solve?

I am not in a field that publishes at conferences, but I expect the situation to be similar to that for journal citation styles and similar: Either somebody got through the trouble of creating a template, in which case it’s easy to find on the Internet (ideally on a repository suited for code like GitHub) or nobody did, in which case there is nothing.

A database is also nice if there is a need for having some information compiled, but I really don’t see somebody needing a bunch of conference templates all of a sudden.

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  • OK I can see that this database, collection, list,... approach has its drawbacks. What just crossed my mind is a question for each conference. Possibly even better in terms of visibility. What would you think about this?
    – carlosvalderrama
    Commented Mar 15, 2019 at 19:23
  • The problem is that if someone went through the trouble it must be assured that other people find their work. I thought (well actually still think) academics.SE would be a good place to share such knowledge for future reference.
    – carlosvalderrama
    Commented Mar 15, 2019 at 19:31
  • @carlosvalderrama if people put their cls files on ctan, they will get included in TeX distributions. Isn't that the best outcome?
    – StrongBad
    Commented Mar 15, 2019 at 22:23
  • @StrongBad Ideally yes. But facing reality, who will go through the trouble of putting it on ctan? In the best case it ends up on github, which is fine. But the problem is -- in my opinion -- that people just don't know about the existence of such a repository. This is what I would like to improve.
    – carlosvalderrama
    Commented Mar 15, 2019 at 22:36
  • @carlosvalderrama: If I am looking for such a template, I would not go to CTAN, GitHub, or whatever first, and search there, I would just use a general Internet search engine (Google, DuckDuckGo, …). These are usually capable of searching all kinds of repositories and find such templates. Having extra questions on Academia for this would even be harmful here, since they would rather be noise in such a search.
    – Wrzlprmft Mod
    Commented Mar 16, 2019 at 9:09
  • @Wrzlprmft The thing is that I could not find my own templates with typical queries. Apparently this can be improved in github by setting certain keywords, I have to try that. People will use a search engine and the contributions of motivated people should show up there, that is the main point. I thought that using SE would help as well.
    – carlosvalderrama
    Commented Mar 17, 2019 at 19:18

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