How can a single QA for all engineering disciplines benefit anyone?

Question

Proposal: Engineering

I strongly believe that there should be separate QAs for all the different disciplines in engineering rather than a single QA for them all. I shall briefly list out my reasons :

1. On successful launch, this QA would consist of a chaotic mix of questions from more than 5 or 7 different disciplines.
2. Technically only less than a fifth of the total users would be able to relate to a question. And very few of these would be able to even answer it.
3. A student or professional from a particular discipline will not be interested in most of the questions on the QA unrelated to his/her discipline.

I would rather that each and every discipline have its own QA. I strongly believe that each discipline can have a healthy QA with very active users. Do the pros outweigh these evident cons? Or should this proposal be closed?

Answer 1

This proposal came about because a number of previous proposals for separate engineering disciplines failed to reach critical mass and were closed. I agree that it would be preferable to have strong active user bases for each discipline independently, but that was tried and didn't turn out to be practical at this point. Perhaps if this omnibus exchange works out, the base will grow and we can spin off smaller exchanges again.

Answer 2

I think an engineering QA is not a bad idea and probably a very good one:

• Different disciplines can learn from each other. Engineers are meant to be curious, and seeing how problems are solved in closely or not so closely related disciplines could be very beneficial. Even seeing what problems are discussed could be extremely valuable.
• While expertise in a subject/specialty is what earns us engineers our bread and butter, looking beyond our plate is what creates fame and makes our life fun :). On top of this it's practical: How often were you forced to provide advice to a client on a topic you sort of are familiar with? How often have wished you would have had access to a specialist in a niche area? This site could deliver this.
• The most successful SE example, Stack overflow, is about as broad as it gets. Programming in itself is about as broad as it gets and I'd bet that most of the enthusiastic proponents of an engineering site or (add your specialty) site are those engineers who found programming useful in the professional endeavors and learned a lot from SO. If you have a look at SO, you'll notice that the difficulty of question ranges from "mom/dad asking questions regarding their children's homework", i.e. starting off in programming, to "knowing this will determine our business next database structure". SO is extremely wide!
• What other mechanism do you know where the expertise of true experts, this tiny percentage of users you are referring to, can benefit so many for so long?
• How many young people end up starting programming in one of the many subsets because learning becomes a lot easier due to SO? How many people would not start studying engineering because there would be a Engineering Stackexchange that accumulates a very wide variety of knowledge?

While there are niches and specialties in engineering, we are using similar and often the same tools to solve our problems. Our money is made by how skillful we are at applying this knowledge not necessary by the knowledge itself which is what this site would share. I can't see how creating a room for all disciplines could create something that is not utterly useful to be honest.

Answer 3

My perception of what makes engineers special is that they are in some sense generalists and can use knowledge from multiple disciplines for practical applications. A generic engineering site makes perfect sense from that perspective.

Answer 4

Critical mass is one thing, but not everything. Like most engineering solutions its a tradeoff between bigger audience but less relevant questions. Part of the reason why I have started to dislike SO is that it has too much clutter,repetition and the stuff drops too fast down for nobody to see.

The clear advantage is the likelyhood of viability of the exhange itself. But this comes at a cost making it harder for diciplines to cement. See the system breaks if certain diciplines get outnumbered by a significant margin. So some engineering dicipline might drop out because it felt singled out.

Second is that making good explanations is hard, but making them understandable across board might be frustrating. I had the unfortunate opportunity to see this with my master thesis, every little thing had to be explained because my target audience were not computer scientists. Especially funny because i was arguing that this in fact was the problem; that you can not offload the problem to computer scientits. Anyway, point being making good answers is a big enough job as it is, without trying to ensure all engineers understand it.

Anyway this can be fixed with good tag policy so I dont mind.

Answer 5

There could be a real expertise site for the professionals and another one site for amateurs, for example, math stack exchange and math stack overflow, and so does this site accept for more general Q&A rather than than more expert ones.

Answer 6

I agree - how can you have a general Q&A site for engineering, when each type of engineering can differ so much from the others and some of them already e.g. Electrical Engineering and Software Engineering (more or less Programmers.SE) have their own SE sites?

Just considering a few of the disciplines I can think of e.g. Electrical Engineering, Mechanical Engineering, Civil Engineering, Software Engineering, Biomedical Engineering, Material Engineering, Biotechnological Engineering, there are a few intersections between them, however, in my opinion:

1. The disciplines differ too much
2. The intersections could be placed under the discipline they are more related to e.g. motors (related to Elec and Mech Eng.) under Mech, building related materials (related to Civil and Material Eng. under Material Eng.) and etc.