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Proposal: Theoretical Physics

Does anyone have any thoughts on how best to promote the site within the physics community? By this I mean the community of research active physicists. I've tweeted and blogged about it, but this will likely only reach people in the QIP community. Any ideas would be most welcome.

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We need to remember that non only we need to collect 200 committers, but also - the a number of people with >200 reputation points already on the StackExchange system.

I suggest promoting the Theoretical Physics proposal on other SE sites; especially when one there asks a questions which is in fact much more related to research-level physics than the SE site it has been posted on.

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Make a poster printable on a letter/A4 paper and ask the people who have committed so far to ask the administration of their physics department to post it on their graduate/faculty bulletin board.

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    Great idea! For what ever reason this didn't occur to me.
    – Joe Fitzsimons
    Commented Apr 26, 2011 at 19:20
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I think this is crucial point for the success of the site. For this goal i think it would be appropiate to

1) send special priviledged account invitations to in-campus professionals. I'm not sure what is the best way to achieve this, but some sort of reaching-out like this will be required

2) at least initially (maybe for the first year) restrict new accounts to users of the regular Physics SE site with a high score/reputation (i don't know what would be an appropiate threshold though)

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    Neither of these suggestions can be achieved within the stackexchange framework, so it's not really something we can choose to do. However, I would be particularly against the second pointt: Many of the committers who I respect the most (I know a fair few either personally or by professional reputation) have not participated in the Physics site. Further, I don't think all that many of the current Physics.SE users (even with high rep) are the target audience for this site.
    – Joe Fitzsimons
    Commented Feb 4, 2011 at 17:04
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    yes, its not a perfect plan, but i see this as a way to avoid spending a lot of time in post moderation for contributors
    – lurscher
    Commented Feb 4, 2011 at 17:11
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    @lurscher: I'm not so worried about the moderation. CSTheory has worked quite well and they are in a similar position. As long as there is a sufficiently expert community, closing the totally off-topic, low-level or crackpot questions shouldn't be too much of a problem. I'm more concerned about how best to continue to attract expert users.
    – Joe Fitzsimons
    Commented Feb 4, 2011 at 17:19
  • @Joe, consider the proposal I've posted. This may expand our potential user-base to a sizable number of theory-ph and math-ph arXiv users.
    – UGPhysics
    Commented Sep 9, 2011 at 2:45
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    @UGPhysics: We can only do stuff within the StackExchange framework, so can't have a sub site on a specific topic. This is simply because we have to work with what stack exchange provides, as it is their platform we are using to build the community. Questions on papers are of course on topic, and if you think they should take a specific form, then it is a discussion we should have on meta once the site is launched. Perhaps, though, I've misunderstood what you are proposing.
    – Joe Fitzsimons
    Commented Sep 9, 2011 at 2:56
  • It's not a subsite, just a format system for posting paper-specific posts. ... Given that most of our hoped-for participants and audience will be researchers, a sizable fraction will reference / ask questions on research- / review- papers: this just makes it much more manageable from the outset, while allowing us to merge the posts seamlessly with the site. ... This is a good idea. This is what, I think, will attract a lot of users to the site. Let's give it a try before we discard it.
    – UGPhysics
    Commented Sep 9, 2011 at 3:04

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