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Proposal: Big Data is not reasonably scoped

While I like the idea of having a community centered around Big Data I believe this is not a good fit to the StackExchange model in its current state and its scope needs to be refined.

People seem to talk about Big Data like a buzzword today and from the description of who this site is intended to, I believe that the scope is just "everything related to big-data". You can't just expect to have a community of experts on something so vague and so broad, and the risk of fragmentation of the community when/if the site is created is just too high. Mentioning statistics on top of that is just not reasonable, statistics is not necessarily tied to big data, and this only makes the scope even more fuzzy.

There is already a bigdata tag on SO and I don't see what this site would bring that could not be found on SO in this case.

In my opinion, instead of having such a huge site which in the end will just become a cluster of sub-communities and fail, there should be separate sites with better granularity.

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  • I think it would be better to specialize portions of Stack Overflow. A BigData sub-site will allow for better granularity with an extended set of specialized tags. In Stack Overflow there is NOT a tag for datavault, sure I could make one but I'd prefer the technologies beyond SQL such as MDX be separated via Job Titles, eg Developer/AP/Soft.Eng. use SQL and should be distinct from the BI Specialist type of role who uses MDX and etc.
    – Jeremy Thompson
    Commented Mar 3, 2013 at 6:04

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I think "Big Data" is no less broad than "Programming" and ultimately will consist mostly of data mining, business intelligence and analytics, and also data visualization and reporting.

I think there is a wide breadth of topics and more importantly expertise in these areas; enough so to establish a community of scale from which you gain the benefits of viewership and participation that would otherwise be dispersed across several niche sites if we were to break all of these down into smaller sites.

Also, to your point about the SO tag, I believe that if programming-specific or database-specific questions were targeted to a more relevant audience (StackOverflow and Database Administrators respectively), it would limit the scope sufficiently to balance having relevant Q&A as well as provide for a larger community for increased viewership and participation.

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