Proposal: English Language Learners
My basic issue is that ELU is for linguists, etymologists, and (serious) English language enthusiasts.
ELL is supposed to be for English learners
And we still have no site for the most common kind of visitors: For English users:
- Engineers striving for a good word to describe given situation in documentation.
- Aspiring writers who are not sure about a correctness of their grammar in given sentence.
- Students, whose work has been turned in with an error underlined, and they can't guess the nature of the error.
- Managers worried about using jargon in their formal documents.
- Researchers stumbling upon a sentence that contains ambiguity or an error, trying to untangle and understand it.
In other words, the people for whom the language is not a hobby, nor the subject of their job, and simultaneously not a new new, steep mountain they must scale. Common people for whom the language is a daily tool.
Of course I'm totally against creating a third English site. Personally, I'd welcome them on ELU. But it seems this is not going to happen - ELU is in tight grip of people very adamant about maintaining their tagline; the site's purpose is to serve at least serious enthusiasts and scholars, not common language users.
Thus, my plea for broadening the scope of ELL to include both learners and common users.
While ELU strives for the role of an English counterpart to "theoretical CS", ELL should be the English counterpart to StackOverflow.com
What I'm worried about is that EL&U name currently may confuse users into thinking ELL is "simple English"(for learners) and ELU is "intermediate and advanced"(for users and enthusiasts/experts) while in fact ELU strives to be strictly "advanced"(for enthusiasts/experts) and so ELL should be "simple and intermediate"(for learners and users). I think the difference should be more clearly stated in the name of ELU - something like "Study of the English Language" or similar and give ELL a more broad name.
Just to clarify, this is not an attempt at Hijack - these are apparently the very feelings of ELU "staff", where their "general name" attracts the wrong kind of audience.