45
I think it's interesting that Robert's post above focus so much on communities - the idea that a site proposal should be made with an existing community in mind is new to me, and none of the site launches I've been part of really had a true community before the site launched.
Fundamentally this is a problem because nothing in Area 51 is set up to foster ...
35
Going through the proposal process quickly appears to be a good signal that a proposed site is viable (because failed proposals evaporate, I don't have statistics on how many failed in private beta after making the 4/4 deadline, but I don't recall there being very many). However, the opposite situation of taking a while to go through the process doesn't ...
23
The "rarely-visited meta" — as you called it — was a big part of the problem. Meta hosts the core governance of the site. I wish I could point you to the myriad of efforts that went into getting this site going again. The Community Managers, Moderators, and top avid users tried valiantly through a multi-year effort to try to energize this ...
22
In short, this undermines anything other than technology sites.
And perhaps that's the point, given the structure of how Stack Overflow currently makes money.
The site offers a great opportunity to sciences. The collaborative structure, the protocol keeping questions and answers on topic and useful, and the efforts to circumvent elitism all foster ...
21
Translated to English, this proposal is saying "StackExchange doesn't want to participate in building new communities". The community needs to be ready and Area51 doesn't want to be the tool for people to build a new community.
But this is not the way StackExchange flourished. It has successfully build a communities of people around various topics.
I think ...
21
This is a reasonable policy to apply to Area51 (although it was done rather abruptly).
But Stack Exchange should provide some other process or mechanism to create beta sites that have a good probability of turning into avid and active SE communities even though at the outset they lack a coherent community of at least 200 people to advance them through this ...
17
The proposal was originally just for Veganism (not just the diet aspect), but after discussion we decided to expand to include Vegetarianism due to many (but not all) overlapping aspects.
If we included non-Vegetarian diets such as Pescetarianism, we may as well include all other diets like Paleo etc. It would be too broad, so the line is drawn and ...
17
Being frustrated with how the Answers.Onstartups knowledge was closed, we re-created the community over the last month: Bright Journey
More details on this answer here:
Site "On Startups" is closed - what to do now?
It took us a month working on this 'round the clock, but it was well worth it. There was tremendous knowledge on the site and ...
15
Hopefully these changes will help, but I am skeptical. The real issue is addressed in https://stackoverflow.blog/2018/04/26/stack-overflow-isnt-very-welcoming-its-time-for-that-to-change/?cb=1.
Most new proposals mean gaining non-SE users. For many, the benefits of SE's QA model do not outweigh the costs of learning a new platform (particularly for older ...
13
I visited answers.onstartups.com nearly every day for almost two years. I even checked the meta site most days. My complaint with what happened is that we were never told, "If you don't fix this, we'll have to shut it down." It was, "This site is shutting down November 12th." At that point, there were actually quite a few people there trying to find a way to ...
13
Hmm, just an observation, but it turns out my hypothetical scenario in the comments actually ended up being true.
This proposal was closed for being just three commitments short of the required 200. Does this mean that the proposal is non-viable? Also, how did you choose the number four months, instead of, say, three or six?
Just asking.
10
From Closing a Proposal After 4 Months in Definition or Commitment:
Do you have a community ready to build your site?
We generally expect proposal authors to have access to a community to help build your site. Area 51 cannot find that community FOR you.
If so, then I think we should have a community wiki guideline for authors to find such community, ...
9
You are mixing up "low quality" and "simple".
Asking why the sky is blue is not necessarily a "low quality" question (for example), the quality of the question depends on how it was asked not it's content. What it is is a simple question with an easily discovered answer and one that has probably been asked before. Asking a question on Stack Exchange should ...
7
Like many others, I too spent numerous hours on the answers.onstartups.com site over a couple of years. I answered a lot of questions and did my best to help people, as well as report spam, up-vote questions and comments, edit typos, etc. In short, I spent a lot of time being "a good citizen" and this seems to have been reflected in the reputation points I ...
7
I and some others have given this some thought, and we believe that the most effective things that you can do to help are the following:
You can share the proposal with your network to get more people to simply commit, a number of these people may already have 200+ reputation on StackExchange.
If you do not already, you can get 200+ reputation on a site ...
6
Materials Modeling had a Facebook group with nearly 2000 members that was supporting the proposal. Drones and Model Aircraft had a Youtuber with ~150,000 subscribers promoting the proposal, among other things. Operations Research had an outside forum looking to add structured Q&A. Cryptocurrency proposals invariably have a discussion forum.
That's ...
4
I'd rather not start another way of crowdsourcing ways folks can fail in this process. Going back through the last decade of documenting missteps and community problems, every time the latest version of the help center grows to unusable proportions, or the latest policy wiki falls to neglect, and the FAQ tags fill with too much minutia, or old meta support ...
4
When you submit a proposal for a site, it is generally assumed you already have access to an audience to build it. Area 51's role is to help assure you have enough users and content to make that site work, but Area 51 cannot find that community for you.
See Changes to the Area 51 process
3
It's the website where the (existing) community backing the new proposal currently is. An example would be an internet forum dedicated to the topic.
The text below refers to it:
If you do not yet have a community organized, ready and eager to build your site, please do not submit this proposal.
3
Add to the "science helping science" ads:
Since almost 10 years ago, the "Science helping science" ad has been on the Meta site of Physics.SE, and later also on Chemistry.SE, Astronomy.SE, Earth Science.SE, Engineering.SE, and OpenData.SE.
Synthetic Biology can be added under "commitments needed" to all of the above.
More places ...
3
Area 51 is currently accepting proposals for subjects not already covered by our existing communities. Ask Ubuntu was launched before the broader Linux site, so we did not have a site on that subject. We do not split off individual tags simply to give a topic its own space, so we would not be interested in creating sites for distros already covered under ...
3
Explicit low quality is a terrible thing. Even where there's different sites for different levels of knowledge, say ELU and ELL questions have to meet a minimum quality standard.
There is no ban button. Question bans are automatic and one needs to have a certain number of questions put on hold to hit it. There's even a warning.
One question being closed ...
2
I personally agree with your analysis over here: https://area51.meta.stackexchange.com/a/17760/112766
I suggest we analyze the questions we get then,
As we all know, not every question in Arabic can have a English question side-by-side. Arabic can express more per word and combination/type of radicals/declension than English, especially question such as ...
1
It is OK to make the proposal, but finding the required support for such a narrow proposal may prove very difficult.
Related: Minimum Activity Requirements for Area 51
1
There are some ideas here and here which you are welcome to leverage on.
But Music Fans is at 181 people committed, it has started it's upward swing of people jumping on. You need do nothing else and the site will reach 200+ easily. The first 150 people committing are the hardest to get the last 50+ follow the crowd that you have already gathered.
Only top voted, non community-wiki answers of a minimum length are eligible