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A case for the Mathematica proposal
I find Robert Cartaino's answer highly unsatisfactory and epitomizes the typical "meh" responses that are doled out on Area 51. It's unfair to criticize proposals for languishing on Area 51, when the voting process was clunky to begin with. Mathematica was one of the proposals that went into commitment soon after the new ...
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The about page for the Home Improvement site states that:
The core of this site is around parts of your home that are typically included when you buy or sell it, the structure, utilities, and major appliances.
Based on this summary, questions about cabinetry, hardwood flooring, molding, doors, and some power tools would likely overlap with Home ...
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We thought about this the first time the topic came up (and went to private beta). This isn't the first time we've examined the idea of a site primarily focused on sex, intimacy and sexuality. While it is textual Q&A, pictures and stuff do make for easier explanation, so it was a concern that several raised, and that was raised internally, long ago.
If ...
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Music Practice & Performance is about people who make music. I'm no subject expert, but this strikes me as very different from people who consume music — like writers vs. readers or computer programmers vs. computer users.
MPP is open to enthusiasts — as in people who participate in the church choir or play the guitar now and then as a hobby. That's ...
answered Nov 6 '13 at 2:16
Gilles 'SO- stop being evil'
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No, you want to give the community a chance to vote for all questions, both up and down. The score needs to reflect (budding) community opinion.
By locking a question to a score of max 10, you remove that option. Downvoters would gain an unfair advantage, as their downvote would suddenly weigh more than the upvotes.
The voting process defines the community,...
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If you don't have a high level of professional/technical proficiency in any particular field of study, we also have many mainstream sites in subjects like
Coffee
Music Fans
Sustainable Living
Parenting
Pets
Gardening
Cooking
Travel
Movies & TV
Physical Fitness
Politics
The Great Outdoors
Photography
Board & Card Games
Lifehacks
These communities ...
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Both answers so far tackle the practical matter of things, I'll give my two cents why it shouldn't be limited: Underage people do practice sex. Even if they don't, there's nothing wrong with learning how bodies work; I can hardly think of something that is inappropriate for a minor in that regard - we don't publish pornography.
I understand though that some ...
26
Your warning against letting the proposed Emacs exchange siphon off content that ought to be on Stack Overflow is frustrating. In my experience with the Emacs tag on SO, overzealous users would frequently flag Emacs questions as off topic, with the result that Emacs questions get spread over SO, Super User, Unix, TeX. In some cases, questions would be ...
25
I agree this is a major problem when it happens — but it does have a solution pending, sort of.
I've designed a "circuit breaker" which addresses this exact issue; unfortunately, I don't think it will get implemented for quite some time (at least months, but probably closer to next year if ever).
In the interest of transparency — I've ...
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I do not think so. There should be nothing automatic about moderator selection. If it were set up that way, the system could too easily be gamed. The mod tools provide too much access to a lot of personal information for moderators to be automatically designated.
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SO? Programmers? You can't.
Unsurprisingly, my opinion hasn't changed since that Meta.SO post, because the state of existing sites hasn't changed significantly. Let's review them:
Stack Overflow: Theoretical questions linger unloved, even get closed (what, no code?). Questions get closed as non-constructive because they're about science and not technology. ...
answered Nov 6 '11 at 22:41
Gilles 'SO- stop being evil'
2,1491 gold badge22 silver badges47 bronze badges
22
MTG would really benefit from some game specific features (simplified linking to cards) and more specific tags (formats, sets, etc.) Including features like that will make it more appealing to more questions. Can features like this be included in board and card games without taking it over?
I was just looking at the Board and Card Game tag listing and see ...
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Personally, I would find a site that hides content behind a curtain like that an embarrassment. It's not going to happen if I have anything to say about it.
Will this site be safe for work?
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It isn't enough to simply fill a room to create a productive Q&A community. We build sites around groups of experts in very specific fields. You can't simply start gathering up smaller groups of people in peripherally-related subjects to beef up the numbers. That might satisfy the mechanics of Area 51, but it doesn't build a successful collaboration.
If ...
20
It's a site on the Internet, if minors want to find something, they'll find it. Besides they could do much much worse than a textual Q&A site with voting.
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I hypothesise that the proposal has been closed for the same reason that it was opened: non-Mathematica users just don't get it.
There have been many cases of Mathematica questions on SO that have attracted erroneous close votes from non-Mathematica users who think such questions belong on math.SE. There are many Mathematica issues that are not, strictly ...
19
If Go is a game, then why can't you make the Board Games site "a place that Go experts would gather"? The first step to achieving that status would be to start "posting very 'technical' Go questions".
This is not an unsolvable chicken-and-egg problem. You're the chicken, so all you have to do is lay a couple of golden eggs. And maybe tell your friends. ...
19
There are two parts to this, and neither is as hard as it sounds.
1. Questions About External Morality
As with any subject of Stack Exchange, it is generally assumed that the target community are those who purport to be following (or at least interested in learning about) veganism. So in that context, it is entirely defensible to close any question that ...
18
According to the post No Artificial Intelligence in Area 51 the main reason for the failure of the last proposal was the lack of expert-level questions:
It wasn’t so much the lack of questions that was of concern — a site
can stay in beta as long as it takes — but the conspicuous lack of
expert-level questions. This was also the emerging opinion ...
17
I have to say, this was an astounding and disappointing decision, and one that is entirely contrary to the way Area 51 is supposed to work. If the site wouldn't have enough usage to reach critical mass, that would be identified quickly and it would be shut down. Why shut it down now that it has almost 90% commitment?
The only people that don't want it shut ...
17
We (Stack Exchange) do not believe in the adage "if you build it, they will come." Every time we tried that, the site has failed utterly.
The Definition phase does more than just define the scope of the proposal. This phase helps determine if there is a sufficient depth of questions to keep the site interesting, while measuring if there is enough ...
17
Yes
Although this proposal is focused on monero, we consider questions about other CryptoNote coins to be on-topic.
16
Astronomy & Astrophysics has now been extended to clearly include observational astronomy, solar astronomy, planetary sciences, stellar astronomy, galactic & extragalactic astronomy, and cosmology. Hopefully this proposal will now be broad enough to capture the attention of people in any of the astronomical areas, without being too broad, and without ...
16
Other than what John pointed out, there are a lot of other reasons too.
Proposal creators disappear many a time after creating the proposal.
Other users have a greater impact on the proposal than the creator by bringing in new followers, sharing, and spreading the word.
Many users come together, discuss, debate, explore and then clearly define the actual ...
15
Supporting a proposal successfully isn't a one click and forget it kind of deal. There are several different phases that occur during the proposal period-what is required of us in each stage is different.
To support Joomla in the definition phase, we need to follow the proposal, need to ask good example questions and vote on the ones we think are suitable ...
15
Chenmunka,
Why is "What's the best DVD ripper?" a borderline question? I teach Information Security for a living. Part of my job is to teach people to use software like Metasploit. Metasploit is a vulnerability scanner. In the hands of the wrong person it could be used as a prelude to attacking a network. I teach how to use it for legal, legitimate ...
14
Yes, these policies are still in effect. Which you can verify by reading our policy at any time. If/when changes are made, the new policy will be clearly indicated.
For private beta, the site will start out on the stackexchange.com domain. Recall that during private beta, the site is not indexed by search engines, or linked to publicly within the Stack ...
14
You can read a Spanish-translated version of Stack Overflow right now using Google Translate:
http://translate.googleusercontent.com/translate_c?depth=1&hl=en&ie=UTF8&prev=_t&rurl=translate.google.com&sl=auto&tl=es&u=https://stackoverflow.com/&usg=ALkJrhh3Q8mQ4mfVkq1m6cA94GzdNR7h5Q
But we are not going to embrace this as any ...
14
My two cents: Yes, questions that discuss how to raise children in an atheistic or non-religious manner should be on-topic.
Since religion is a prevalent phenomenon in most societies, raising children without any of it could give raise to interesting issues, which are off-topic on Parenting, as they don't deal with religion (or lack thereof).
That said ...
13
Fundamental problems that I see with a Q&A site for politics:
Answers in a Q&A site need to be verifiable by facts and legitimate sources, bottle fed talking points should be lower quality.
Quality of an answer needs to be based on its own merits, and not if it goes against somebodies heartfelt beliefs. With current SE tools, only the moderators ...
Only top voted, non community-wiki answers of a minimum length are eligible
