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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 ...
39
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 ...
38
Sounds great - this is a much more intuitive voting system. My one concern is that this:
might be the most awkwardly worded sentence I've ever seen. "5 up questions"? What's an "up question"? Consider revising - perhaps to "You've already voted up(/upvoted) 5 questions for this proposal", or similar.
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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 ...
37
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 ...
30
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,...
29
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 ...
29
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 ...
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 ...
23
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 ...
23
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.
23
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?
22
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. ...
21
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
We've talked a lot about this one on the Stack Exchange Community Team, and we have plenty of time before the Sexuality proposal is likely to see a private beta in which to hammer out the details. It is clear to us that there will need to be some separation between the Sexuality site and the network at large -- for example, non-PG13 question titles shouldn'...
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.
19
Our goal to make the Stack Exchange Network a great place to produce high-quality Q&A sites, no matter what language they speak. But we are still predominantly an English-speaking organization and we need to understand the underlying premise of these sites.
We allow the creation of non-English sites, but we have a few requirements.
Non-English Proposal ...
19
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
Another minor bug, that I've noticed: up and down votes are inverted.
18
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 ...
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
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
Cross Validated seems to be interested in only a subset of machine learning science, particularly the established machine learning methods that apply to data analysis in the narrowest sense. You will not find there many (if any) topics on machine learning as it relates to cybernetics (for example, systems control and robot control) or computational ...
16
If you don't see a future for Politics SE, then I would respectfully suggest that you do not commit to it. Creating a successful Stack Exchange site is hard work; We need people who will activity fight the against the bullet points you raised above to guarantee its continued success.
Politics SE will not become a discussion board if we adhere to the same ...
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 ...
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