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Proposal: Geoscience

I believe we need a communal site for all the geoscience proposals. This site would cover multiple areas and multiple proposals into a larger site. Th Geoscience site would cover the following areas (which would need merged into this one):

Should those four proposed sites already proposed be merged into one Geoscience site? I believe that this would help improve the viability of the earth science proposals.

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And don't forget Geophysics, Hydrology, Atmospheric Science, etc. (although ... does it have to be 'Geo' ... the planetary folks always seem to get left out, just because they're not on earth, but the American Geophysical Union and the Eurpean Geophysical Union still accepts them. (even space & solar physics) – Joe Dec 23 '11 at 16:33
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I'd add Earth, Atmospheric, and Planetary Sciences to the list. – Ambo100 Jan 20 at 13:04
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merging geology, meteorology/atmosphere and oceanography... doesn't make big sense AFAIK. The followers will add up of course, but there's no big overlap - most people will cover only one of these areas and will know nothing of the other, so there's no real benefit in merging .. that's what I think. – Tomas Feb 16 at 16:20
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The issue is that all the independent topics are failing to get any traction at all. Astronomy is struggling to get out of beta. If we want something that can get out of beta, then we have to merge them all (just like the AGU merges them all). The main Stackoverflow also has a bunch of unrelated topics, but the use of topic tags helps keep it usable for everyone. – InquilineKea Feb 23 at 16:05
Would be good if this discussion could be made into a community wiki. It's out of date (environmental science has been removed, numbers and dates have changed, scopes have probably changed slightly for some proposals...), and it'd be nice if people could add links to more proposals as they come up. – naught101 Feb 25 at 2:44
There is now an Oceanography proposal here. – borticus 18 hours ago
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6 Answers

up vote 5 down vote

I suggested merging Geology and Paleontology but that didn't get anywhere.

If a Geoscience proposal goes ahead, then the Geology proposal should be combined with it.

There's interest in all of these proposals, just not quite enough to push each individual proposal forward.

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That was my thought when I created the proposal. I wanted a place for geology and meteorology questions, but both of those proposals didn't seem to have enough steam to move make it to the commitment phase. – Richard Nov 8 '11 at 15:45
why not wait longer, we waited for much broader biology.SE also very long? – Werner Schmitt Nov 25 '11 at 14:34
Paleontology has a lot of cross over with biology and the study of evolution, perhaps even more than with geology. It's not entirely surprising if people wanted to keep them separate. – naught101 Feb 6 at 12:37
Yeah, the issue of Paleontology is a fuzzy one. It is pretty much in the Geoscience departments at both Yale and Chicago though. – InquilineKea Feb 23 at 16:06
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...And Cambridge (The Cambridge :-) ) and Durham, and probably most modern geology/earth science departments? – winwaed Feb 23 at 16:53
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up vote 3 down vote

I think that's a great idea. It makes sense to start broad with a topic such as Geosciences and then spin off more focused sites down the road. StackOverflow and ServerFault have spawned many child sites based on a specialized topic. Geosciences would be a good umbrella site to start with. Folks can tag specific interests within the larger site.

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it makes only sense to start a broad topic, if you have enough experts on SE for it, thats the whole point of area51 process. Just starting broad proposals without experts may kill the quality for ever like on philosophy.sE – Werner Schmitt Nov 25 '11 at 14:33
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up vote 2 down vote

Yes, we should merge them all because we simply don't have the numbers to launch the sites individually and to infuse them with the numbers necessary to prevent them from getting closed down in the same way that Astronomy.SE and Economics.SE got closed down due to inactivity - bear in mind that there's also significantly more Economics and Astronomy activity on the Internet than there is activity on all the geoscience subjects combined.

In general, there are not many people who discuss these subjects on the Internet (I know, since I'm quite active on the associated topics on Quora, Reddit, and Physics Forums), so something like this would definitely grow if all merged into such a topic. We can follow the model of the main StackOverflow, where there are a huge number of discrete unrelated topics, and people can subscribe to individual tags.

I just proposed a new possible merger under the name Earth, Atmospheric, and Environmental Sciences (the word "Geoscience" often makes atmospheric scientists feel neglected - I want new users who Google "Atmospheric Science Stack Exchange" or "Environmental Science Stack Exchange" to actually find the site that they're looking for, rather than something they think is mostly Geology). Also, all of these topics would fit under the Nature Geoscience article, and all of them would fit under an American Geophysical Union meeting. Planetary Science topics should go under this too, but it does seem that most of the Planetary Science activity on the Internet ends up on Astronomy forums. I'd be willing to append the word "Planetary Science" (and/or Oceanography) to the above description if people don't consider it too wordy.

It's not just the AGU either - numerous universities combine them all into one area - there's Caltech (Geological and Planetary Sciences + Environmental Science and Engineering), MIT (Earth, Atmospheric, and Planetary Sciences), UChicago (Geophysical Sciences), Columbia (Earth and Environmental Science), Yale (Geology & Geophysics), and Brown (Geological Sciences). And even when they are all combined, they still only reach sizes that are similar to the sizes of other departments found on campus. There are only roughly as many geoscientists (of all subdisciplines combined) as there are physicists or chemists in most universities.

Moreover, in many cases, geologists often value the information contained in fields like oceanography. Geologists who want to study the history of the Earth (or stratigraphers), for example, might often talk more with oceanographers and paleontologists than with people who are more into deep-earth processes, even though both stratigraphers and deep-earth people are technically geologists.

Atmospheric Science and Oceanography are quite related to each other (through fluid dynamics), and we must also remember that there are only a handful of strong oceanography departments in the nation. Most schools (especially strong ones like MIT) put their oceanography in their Geoscience departments.

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The University of Michigan has a similar grouping called Atmospheric, Oceanic, and Space Science, but notably it's part of the college of engineering. I'm not sure that just because these departments are combined in terms of engineering that should lead us to combining them in terms of questions and answers. – Adam Davis yesterday
We should combine them since (a) most schools combine them [so the audience will most likely see them as combined] and (b) if we just launch individual SEs, they'll most likely suffer from inactivity and meet the same fate as Astronomy.SE and Economics.SE – InquilineKea yesterday
(a)If you visit the departments in the schools, you'll find they are very, very separate in almost every way. The school forces them into one building/category for convenience only - they do not see themselves as a single group. (b) The same thing will happen in an aggregate situation, because they'll still only answer questions in their field, each question will get few to no answers, and they will still languish away. The "critical mass" of users is the number of users needed to make an expert topic viable. Without this critical mass of users questions don't get answered. – Adam Davis yesterday
Adding different user groups together doesn't increase the critical mass because each group needs their own critical mass to answer their own questions. It's not an issue of getting enough people in the same building talking about different things - you need enough people in the same building talking about the same thing to achieve a critical reaction that is self sustaining. A geologist visiting the site will find fewer than 20% of the questions pertain to her field, and less than 1% to her specific interest - she's not going to hang around. – Adam Davis yesterday
But then why not encourage the geologist to just follow the geology tag? In the same way that we don't have a separate SE site for Javascript, but that we do have a separate tag for Javascript (stackoverflow.com/questions/tagged/javascript). Anyone who goes to StackOverflow will find that only a very small minority of the questions there will pertain to their field. It certainly hasn't stopped StackOverflow from being the most active site on the network. – InquilineKea yesterday
That doesn't solve the problem of critical mass. If there aren't enough people following the geology tag, posting questions, providing answers, and so forth on a daily basis, then visits will decrease as people notice the inactivity in their tag, and the site will still die. Combining the topics doesn't resolve the issue of critical mass because the different groups don't react to each other as much as they'd need to. – Adam Davis yesterday
But not all geologists are going to stick with just following geology topics. Many people in the geosciences are at least somewhat interested with some of the other branches of geoscience too (atmospheric phenomena and biological phenomena are both quite relevant to many geological processes). The site will nonetheless die if it launches as geology alone simply because there are far fewer geologists than astronomers on the Internet. Also, people can request email/RSS notifications to activity in each individual tag. – InquilineKea yesterday
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up vote 1 down vote

I just renamed a proposal (originally Marine Science) to Oceanography. I personally think that Oceanography is distinct enough from the other aspects of geosciences to deserves its own page (but I'm an oceanographer). There are also aspects of oceanography, e.g. marine biology, that do not fit into the geosciences framework at all.

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Totally OK with you marine biology don't fit in geoscience proposal and that a major field of oceanography – humboldt May 13 at 21:10
The problem is this: is a separate Oceanography proposal going to get enough activity (at least 5 questions a day, etc...) that it won't be closed down the same way that Astronomy and Economics got closed down? There are only a small handful of universities that even have their separate oceanography departments - most of them merge them with their earth science department. – InquilineKea yesterday
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up vote 0 down vote

Seems to me it depends what people want to do as a priority - get it off the ground or discuss individual topics. Since getting it off the ground would appear to be the priority, why not do that first, see which topic dominates, then splinter later. Those active in the first will probably follow the second and feed that too. And so on. Suck it and see, in other words.

I'm not sure of the value of 'the hump' though if the priority is to get it off the ground. Seems a bit of an obstruction. It's the topics that will determine interest, not whether they have 'qualifed'.

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Interesting, but is merging is the best way to get of the ground. Is there other way ? Maybe it more related at the general visibility of SE forum. – humboldt May 13 at 21:02
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up vote 0 down vote

The primary issue here is critical mass. A given topic of discussion has to have enough people asking and answering questions about it to be self-sustaining and grow over time. Without that growth, the site dies. Without a sufficient number of experts on that one topic, you don't get answers. Without answers, questions languish, and people don't return. It's either an upward cycle, or a downward spiral.

Combining groups in the manner suggested by this proposal doesn't fix this problem - the critical mass does not improve, since the experts in each group will not be answering each others questions.

The site might get into beta with this method, but once the insular groups start answering their own questions the site dies more quickly. It would be as if 5 different sites started with 1/5th the normal community required by the area51 process, but sharing the same front page.

The area51 process isn't meant to prevent people from starting sites - it's meant to make sure that sites have a minimum critical mass before they start.

This proposed combination of sites and topics may allow it to do an end-run around the area51 process, but the outcome will be the same - the site will fail since none of the topics have the critical mass required to succeed.

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The thing is, though, that the main StackOverflow has a huge bunch of separate topics, and users just subscribe to the individual tags within the topics. Do people really go to each AGU meeting with lukewarm enthusiasm? The thing is, that if we launch the sites separately, they'll almost certainly meet the same fate as Astronomy.SE or Economics.SE and get closed down for inactivity. – InquilineKea yesterday
@InquilineKea Stackoverflow is for expert programmers. I may not program in scala, but when I see a scala question I can understand the underlying principles and issues because it's a programming problem - it may be in a different language, but it's the same issue one might find in any other programming language, merely expressed differently. You can't easily say the same for a geologist and space scientist. New users aren't going to understand tags and tagging. They'll pop in, see that only 20% of the questions are even in their field, and only 1% are interesting to them, and leave. – Adam Davis yesterday
Maybe, but couldn't we try to make a Tutorial and sticky it or something? Again, I won't object to the creation of separate proposals, but the way things are now, it seems extremely likely that separate proposals will meet the same exact fate as Astronomy.SE or Economics.SE, given the low number of people in each subfield who often post on the Internet (and this problem will only be worse for Atmospheres or Oceanography because there are far fewer Atmosphere/Oceanography people online than Astronomy/Economics people online). Can we really expect enough activity to make it to 5 questions a day? – InquilineKea yesterday
I've modified my answer to better describe the real problem with this proposal, which is one of critical mass. Without the critical mass of experts in each area checking the site daily, the site will still languish and die. – Adam Davis yesterday
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