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How To Start My Own Classified Site?

Starting a new higher-level physics site: how can a critical number of good contributers be attracted right from the start?

  • We are some people who are trying to revive the closed Theoretical Physics Stack Exchange site http://area51.stackexchange.com/proposals/23848/theoretical-physics with a slightly broadened scope http://tpproposal.wordpress.com/2013/09/12/what-topics-should-be-welcome-on-the-new-physics-site/ outside the Stack Exchange network. The new Physics site will be called PhysicsOverflow, to highlight that we are trying to build a similar high-level community as MathOverflow is http://mathoverflow.net/questions but for Physics. The level will presumably be graduate-level upward http://tpproposal.wordpress.com/2013/09/12/what-should-be-the-level-of-the-new-physic-site/ We have already quite successfully tested importing the Theoretical Physics Stack Exchange data dump into a Q2A offline test site, some not too obstructive final technical issues have still to be resolved before looking for hosting and going online. For MathOverflow to be as successful as it is, it was important to attract the right expert audience right from the start: http://meta.mathoverflow.net/a/1127/30967 So here I want to ask: What are the most important things to consider, in order to attract a critical size audience to our new site right from the start?

  • Answer:

    Make a refereeing section, devoted to individual papers, link to arxiv. Allow anyone to join, and answer, but in order to gain reputation, anyone who comes in has to negatively referee (find a mistake in) exactly one previously unrefereed recent paper by a nondeceased active person, any paper that someone else hasn't done yet, coming in. That will bring in the author of the paper, so as to respond, and this can lead to a chain reaction, as the multiplicative constant for joining is greater than or equal to 1. Plus, it's no problem for any academic, they have referee reports lying around that they don't do anything with.

Ron Maimon at Quora Visit the source

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I wouldn't try attracting a "critical" number of contributors from the start. What really matters is getting things right first time, as they did with Math Overflow, and then allowing the site to grow at its pace by word of mouth. What do you consider to be a "critical size" audience? Looking at the http://stackexchange.com/sites#questions for the statistics of the sites: Mathematics Stack exchange 566 questions/day, 109K visits/day Math Overflow 40 questions/day, 19K visits/day Physics Stack Exchange 40 questions/day, 36K visits/day So at best you can expect 3 questions/day, 5K visits/day on this new site if it was associated with the Stack Exchange group of sites. It isn't, so let's divide these by 10 to give 0.3 questions/day, 500 visits/day.

Larry Harson

I run https://www.physicsforums.com The best way to achive a running start is you head over to your nearest college or university and try and recruit grad students or professors.

Greg Bernhardt

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