Is the site working?

Question

I signed the petition and committed to participating in this website. This pledge accounts for some of my involvement. However, it seems clear from tracking the site statistics that Physics-Stack-Exchange is ill. (A healthy sign would be exponential, or at least super-linear, growth.) Why?

My guesses:

1. Advertisement.
2. Quality.
3. Nervousness.

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1. How many working physicists know about the site? Probably not many, and I believe the answer is tied in with #2.
2. I understand that the community disfavors simply research-level questions. However, without high-quality answers the site rambles through low-level questions with a high noise-to-signal ratio. This state of affairs will not attract the attention of those who who can make the site better. It's fun to ask about fans and cars and planes and sails, but modeling these things seriously to reveal deeper phenomena is formidable. Instead, we get a mostly qualitative, hand-wavy argument about why things work. That has value, but it is not academic physics. (Maybe that's the goal? If so, I [personally] would discontinue using the site after fulfilling my start-up commitment.)
3. I think some physicists do know about the site but are unwilling to reveal their uncertainties and insecurities. This may be a physics-culture thing or it may not. There is some similar phenonmenon in Math-Overflow, but at least postdocs seem very open to the Web exchange.

Solutions? I don't know. You?

Answer 1

Are you really sure that the state of affairs is so bad? What did you compare the site statistics with? Looking at other SE proposals it seems to me that this site is doing quite well for a site 30 days in beta.

Sure, it will take some time to attract more knowledgeable people and maybe higher standards for questions should be probably encouraged (more onto this later), but I think on the whole, the site is fine. But if people like you (who are absolute top on this site, in my opinion) start to leave then the site obviously has a big problem.

Now, back to the level of questions. I think we have decided that the level should be higher. But apparently there are still lots of (or even most?) popular and high school level questions and we are doing nothing to stop that (I am not sure whether that's good or bad, just stating the obvious). But I guess if we would start to drastically close those questions many people would leave and although standards would be higher, there would be just few good physicists left and the site would collapse.

I think a better approach (apart from starting a research level site like TP.SE) is to let these questions stay, let lots of people come to ask them and make the site popular. Because then also good physicist will discover the site (at least I believe so) and the level will slowly rise (hopefully). I honestly don't see any other way than this. In particular, I am not quite sure how to spread the word in a way that would attract established physicists.

Answer 2

Dear Eric,

I want to give a little comment on the second part, the quality discussion.
Actually I think that it is no problem to have different kinds of quality on the page as long reputation does not play a major role. Answers and questions of different levels have different work load. You can get a lot of reputation by just answering simple questions and you get almost nothing with stuff that only a minority can actually understand.

But this situation is not so uncommon. It is exactly the difference between fundamental and applied research. You simply cannot compare publishing behaviour of those two groups. So one might ask the question: If this site is ill, what will happen to TP.SE? Or are simply our definitions of "illness of a beta" not comparable between different areas?

Whatever will happen, I wish everybody a nice third advent :)

Robert

Answer 3

My 2 cents.

1) Broad advertisement would be a bad idea right now because most professional physicists would take a look or two and not come back because of the low level of questions and answers. It would make sense to selectively recruit a few sympathetic people, perhaps some of the more physically inclined people from MO and anyone else who you think would raise the standards.

2) The quality of questions varies, but what disturbs me more is the low quality of some of the answers, many of which get lots of up votes in spite of being vague, misguided and sometimes plain wrong. I'd love to vote some of them down but don't have enough rep to do so.

3) There are a few legitimate reasons for anonymity, but by and large the reputation of the site will be higher the smaller the number of anonymous users. If you are going to put some effort into asking and answering good questions why not let the world know who you are? It might even help you get a job some day.

Answer 4

I added this site as a proposed URL into Google and Bing to increase its level of visibility. However, a proper way to do it (and one much more effective) would need administration privileges. Therefore, I encourage the administration to take those steps (if they haven't already). This concern arises from the fact that few searches return this site in a decent ranking (e.g. physics forum, physics Q&A, etc) which is somewhat worrying.

Answer 5

Currently, there is certainly a tiny amount of working physicist register here. Most of the registered user should be students. I guess there is only a quarter of them are graduate students and post-doc, maybe the same set of those 100 people committed in the TP.SE.

A rough estimate of all working physicist should be around 50k (see number of physics author and the employment). It is obvious that there is much room for improvements while it is comparing with the 800 people registered here. The grow of the registered user seems to be slowed down, so some form of advertisement may help this situation.

In regard of the quality of questions, it should be fine if part of them are easier than the research level questions. Sometimes askers do want a deep answer for an easy question. You also need new questions to attract people coming back. It should be noticed that more questions itself is a good way to advertise because you can easily found the website in the google. I know the SO simply because it often appears in my search of programming topics.

For high quality questions, it is likely to be asked by knowledgeable people in the particular field. Hence, the number of high quality questions is always much less than the number of low quality questions. So, why don't you try to ask difficult questions here to attract them. It may surprise you that there is person that can answer those questions. Those questions may need weeks of reading and consulting your supervisor.

There are no single good ways for physicists to ask questions in the web and this site has a good system. So, hopefully, it should attract them slowly if we can keep the current quality.

Edit: Regarding your last question, I have been surprised to see Peter Shor (shor algorithm of prime factorization) participating the discussion in the TCS.SE.

Edit 2: It also seems that people rarely asking questions about papers, which should be count toward research level question.