13
$\begingroup$

There is a significant overlap between physics and chemistry.

For example: Explanation of "thermite vs ice" explosion

Therefore I suggest that questions tagged "chemistry" on physics.se be displayed and editable on both chemistry.se and physics.se. The reverse would also be beneficial: questions on chemistry.se tagged physics could appear here as well as there and be editable by both communities.

A question immediately arises, should we collaborate on other tags? I would suggest that only tags involving the word chemistry or physics respectively should be cross-communal projects.

[edit]

There is a question on SO meta: Asking on Multiple Sites: "Soft-Migration" which points out how it is mostly the sciences that would benefit from this feature. I guess that means it is "too specific," since we are relatively small. Democracy baby!

$\endgroup$
7
  • 6
    $\begingroup$ Sounds nice, but I suspect it would require major under-the-hood changes. $\endgroup$
    – dmckee --- ex-moderator kitten
    Aug 14 '13 at 0:54
  • $\begingroup$ @dmckee Surely a "virtual stack" separate from both chemistry and physics could be created that would host said questions to allow cross-stack collaboration. That way edits could be visible in both communities without drastically modifying SE. $\endgroup$
    – Dale
    Aug 14 '13 at 0:56
  • 6
    $\begingroup$ I don't know what the architecture looks like. At one point each site had their own database. Any way, I gave you my vote because the team likely won't respond unless there is a clear sign that this is desired. $\endgroup$
    – dmckee --- ex-moderator kitten
    Aug 14 '13 at 1:10
  • 1
    $\begingroup$ This has been suggested many times on Meta Stack Exchange, at least as far back as 2011 e.g. here. It looks unlikely to be implemented any time soon though. $\endgroup$
    – David Z
    Aug 14 '13 at 1:30
  • 1
    $\begingroup$ I don't see a specific physics tag on Chemistry.SE. Could you link to some questions there which could overlap with Physics.SE? $\endgroup$
    – udiboy1209
    Aug 14 '13 at 14:26
  • $\begingroup$ @udiboy Good point! Tag searches for "electricity" and "magnetism" and other broad categories in physics turn up many promising candidates. It might need to be more of a collaborative sort of thing where someone flags a question as potential cross-stack material and a mod approves or rejects it. Also, people would certainly begin tagging things with "physics" on chem.se if they knew of this feature! $\endgroup$
    – Dale
    Aug 15 '13 at 21:06
  • $\begingroup$ @udiboy We have [physical-chemistry] and [quantum-mechanics] over on Chem. $\endgroup$
    – Manishearth
    Aug 16 '13 at 8:13
5
$\begingroup$

As a moderator on both the sites involved, I sort of support this -- this was the reason I proposed soft migration in the first place. Note that soft migration is less complicated than your proposal -- we don't need editing and all, just that the posts should turn up on the main page and in searches. Allowing editing would probably be complicated in the implementation1 as the privileges would need to get carried over.

I had already added a ticker chatroom feed for (and I just added one for ) in the Phy.SE chatroom. If nobody has any objections I can convert it to a chat message feed (every new post is posted in the chatroom). It shouldn't cause too much clutter as Chem.SE doesn't have that much activity.

1. These things always seem easy to implement, but a large app like SE usually has complications in implementing such things. One great example is HTTPS -- to most, turning on HTTPS can be done with the flip of a switch. But for something like SE, it's not so easy

$\endgroup$
2
  • 1
    $\begingroup$ I don't think [physical-chemistry] overlaps a lot with physics, although [quantum-mechanics] might have some overlapping questions. $\endgroup$
    – udiboy1209
    Aug 16 '13 at 11:46
  • 1
    $\begingroup$ @udi You're right, QM has much more overlap that PC. But PC still has a fair amount of questions that are on topic for both, $\endgroup$
    – Manishearth
    Aug 16 '13 at 11:48

You must log in to answer this question.

Not the answer you're looking for? Browse other questions tagged .