Who really has the expertise regarding how new Area 51 communities should organize?

Question

A large community proposal was very recently closed in Area 51: Neuroscience (update: in fact it has just been deleted and all data permanently erased, see below).

150 early supporters gathered in less than two months, including the heads of major laboratories in experimental Neuroscience across the world. This was a concerted effort across multiple institutions established by top practitioners in the field to create a much needed venue to exchange expertise and technical knowledge for students and researchers. It started as a follow-up to discussions on the open neuroscience summer school (TENSS), which every year gathers a community of technical experts in Europe to teach the next generation of experimental neuroscientists. Lecturers, TAs and students from all over the world agreed to support and promote a proposal that would be created in the Area 51 website.

The proposal gathered a large momentum from day one, even before the main networking outreach efforts were started. Many of the most valued and critical specialists in the field are biologists and non-CS people which are actually not keen on using Stack Exchange, so it was very surprising to see such a large number of experts step forth to support this proposal (as you can infer from user statistics, >50% of supporters were completely new to SE).

Surprisingly, after these first promising few months, users suddenly woke up to a closed proposal. Moderators from Area 51 had decided that the Neuroscience proposal was a duplicate of Cognitive Sciences and referred users to the CogSci website.

This was a source of confusion and surprise to everyone involved. Some users did try to reach out to the Cognitive Sciences community and ventured some experimental neuroscience questions, but they were closed off as out-of-scope, apparently by being too technical in nature. On hindsight, this is not so surprising since the scope and content of the two proposals were worlds apart from their very inception: CogSci clearly has their focus on theoretical, computational and cognitive models of the human mind. They also address many layman and popular questions on human cognition, including philosophical conundrums like the origin of consciousness or free-will.

The Neuroscience proposal on the other hand had the specific goal to address the many technical questions faced by Neuroscience researchers and students while trying to design and run experiments. These included, for example, questions about implantation techniques (e.g. electrode drives, micro-injections, patching, optogenetics, etc.), as well as technical details for getting in-vivo neurophysiology and imaging hardware/software to work. These types of questions are particularly challenging and specific to the domain of experimental neuroscience because they stand at the intersection of multiple engineering fields (optics, electrical engineering, programming, material sciences, biotechnology) and thus will usually challenge even experts in those fields. As advocated in many other technical Stack Exchange websites, these types of questions do not blend well with more conceptual, opinion-based questions which are more likely to invite debate.

Given these differences, it was not surprising that there was a strong contest presented by the experts supporting this proposal against this closure mandate. Requests for justifications were sent personally and publicly to the area 51 moderators. Many users presented rational, extensive counter-arguments, but they were answered with silence and a deserted site.

Sadly, the way the whole process was conducted drained the momentum behind the neuroscience proposal and scared experts away. Most users that were contacted feel like this was a lost chance. There is a high probability now that neither CogSci nor Neuroscience will gain these new experts and questions. In this case, Stack Exchange itself won’t benefit from the interdisciplinary expertise which could have spread to other sites in the network.

Furthermore, as all Area 51 closed proposals get permanently deleted and all data is lost, the entire history of the effort will disappear, and no future initiatives will be allowed to learn from what happened. For this reason we decided to intervene at the level of Stack Exchange meta and make our case that the way Area 51 is organizing new communities could maybe use some improvement. It is concerning in our eyes that a movement that self-organized around real-world experts, a clearly defined technical scope, and had a strong growing user base from day one can be shot down without even having a chance to prove themselves.

We think the only reason neuroscience experts would be interested in a Stack Exchange site is if it tackles the interdisciplinary technical problems neuroscientists face every day. We argue that broadening the scope of questions to the point of including opinion based conceptual or philosophical questions is not appealing to a community looking to share technical challenges. We believe it is better to start with a very technically focused site. Experts will attract experts and eventually regular users who want to get answers from experts.

Ultimately, we believe that the decision to close this proposal was made by people who, despite their good intentions, are not experts in the field and don’t really understand the problems facing our community. This leads us to speculate: how can SE make sure that new communities are created and driven by experts if they don’t listen to them? Taking our failed proposal as an example, it seems that it doesn’t really matter how many experts you gather, or their quality, because you can be shot down by the moderators without having even a chance to voice your argument properly and openly.

Did it make sense to prematurely shut down this proposal? Given the vision laid out by Stack Exchange, who should make that call?

Top example questions and user statistics

Since the original proposal has now been thoroughly deleted, we include here the top 10 example questions and user statistics at time of closure for better appreciation of the points made above.

Representative top example questions

• I'm doing extracellular recordings with tetrodes and using optogenetics for tagging. How should I handle photovoltaic artifacts in my recordings?
• I want to synchronize video tracking with my electrophysiology acquisition. I am using Open Ephys. Does anyone have a good configuration to share?
• I am using solenoids for reward delivery and despite attempts at shielding them they produce a lot of electrical noise in my recordings.
• How should I store my neurophysiology data for easy sharing with other neuroscientists?
• I am trying to image synaptic responses in dendritic spines. How can I isolate them from fluorescence arising from back-propagating action potentials?
• What minimum time window is needed to meaningfully estimate coherence between two LFPs at a given frequency?
• How to ensure long-term stability of chronic headpost implants?
• How do you prevent light leak from the optogenetic stimulation light onto the PMT when 2p calcium imaging and stimulating simultaneously?
• Is there a tangible benefit of synchronising the sample clock to the laser pulses in a resonant scanning 2P microscope?
• Is there any good automatic open source solution for whisker tracking in freely moving rodents?

Users also following

• 10.1% Open Science
• 6.1% Artificial Intell...
• 6.1% Internet of Things
• 4.7% Literature
• 68.9% only this proposal

followers active in

• 15.5% Stack Overflow
• 15.5% Documentation Beta
• 4.1% Meta Stack Exchange
• 3.4% Super User
• 3.4% Cross Validated
• 3.4% Mathematics

Answer 1

From a quick look at your example questions and Cognitive Sciences' help center, it's clear why the two proposals were thought to be duplicates. The help center on CogSci says that:

If you have questions about ...

• Cognitive science
• Psychology (e.g., cognitive, social, developmental, biological, applied, clinical, organizational, etc.)
• Psychiatry
• Neuroscience and neurobiology

... then you're in the right place to ask your question.

Emphasis mine.

Neuroscience is on-topic at Cognitive Sciences. Creating sites that only cover a subset of what an existing community covers is generally a bad idea - they just drain traffic away from the existing site, which isn't a good thing. However, creating a site which covers an area already covered by an existing site, plus some extra areas, may be worth it.

In this case, I think it would be worth trying the proposal again. From the reaction of CogSci to the questions posted there, it seems that the theoretical science is on-topic there, but the applications and technical aspects of neuroscience are not. That's your extra area - the new Neuroscience site could cover the theoretical, plus the application and technical sides of neuroscience.

Given that, my advice would be to try again. Create a new Neuroscience proposal on Area 51, contact your field experts again to tell them you're having another attempt. Once you've done that, one of the first things you should do is to create a discussion question on Area 51 about the proposal, outlining why you think it's not a duplicate (because you also cover X and Y areas, which CogSci doesn't) and why you think it would make a good site (because you've got subject experts committed to making it happen). This should provide anyone looking at the proposal with the necessary information to make their own judgement.

If that fails too, then at the end of the day - oh well. Stack Exchange isn't the only Q&A platform in the world.

Answer 2

Your situation seems very similar to another one I read about.

But first, I want to say that "all data permanently erased", "thoroughly deleted", and the entire section about losing the history of the proposal forever are overstatements. It's not gone at all; it's just hidden to everyone with less than 10k rep:

What is a trusted user?

Trusted users are allowed to perform trusted actions, including:

• cast delete and undelete votes on proposals
• view deleted proposals

Anyone can look at the archive.org version.

---

Now, back to the story I wanted to tell.

There was another proposal that was created years ago. For several months, it gained traction, including commitments from several "big names" in the industry, only to be closed as a duplicate of other sites. However, questions asked on these other sites were likely to be closed.

If you clicked on the link for that proposal, you'd notice that it's deleted now. But the story doesn't end there.

A new proposal was created, and it gained progress very fast as everyone from the old proposal committed. It would go to beta, and then became the fully-fledged Mathematica site you can visit here.

You can read more about this here.

---

I wouldn't give up hope for your site. After all, a site can come back from deletion, or a new one could take its place.

---

---

More information about closing down sites:

• Proposals must have examples, committers, and activity:

Proposals that do not meet these requirements within three days after submission are subject to removal:

• 5 example questions you would like to ask on this site
• 5 users who are willing to 'follow' this proposal

Note that abandoned proposals which receive no activity for a period of 30 days may also be removed.

• Sites can be closed down in beta:

Private beta, which is limited to Area 51 committers, lasts 7 days. It is during this time that the community must demonstrate that it is capable of putting together quality content.

Public beta, which is open to anyone, lasts at least 90 days. It is during this time that the community must demonstrate that it is both capable of maintaining a high level of quality for a duration of time and that it is capable of significant activity.

If at the end of either period, the community has not met its goal, the site will be closed.

More information about deleting sites:

• Trusted users can vote to delete sites.
  • There are currently 6 non-mod users with 10k+.

It takes 3 votes, minimum, to delete a closed proposal — and the proposal must have been closed for 2 days. However, the number of delete votes required scales to the number of followers. If you feel a proposal should be deleted despite having lots of votes, please flag it for community moderator attention.

• Posts may be deleted for being inactive:

Inactive proposals that do not receive any activity for one month are subject to deletion.

• Moderators have the power to instantly delete (or close) proposals:

Occasionally, proposals may be removed from Area 51 for reasons of moderation: spam, off topic, abuse, etc.

Note that the community may (as far as I know) delete proposals with flags (if the proposal is spam or offensive):

The offensive and spam flags are designed to automatically eliminate truly offensive posts through the collaboration of the community. When a post receives 6 flags, it is locked, deleted, and its owner loses 100 reputation.

Answer 3

There is no easy solution for your problem. The original cause of the problem was without doubt the poor moderation culture of the cogsci SE.

Unfortunately, SE sites, as they grow, tend to become more and more closed, their rules tends far away from the common sense, they start to implement illogical, meaningless policies what they apply more and more against any rationality, with increasing harshness.

I wouldn't close out, that the CMs, at least partially understand the problem, but even they can't do too many. It is also possible that they simply ignore the problem (and also the site statistics). Sometimes I had a quite clear impression, that also the CMs tried to do something against a poor, sick site culture, but unfortunately it doesn't happen enough often.

It is easily visible, for example, that most of the small but active SE sites have around 5 regular close voters. It is because they are the minimal set of users capable to close questions.

It is not easy to say, what to do. If you restart the neural science proposal, it will be probably closed again as "cogsci clone", while the cogsci will still close the neural science questions. And then they will say it is ontopic. Yes, being ontopic in the site FAQ doesn't mean that it is being ontopic also in the review practice.

Simple solution for this problem clearly doesn't exist, longterm solution can.

First, get to a high rep on the cogsci and try to invest all of your influence to fix its community:

• Most of the VtC voters simply don't understand what are they taking part. They live in a world where they are taking care the site by closing bad questions. Awake them.
• Find other, mainly newbie users handled on unfair ways and try to explain this also for them.
• Between the "caretakers", identify the few really bad guys. Their primary characteristic, that they have a strong wish for power and that they are gaming. I.e. their goal is not tp read and write good questions and answers - although many of them does it, they can be even the best experts of the site. But, their unsaid goal is simply to get to the top in the site hierarchy. It is probably some psychological defect by them. For them, closing 3542 questions is quite similar as if you would play a first-person-shooter with your friend and you would shot his 3542 characters on the screen.