Why is Area 51 proposal for Database renamed to Database Administrators?

Question

One of the proposals I had committed to, Database is now known as Database Administrators. Why is this so ? Now I fear that the Stack Exchange site is catered more towards Database Administrators than Database Professionals as to which I had committed.

(yes, there is a huge difference between database professional and a database administrator).

Answer 1

"Databases" is nebulous term, used by many, many professional disciplines. So we had to become absolutely crystal clear about the primary audience for this site. Yes, a clearer title could have be chosen early on to indicate the target audience… preferably by the community creating the proposal — Or we can step in and take one of the following three actions.

Pick one:

1. Leave it as a "Database" site whose primary audience becomes professional programmers whose skill set includes slinging around the occasional SQL code to get their job done.
   Result: Closed as a duplicate of Stack Overflow
2. Leave it as a "Database" site whose primary audience becomes system administrators who might have a database or two to maintain as part of their organization.
   Result: Closed as a duplicate of Server Fault
3. Create a "Database Administrator" site for professionals who properly call themselves "DBAs" as a full-time profession; Those who identify themselves as neither programmers nor system administrators and don't currently feel they have a place on our network.
   Result: Rename "databases" to DBAs before launch… instead leaving the target audience to chance having to close it down when 70-80% of the content duplicates existing sites.

So we went for option #3.

Answer 2

yes, there is a huge difference between database professional and a database administrator

Er.. what?

All our sites (at least in theory) cater to experts, and we felt the best way to make that clear is to say DBA, as in the standard professional title:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Database_administrator

A database administrator (DBA) is a person responsible for the design, implementation, maintenance and repair of an organization's database. They are also known by the titles Database Coordinator or Database Programmer, and is closely related to the Database Analyst, Database Modeler, Programmer Analyst, and Systems Manager. The role includes the development and design of database strategies, monitoring and improving database performance and capacity, and planning for future expansion requirements. They may also plan, co-ordinate and implement security measures to safeguard the database.[1] Employing organizations may require that a database administrator have a certification or degree for database systems (for example, the Microsoft Certified Database Administrator).

And, this is hilarious

It has been suggested that this article or section be merged into Database.

I lol'ed! We had the same discussion, but I think when you're trying to build a community of experts it's best to spell that out as clearly as possible in the title and description.

Should we have figured this out earlier? Sure. But at least we figured it out before the site went into private beta and people got confused about who the expert audience is for this site.

Answer 3

Probably because the other major type of database professional is the database developer, and I think there's already a site for that, somewhere...