Commitment message should ask if you're an expert

Question

A danger for any new Stack Exchange site is to have a population of mostly laymen, and few experts who can ask and answer the difficult questions which the site's survival ultimately depends on.

Physics is suffering from this and experts decided to create their own site. Artificial Intelligence was closed because of this. Something has to be done to address this problem. Otherwise, many other proposals will suffer of the same fate rather than become extremely useful resources like Stack Overflow has become.

Thus, I propose that a text similar to the following is displayed when ones tries to commit to a proposal:

The success of a new site is predicated on the presence of experts on the subject. A too large concentration of laymen early on is detrimental to the website. As such, we only allow [audience] to commit to a proposal. Laymen can join the site after private beta.

The [audience] above would be replaced by what is found in the "Who is this site for?" field that is filled when creating a new site proposal.

The Economics site's commitment message, for example, would ask:

The success of a new site is predicated on the presence of experts on the subject. A too large concentration of laymen early on is detrimental to the website. As such, we only allow economists and graduate-level economics students to commit to a proposal. Laymen can join the site after private beta.

It's not perfect, but it should at least be an improvement.

Language proposals (English-French translation, Spanish Language & Usage, etc.), for example, could talk about level of fluency to hopefully chase away the merely curious and those learning a language. Again, that wouldn't be perfect but it would certainly help.

Also, to confirm, rather clicking on a button, typing would be necessary. Something like:

If you are an expert of the subject, type "I am an expert" in the box below.

Typing is required, over clicking a button, because it forces the user to read the text. Otherwise, it'd probably still be too likely that someone presses "I am an expert" without reading anything.

It might also be a good idea to lengthen the duration of private beta on topics where you'd expect the incoming of a lot of laymen right at the end of private beta.

Answer 1

This has the danger of making every site one consisting of and only for the higher end of experts - similar to mathoverflow. This is fine if that is what the site is meant to be, but a lot of sites are for general purpose questions as well as the truly expert questions.

Once beta ends and the amateurs are permitted, they will either get bullied off the site, or the experts will leave after seeing such a drastic change in the nature of the site.

It would likely be better to allow anyone to join, but if they identify themselves as something less than a professional in the field then their commitment accounts for a smaller portion of the commitment required to start the site.

For instance, a site would require 40% of its commitments from those that identify themselves as professionals with 10+ years of experience in the topic, while the remaining 60% can be filled by those with less experience.

This would ensure that enough of experts join prior to starting the site, and allow the site to grow to fill everyone's needs, rather than splashing cold water on it later.

This number should be tweakable on a per site basis (perhaps have people rate it on a scale of 1-5, where 5 means only for experts, 1 means no experts required, and average the results during the following phase to give a ratio of expertise). Mathoverflow like sites would require 100% experts/graduate/post-graduate researchers, while a gaming site may be fine with 80% people who are mere enthusiasts, but not experts.

Answer 2

I had considered something similar, but it might better be implemented by asking the user what their role/interest is in the site rather than asking "Are you an expert?"

Something like this:

What role do you play in [Photography]?

○ Professional or Expert
◉ Avid Enthusiast or Prosumer
○ Academic or Research-Level Student
○ Beginner or Learner
○ Merely Curious

Answer 3

The problem is that a lot of experts know how hard a subject is and therefore do not think of themselves as experts, but a lot of non-experts think a subject is easy and therefore think of themselves as experts!

There needs to be something better than asking "are you an expert".

Answer 4

I doubt that it will work: at least in the field where I am somewhat competent (e.g. programming), I see that people who are one step above the complete newbies (not "hello world" any more, but still firmly in the "beginner" range) look down on the total newbies and think "I'm not a noob anymore, therefore I must be an expert, The Expert even!" Only with more learning, people will find out how much more there is to learn. Also, people are 1) vain 2) liars, so they'll pretend expertise to prop up their egos.

In other words, 90% of the people will proclaim themselves experts, rendering this checkbox-but-not-a-checkbox useless.

See also: Dunning–Kruger_effect (a.k.a. "unskilled and unaware of it")