Stackexchange on Tony Andrew Meyer

More pitching (scifi.stackexchange.com)

Fri, 18 Feb 2011 20:22:42 +1200

The elevator pitch discussion died down, but I’ve been thinking about this over the last few weeks. As I noted earlier, I’m not a great pitcher, but perhaps I can get something good enough together that others can then work on. DVD extras meets user generated content. I like the idea of starting the pitch with a mashup of something that the pitchee is likely to be familar with (harking back to Donaldson’s thought that all good ideas come from the collision of two separate ideas). In addition, “user generated content” is fairly buzzword-y, which I generally dislike, but is probably appropriate for a pitch. I’m referring only to the best DVD extras, of course, but I think that is implied (also the best of user generated content), and “Book extras” if there was such a thing, as well. Imagine if you could set the questions on the DVD extras for your favourite TV show or movie - or if you had extras for your favourite book. You get answers about what, how and why things happened both in-universe, and in reality, from people who are intimately familiar with not just that one work, but the entire science fiction and fantasy genres - people that can pull together expert and interesting answers about how this work relates to other genre fiction and to the world. They’ll even explain what stories you should move to next if you loved particular aspects of this one. This doesn’t include story identification - but the pitch doesn’t need to include every topic, and it doesn’t fit with the “DVD extras” analogy. It hits some marks that I think are particularly important:

Figuring FAQ (scifi.stackexchange.com)

Fri, 18 Feb 2011 19:50:37 +1200

The scifi.stackexchange.com community (or more accurately, the meta.scifi.stackexchange.com community) is still trying to figure out what’s on-topic, even though it doesn’t appear that the meta consensus directly influences the actual reality of the site. When I last left the search for an elevator pitch, I wondered whether the FAQs of the other (launched) sites would be a fertile ground for inspiration. So, here goes - this is the same list of sites as last time:

Dealing with recommendations (scifi.stackexchange.com)

Fri, 28 Jan 2011 17:52:12 +1200

One of the problems that scifi.stackexchange.com faces that isn’t unique to that site is “recommendation” questions. These are a specific type of list question (which are generally ill-suited to the sites), where each answer offers one possible recommendation, and the votes cast are not just “that’s a good answer” or “that’s a bad answer”, but votes for (and less often, against) a suggestion. StackOverflow has a long history of problems with these sorts of questions (e.g. “favourite programming cartoon” and “great programming quotes”). With few exceptions, these questions are closed, often not before they gather huge numbers of votes, answers, and answer votes. I don’t really see a huge problem with these questions myself - if they are “community wiki” then they aren’t just a way to gather huge amounts of reputation, the voting has merit (if something is popular, it is likely for a reason), and the format does fit (unlike discussions, for example). I can understand that a specific site might choose to disallow them (e.g. StackOverflow), but others (e.g. programmers.stackexchange.com) could allow them. I don’t think that having the majority (or even just a non-small percentage) of a site’s questions be ones of this type would do much for the quality, but in moderation they seem ok. I doubt this would ever be allowed by the powers that be at StackExchange, but I think the following would be a great system for scifi.stackexchange.com:

scifi.stackexchange.com

Tue, 18 Jan 2011 18:04:02 +1200

The Science Fiction StackExchange site came out of private beta today. It’s not the first proposal that I committed to that has made it to beta (that was Card/Board games), I’ve found it more interesting (so far) - Card/Board games has so far focused on a lot of games that I have no interest in (and I’m not so interested or have enough time to ask a lot of questions myself). The current state of scifi.stackexchange is a little worrying - as might be expected, there are a lot of list/opinion/subjective/discussion questions, which aren’t really a good fit for a SE site. A lot of questions are “community wiki”, which reflects this, and that means that reputation is hard to come by for many users. It seems like there might already be a lot of ‘definitive’ factbook-type sites for many of the major scifi stories (e.g. wookiepedia for Star Wars), and there’s little point just duplicating that information (even Wikipedia has a lot of data, presumably because of a sci-fi bias among many of the editors). However, there does seem to be a lot of potential for the “long tail” type of questions that SE is designed to address. There’s certainly a lot of lesser-known scifi novels/TV shows that don’t have a lot of information about them online. It looks like “identify this book” type questions will be acceptable as well, which definitely seems like it would be valuable (even when coming from a Google search). Overall, I’m hopeful - so go check it out! I’m still waiting for the Parenting StackExchange site to reach the beta phase. It might end up being a huge mess of subjective opinion, but it might also end up being a truly valuable resource. If you’re interested, commit!