@Gilles There's not much we can do about it. Stack exchange's subsites are essentially meta-tags. ("I want to ask at machine-learning question from the perspective of a computer-scientist," or "I want to ask a machine-learning question from the perspective of a mathematician.") And so the subsites have the same problems that meta-tags have:

Also: your answer on the meta question about where to post neural-nets questions is only half right. Yes, subsites correspond roughly to academic departments, but Machine Learning (and Neural Nets specifically) are multi-disciplinary, and a large fraction of the academics (in the US, at least) are now in other departments (electrical engineering, applied math, neuro-science).

IMHO the best work is being done by people who come from a statistics background (in EE departments, that's the people working on the traditional applied mathematics problems of Detection and Estimation (who tend to have first come to the field through Radio Communications.))

On Stack Exchange the experts in Machine Learning and Neural Nets are clustered mainly on Cross Validated.

Examples of good PhD theses involving machine learning? (self.MachineLearning) / reddit

↑ (a question that would die in seconds on stackexchange)

:23448974 (oops/ rats hit delete by accident let me retype that)

@WanderingLogic an example of SE mgt (from top down!) not really understanding the concept of a folksonomy

@vzn I think the meta-tags (subsites) are generated organically (by the "folks" generating new sites on Area 51.)

This is more an example of an unintended consequence of an engineering decision that was made a long-long time ago. (The decision to create SuperUser and ServerFault because they couldn't find another technique to get the entrenched culture on SO to stop downvoting and closing all the system configuration and system maintenance questions.)

There's really no way to fix it except to design and launch a new StackExchange 3.0 with a more sophisticated tagging system that lets new subcommunities emerge organically. (Which I don't think anyone knows how to do.)

@WanderingLogic afaik most initial tags are generated in area 51 but afaik new tags can be created at any time by anyone... maybe with sufficient permission. agreed the tag systems tend to stabilize after some months but one would not want them to be frozen either!

not really sure that anything is broken either! just feel mgt sometimes tends to micromanage the tags too much & think the atwood blog nearly falls into that (...trap!)