Will the chat room eventually close if we don't bump it for a while?

@BruceConnor I would say yes, but I'm not sure if this room has some sort of special status as the "official" chat room of physics.SE that keeps it from being closed. Regardless, I think it takes about a week with no activity for the chat room to be closed, and even then a moderator can reopen it. (That happened once before)

ah, finally works :)

so... anyone have anything to discuss regarding site promotion? or anything else?

Not a whole lot, apparently...

I guess we did cover most of it in the last chat session

I mainly just wanted this to drum up interest in actually implementing some of our ideas from last time

/me thinking aloud:

Looking at the list from last time, the only things that look like they could have central implementations are the two suggestions for publicity generation: doing posters or some such, and asking prominent bloggers to plug the site. Most of the others involve the questions being asked.

I agree

I think the posters might be a higher priority at this moment, since they could potentially be put up at universities to catch people at the beginning of the spring semester

whereas we can deal with bloggers equally well at any time

You might get a bigger payoff from bloggers, though, as the people they reach are already online.

I agree with Chad the bloggers are going to be the biggest payoff for general promotion.

true, although I think the posters would be mainly targeted at undergraduate physics majors and grad students, many of whom are also frequent web users

we can certainly do both

so: who in the blogosphere (perhaps technically a "blogoball") should we reach out to?

One of the things that is not clear to me is what this site is about. The target audience. I've seen several questions closed in the last few weeks because a mod didn't think the question was a good one but that is only going to discourage newbies from posting. If we are going to target physics majors that's one thing but what about the high-school students?

@inflector I've been under the impression that our target audience, in the sense of the people we want answering questions, is undergraduate physics majors and beginning graduate students, or others with similar levels of expertise

Hello to everyone.

The target audience that we want asking questions could encompass a wider range

Hi Kostya :)

but the questions still have to be reasonably well-formed

I thought that it is questions that should have a reasonable level of knowlege.

Well, if that is the case then we should be clearer up front about the questions somehow and figure out what to do with the Google searchers who are not this demographic. They are going to ask questions that don't fit. And it becomes a marketing problem, we either have too many of those types of questions and the undergrads think it is too basic or we discourage the newbies.

I mean -- people experienced in physics anwer questions to people that want to become experienced in physics

@inflector There isn't a regular physics blogger chat or meet-up or anything. I do occasionally exchange links or Twitter messages with some of the others.

The question is not whether or not the questions are well formed but how we handle them when they aren't. Do we help the questioner develop the question or do we just slap them away?

@inflector I've used the tactic of closing the question and leaving a comment informing the OP of what could be done to fix it up

@DavidZaslavsky It wouldn't hurt to email Sean Carroll directly (he's got contact information online)-- Cosmic Variance is probably the biggest of the physics blogs, traffic wise, and Sean's generally a nice guy.

Well, maybe If someone want to work with a particular question -- then it shouldn't be discouraged.

hello

Hello Marek

@ChadOrzel Yeah, I suppose most of you are in very different fields so you won't tend to cross paths at conferences, but I think since you do know each other at some level a note coming from you will be more likely to be acted upon.

@ChadOrzel OK, good idea. Would you like to do that? I'd be willing to send the email but I think the request would carry more weight coming from you, or perhaps any of several other people here

I had an idea about promotion, but maybe it alredy was proposed. Since we are targeting at undergraduates, why not promote the site at their "habitat". I mean -- Univesities.

@DavidZaslavsky A lot of the time, you can find the seed of a reasonable question in something that's otherwise useless. I've ended up answering a few questions that were subsequently closed on that basis.

@DavidZaslavsky I could email Sean, sure.

@Kostya That's basically the idea we had of creating a poster for the site and putting it up at universities

The consensus is that we get a bigger payoff by marketing the site to bloggers than going into the universities

@DavidZaslavsky Yeah. That would be great.

but we can still work on that idea

yeah, I wanted to create that poster but actually never got to it :-( I hope someone else does

@ChadOrzel thanks, that would be great

@Marek I'll take a crack at it sometime in the next couple days, but don't let that stop anyone else

Didn't you start a meta question about posters at some point?

@DavidZaslavsky I think closing will seem like a pretty harsh action to the originator. It seems to me that one should try to lead the questioner through to a good question before closing it. There are a lot of people on forums and such who may not be good at asking questions and we don't want the word getting around that things are too harsh here. Yet, we need standards obviously so I think bad questions should initiate a process that might result in closing if the question doesn't get fixed.

@Marek I can try... Have you invented any "slogan" or something?...

@inflector That's fair. I've scaled back on the closing, these days I'll be more likely to just leave the comment, and possibly downvote if I think it's a badly written question (and of course I reverse the downvote if it gets fixed up)

Perhaps editing the question to make it well formed while leaving the poor question below might help. That way people will start to see what makes good questions and what doesn't. Some questions are hopeless and off topic, but a lot of the time it is obvious what someone meant .

@David I think I haven't but I intended to at one point. But then I decided I better create something first myself

@inflector That could be a good idea. I know most of us are reluctant to make major edits, but perhaps we should be more proactive about that

@Kostya to be honest, I just wanted to collect some of the best questions (and we could start a metaquestion for this, btw) and some intro talk (which was done by David but for other purpose)

Also note that the previous versions of the question are always viewable in the question history, so there's no need to leave the original text below the edited version

Ok, I see

I also worried about this question on "loosing weight". Do you really beleive that this thousands of visitors are interested in physics, not in, well, loosing weight?

@DavidZaslavsky Really? That's a feature I haven't seen yet. How does one see the "question history?"

@David btw, I intended to ask this as metaQ but since you're here: do moderators have access to some kind of statistics for the site (ideally with time dependence)? And I mean something more than what's to be found at area51

@inflector Where it says "edited <date> <time>", the date and time are a link, and if you click on that, it shows you all previous revisions of the question

also if you go to edit it, you can see previous versions and roll back to one of them if needed

@Kostya that is actually very good point I haven't thought about. We probably don't want such questions. Perhaps we should edit the title to make it more physical

@Marek yes we do, although we're not supposed to discuss the details except with other moderators

Here's one example of a question that I think should have not been closed but was. Perhaps losing us a supporter in the process: physics.stackexchange.com/questions/2567/…

@David ah, okay then

@DavidZaslavsky Thanks David, interesting. I hadn't seen that yet. I'm glad it is there.

FWIW the statistics I see don't agree with the numbers on Area 51 at all

so I'm not quite sure what to believe :-P

Have we done any promoting with the moderators of the physics forums? They might see this as competition but it is really a different sort of thing, so perhaps not.

@David that's why I am asking actually. There are also some statistics at the home page and the number of daily visits differs (a lot)

@inflector They don't allow competing sites to be mentioned on the forums, so unfortunately we don't have that option

@David yeah and it's pretty unfortunate. I'd have no problem with leaving reference to PF (say) where it's due. we could be collaborating. although they probably don't need our help at all, being long-established sites

@inflector I was hoping to discuss that one with Noldorin, but he hasn't gotten back to me about it. Admittedly I would like to see the question be a bit better written.

I've certainly made references to here with respect to specific questions before without moderator intervention. So that seems not to set off the alarms as long as the answers serve as a good reference. It seems to me that this should be the distinguishing characteristic. Here you get good answers but on forums any idiot can respond and it is not easy to tell when you are starting out when someone is wrong.

by the way, I've seen number of people from MO crop up. it would be nice if more come because I know there are few good (mathematical) physicists settled over there. is there anyway besides asking questions at MO that reference physics.SE (as a motivation for question, supposedly)

?

@inflector I will state for the record I have no problem with links to PF or any other site appearing on physics.SE

@DavidZaslavsky Good, it didn't seem any different than a reference to Wikipedia to me, so I'm glad you said that.

Yeah, it seems silly to cut off a source of good information just because... well, I'm not really sure why

At PF their rationale for disallowing links to competing sites is that they consider it an advertisement

and advertisements are against the guidelines there

or something like that, anyway

Right, well that's a pre-web way of looking at things. Kind of like the newspaper blogs not linking to other bloggers. Okay, well that doesn't work.

How is traffic going since the Beta was opened up? Is it climbing? It might be good to post progress or some reports so the community can see how we are doing over time, that might prompt us to market a bit here and there if things dip.

Based on the moderator analytics (hopefully this is not more detail than I'm allowed to give away), we had an initial spike in the first week of public beta, then it dropped off and it's been pretty steady since then

Is there a target traffic number that needs to be hit during the beta period, or something?

@Chad As far as I know, no. I'm not sure exactly what criteria the SE team use to determine when we're ready to leave beta

In other words, how big a deal is this?

If you have to keep stats to moderators only, surely there have to be some that can be made public regularly? Who is behind the keeping the stats private idea? The Stack Exchange management, i.e. Joel et al.?

@inflector There's a box on the statistics page itself that asks us not to share the details, but I don't know who exactly was responsible for creating that policy

@ChadOrzel It doesn't mean that we're going to be shut down

The SE team has stated that they're willing to wait as long as it takes for a beta site to be ready to graduate

I don't think it's that big a deal

But they haven't said what the graduation criteria are?

The "Beta" implies unstable site to me and I haven't seen anything unstable yet so far using it for a month or so.

It might be discouraging new users a bit.

@inflector I don't know of anything specific they've said on the matter

You could check on meta.stackoverflow and see if anyone has asked about it

Putting my marketing hat on, they probably want to wait until it reaches some thresholds they can announce so that it seems more impressive when it goes out of Beta officially. A certain number of questions and answers or total or active users.

@inflector: beta is about formulating what the site should be about. and formulation is done by seeing what kind of questions are asked and answered during few months of being in beta. there are some numbers at area51 site should aim at that but in my opinion they are too general to be relevant and as David said, it's no big deal anyway, they'll let you stay in beta as long as you need

but if I understand things correctly, it's desirable to leave beta because after that we can customize the design and other things. which could help a lot

@Marek I think for other sites the design has been done before the beta period officially ends - I think a lot of it depends on when Jin (the designer) gets time

Although I'm sure they will need to see that we're at least viable before committing to making a design

Basically I think we are not doing too bad for now

@David oh, I thought they let people create their own design (assuming people want to, of course)

Right. Well the site seems pretty viable to me. How are we doing for questions in Google so far? Do we have a set of standard searches that we use to monitor progress?

@Marek It's done with community input, but I don't think we can actually create our own design from scratch.

I know that PhysicsForums shows up for many questions right near the top but on usually has to wade through a ton of crap to find the answer. Here it is pretty easy to find the good answers as long as the question Google finds is close to what you are looking for.

@inflector One thing that was pointed out somewhere before was that we don't rank well for searches for physics Q&A site or the like, though I'm not sure what we can do about that

@inflector Any examples in particular?

@David I see, thx.

I did contact Robert Cartaino to ask if the SE team has anything to offer with regard to boosting our Google rankings, but I haven't heard back from him

Common things people might want to know and search google for. For example, if we're targeting physics undergrads, what are some of the questions they'd want to ask? We'd probably get a few on time dilation, definitely some on dark energy and dark matter, anything topical. I'd say any that we keep getting duplicates for are good candidates for a standard search that we can use to track progress.

Gotta run. I'll email Sean Carroll later tonight, and ask him if he'd post something at CV.

@David with [loop quantum gravity description] we are at #7, so that's not that bad

@ChadOrzel OK, great. Especially see if you can point him to some good questions to link to

@Chad yes, that's certainly good news. See you

I'd also take a look at the major news stories and make sure we get a question and answer soon so that when people look for more information we are there at the top. For example, when the LHC announces something on luminosity, it would be nice to have a question that fits the description that contains the definition of luminosity and what an inverse femptobarn is.

@Marek That's pretty good :) although I imagine more people search for just loop quantum gravity

"Look Quantum Gravity" is a great example of the type of search we should monitor to see where we stand and measure progress.

@inflector excellent idea. (although I'm not sure we really need to do an exposition of units - that's handled better by other sites)

This is an active site so it should rise pretty quickly according to Google's normal ranking. If we get a few links from bloggers, it will help a lot.

I still need to write something on my own blog about it :-P

@DavidZaslavsky The point is not to do an exposition but to have the exposition in the definition so that Google indexes it as relevant in case of a search for "LHC luminosity femptobarn"

I mean to have the word mentions with a brief description in the answer, not a full exposition.

@inflector: OK, I can agree with that.

but it's femtobarn, don't know why that p keeps sticking its head in there

Something else that might help with marketing is if we could get a list of regular high-profile contributors. For example, just knowing that the blogger and author Chad Orzel might answer your question will help us with PR and marketing. I mean, he might even help our dog learn physics ;) I wouldn't have an impressive resume for that purpose but I bet that some of you do.

If Chad is OK with it, that sounds like a good idea. Though I don't know of any other frequent contributors who would draw in people.

Then again I don't really have a sense of who has a high profile in the physics world, either

other than certain textbook authors who are almost certainly not going to appear on this site

Anyone with a Ph.D would help, professors and actual scientists.

There are two things you get here. One people have to be relatively smart to have the confidence to post because of the peer review process itself. Two if there is a wrong answer, someone will call the answerer on it very quickly so people tend to answer when they know the answer they don't just BS like on a forum where a newbie will answer something stupid and it takes 15 posts before someone smart notices. You don't get that when you ask your buddy in Phys. 202 what he thinks.

So, if undergrads know they can get an answer and it is unlikely to be wrong, they will come here instead of other places over time. It will be easier and more educational.

@inflector Interesting view. In practice I think people will have a lot of built-in resistance to asking questions here for other reasons besides correctness, e.g. it's just less stressful to ask your friend for an answer rather than coming to an online forum. But hopefully over time those obstacles will diminish.

The point you make would go well on the poster we can hopefully come up with.

Anyway it's after 4 PM here (ending time) and I think we have made some good progress today. So unless anyone has any last comments to be included in the transcript, I guess we can end the official chat session here (not that that means anything, except for what gets included in the transcript)

@DavidZaslavsky Well, that may be true of some certainly, but others don't want their friends and fellow students to think they are stupid so they hate to ask questions where others can see them, either in class, or even among friends. Who wants to admit they don't know something that everyone else seems to know?

Cool, take care and thanks for setting this up.

My pleasure :) of course feel free to stay around in case anyone else wanders in and wants to talk but I think I have to take off for a while now

Perhaps someone can summarize this chat session on meta as Robert Smith did with the previous one

I want to ask about following thing. I remember that I had a lot of questions when I was studying. And I see that those questions are getting reproduced in students over and over. So I was thinking about "playing undergraduate" and ask those questions here. But I cannot work out the appropriate way of doing that.

What are your doubts?

Well, right now I know at least some answer. The problem is that if you understand something it is very difficult to get into the skin of someone who doesn't.

Try with one question, the focus should be that questions and answers should be useful, so I think it's perfectly legitimate to post a question like that. Or else we could wait for undergrads to come and ask them :-)

The worst that can happen is that it gets shot down... ;-)

Ok, I'll try to make some. I don't think that undergrads will ask -- I remember that I thought that it was stupid to ask those question. "Because It is so obvious for everyone."

Ok. I'm leaving too.