This more an extended comment and answers a more selfish question: "what kind of site do I want?". The first part explains my background with cstheory, the second part talks about what I want from cogsci, and the third part talks about how I can see us getting there. Everything here is completely from my point of view, and not that of the community.

I want this site to be a community. My favorite SE site, and personal gold-standard for quality is cstheory.SE. The reason I love that site is because it has a powerful community of experts, this allows:

Asking questions: If I ask a question there, then I know the answer will be authoritative, because I trust the person answering it. They can include absolutely no sources, and say things like "I expect this to happen" and I will value that answer above many "here is a list and summary of sources" answers I see at many other sites. Why? It is because I trust that the community knows what they are talking about.

Keeping up with the site: I usually keep up closely with the site, because I love reading the questions. Even unanswered questions often teach me something new. Further, the character of the community, lets me know that the questions being asked are one that are of interest to professionals. Thus I can get a feel for the field by reading questions without even looking at answers.

I want cogsci.SE to be the same sort of community for researchers (and professionals) in cognitive science, neuroscience, and psychology. I want to be able to read the site and get a feel of the sort of questions professionals care about. I don't want to come to a site where I learn what sort of questions somebody-who-does-not-interact-with-cognitive-sciencel cares about.

When I read an answer on cogsci, I want to trust it because I know that the person answering KNOWS the material. They didn't just do the obvious google scholar searchers (I can do them, too) and return a summary of the first few articles that popped up. I already know how to google, I want to read the views, experiences, and hunches of experts.

How can we get there? I have only hunches. My biggest hunch is that we need to focus on the community. I have no interest in reaching out to people that will ask a few obvious questions. I also have no qualms with closing poorly asked questions. Sure, sometimes a person that asks a bad question will learn from their interaction with the site and start asking good questions/providing good answers, but this seldom happens.

I want to focus on encouraging users who ask good questions, and provide good answers. I want to make them feel welcome, and provide them with a community and interesting content. The few experts (mostly grad students) that we have attracted already, have many colleagues that can be slowly lured to the site if they see a good community.

Thus, I am more than happy to build the site slowly, and focus on a forming a core user base of experts. If this makes the site frightening or unwelcoming to some of the lay audience, I am okay with that sacrifice.

It would be nice to have the best of both worlds, but if we can't then I would like to focus on the experts.

This more an extended comment and answers a more selfish question: "what kind of site do I want?". The first part explains my background with cstheory, the second part talks about what I want from cogsci, and the third part talks about how I can see us getting there. Everything here is completely from my point of view, and not that of the community.

I want this site to be a community. My favorite SE site, and personal gold-standard for quality is cstheory.SE. The reason I love that site is because it has a powerful community of experts, this allows:

Asking questions: If I ask a question there, then I know the answer will be authoritative, because I trust the person answering it. They can include absolutely no sources, and say things like "I expect this to happen" and I will value that answer above many "here is a list and summary of sources" answers I see at many other sites. Why? It is because I trust that the community knows what they are talking about.

Keeping up with the site: I usually keep up closely with the site, because I love reading the questions. Even unanswered questions often teach me something new. Further, the character of the community, lets me know that the questions being asked are one that are of interest to professionals. Thus I can get a feel for the field by reading questions without even looking at answers.

I want cogsci.SE to be the same sort of community for researchers (and professionals) in cognitive science, neuroscience, and psychology. I want to be able to read the site and get a feel of the sort of questions professionals care about. I don't want to come to a site where I learn what sort of questions somebody-who-does-not-interact-with-cognitive-sciencel cares about.

When I read an answer on cogsci, I want to trust it because I know that the person answering KNOWS the material. They didn't just do the obvious google scholar searchers (I can do them, too) and return a summary of the first few articles that popped up. I already know how to google, I want to read the views, experiences, and hunches of experts.

How can we get there? I have only hunches. My biggest hunch is that we need to focus on the community. I have no interest in reaching out to people that will ask a few obvious questions. I also have no qualms with closing poorly asked questions. Sure, sometimes a person that asks a bad question will learn from their interaction with the site and start asking good questions/providing good answers, but this seldom happens.

I want to focus on encouraging users who ask good questions, and provide good answers. I want to make them feel welcome, and provide them with a community and interesting content. The few experts (mostly grad students) that we have attracted already, have many colleagues that can be slowly lured to the site if they see a good community.

Thus, I am more than happy to build the site slowly, and focus on a forming a core user base of experts. If this makes the site frightening or unwelcoming to some of the lay audience, I am okay with that sacrifice.

It would be nice to have the best of both worlds, but if we can't then I would like to focus on the experts.