This is a first step into an attempted reboot of this community: Rebooting Cognitive Sciences: a Suggested Approach
As messy as meta is, through an organized community effort I'm hoping to collect and structure the key issues which have been plaguing this site over the years, as well as construct a backlog of past decisions which have been made in order to direct the community. Such an overview serves two purposes: (1) it creates an agenda of problems that need to be addressed and (2) it can be a stepping stone for new users to pick up were others left off, outlining why past decisions were made.
This being a scientific site, consider it a 'systematic review' of meta, albeit less rigorous. For an initial draft where this is based on, consult the following mind map which was co-constructed in chat.
This review has now been completed, and incorporates most of the key issues from the past.
Problems
Question Expertise
What constitutes a good/bad question on this site?
- Assessing what is too basic relies on expertise. This community is very much divided on what is a too basic question. For example, one of our top users also struggles with making this distinction himself. Also expert users are prone to asking questions which do not suit the given format. However, we do seem to agree on what makes a good question: based on literature, assumptions made clear and backed up.
- Non-technical questions can be interesting, regardless of the lack of expertise. Their answers can still teach you something new. Furthermore, they can address common misconceptions (for example on 'insanity').
- Basic questions scare away experts. E.g., one of our very own mods.
- Initial research should be encouraged, but deciding what is sufficient research first requires answering what is too basic. However, any research at all would already be considered an improvement.
- We should mainly strive to not have invalid content on the site.
- Adjust your answer to the level of initial research. When no initial research was done, the OP is likely not to understand the answer in the first place.
- Without researchers, a research-level site cannot be created from the ground up.
- Chasing away users we do not want might be a good thing. Putting questions on hold is one strategy to this end, which still allows them to fix it.
- More important than initial research, is whether a question is answerable. SE generally speaking supports answering questions even when easily answered by a google search.
- No clear decision has been made on what to do with homework questions. Should we welcome students at all?
- We need to critically rethink who our target audience is. This topic has resurfaced several times now.
Self-Help Questions
Are questions explicitly or implicitly motivated by self-help concerns within the scope of our site, and what should be done about them?
- Self-help questions are too localized, which goes against the Stack Exchange community guidelines.
- Generally not grounded in scientific literature.
- Formulating medical advise poses a liability risk.
- However, one role of this site could be providing scientific answers to questions that lay people are asking in the real world.
- At times these questions can be migrated to Personal Productivity or Health.
- Should the answer be removed once the questions are closed?
Attracting experts
How do we attract and retain experts which are capable of answering questions, not just asking them?
- Get listed on professional sites: e.g., psychology.org.
- Attract psychology bloggers and research groups: e.g., a list of blogs is available here. Ask them to do a review of our site.
- Post links to quality posts on other sites: e.g., some subreddits, quora, Facebook, Google+, Twitter, academic mailing lists, LinkedIn, face-to-face. A full list of these can be collected in this post. How to encourage our users in sharing links? We need to make sure to stay respectful while doing so! This is a historically effective strategy.
- Top posts can be cited from Wikipedia, although this might only work in rare cases.
- Promotion on academic conferences, or even making SE an integral part of a conference. There is a budget for this.
- Promotion in universities, e.g., through awards, but of course, only if we in fact want to attract students.
- Attracting more regular users might just be a matter of time.
- Up vote posts that show research effort, down vote bad posts. Which ones are 'bad' will depend on expected question expertise. Extra efforts to introduce experts to the site (they might not be familiar to the format) are recommended.
- Top questions can be shared through the official Stack Exchange social network profiles.
- Do experts even have time for a site like this?
- Seed the site with popular scientific topics which can attract experts.
- We need to keep an eye on other Area 51 proposals to redirect them to CogSci if overlap exists. For example, a new neuroscience proposal got closed which comprised many experts, we should be welcoming to them.
Scope
Which fields of study can ask questions here? How to deal with overlap with other sites?
- We decided to welcome any cognitive science, in line with the definition of Wikipedia. This includes any field which tackles the mind or its processes (behavior), including animals. E.g., Human-Computer Interaction, Neurobiology, Applied Psychology, Social Psychology, Sociology, Neuroinformatics.
- This implies an overlap with sites like, e.g., Programmers, Biology, UX, Cross Validated, and Skeptics. However, when questions do not pertain to the mind or behavior, they are off topic here: e.g. some questions about HCI, statistics, coding experiments.
- However, generally we do want to have a scientific focus (whether we accept laymen or not). E.g. the Autism proposal was not deemed a good fit for this site.
- Concrete guidelines for overlap with specific sites is desirable: e.g., Biology, in particular neurobiology seems to repeatedly overlap.
- What to do with questions about highly specific tools and tool requests is still undecided. In particular, we have many questions on neuroscience software.
- There is some discussion on whether or not psychiatry should remain in scope.
- Bias-laden questions are off-topic, e.g., improbably human conditions.
- Our about (help section) of the site should clearly communicate what is in scope and what is not.
Site name
We have noticed our site name might lead to confusion on what this site is, what new name should we use?
- The name "Cognitive Sciences" can be interpreted to only welcome cognitive science and cognitive psychology, thus excluding, e.g., non-cognitive sub-disciplines of psychology. We have collected evidence showcasing that psychology and neuroscience is often perceived to be excluded.
- There is a strong majority favoring a name change.
- When choosing a new name, the url prefix needs to be considered as well.
- Many popular suggestions follow the format "A and B": Cognitive Science and Psychology, Psychology and Neuroscience, Mind and Brain.
- An attempt at getting an overview of consensus resulted in two favorites (Psychology and Neuroscience, and Mind and Brain), with Psychology and Neuroscience as a clear winner.
- Unfortunately these suggestions go against the naming standards of SE, which 'suggest' avoiding "X and B" like names.
- Regardless, this is a topic which keeps resurfacing. The name keeps causing confusion even for active researchers in the fields.
Clear suggestions
Edit salvageable self-help questions
- Addresses problem: Self-Help Questions
Redirect self-help questions to support groups
- Addresses problem: Self-Help Questions
- Put in place: Finding help with psychological and emotional problems
Promoting CogSci.SE to gain a knowledgable user-base
- Addresses problem: Attracting experts
- Promote users to post quality posts on other sites.
- A Facebook page
- Promotion on conferences.
- Promotion on Stack Exchange social network.
A close reason for no initial research
- Addresses problem: Question Expertise
Name with prefix: e.g., "Cognition: Psychology and Neuroscience"
- Addresses problem: Site Name
- Since SE does not want us to use 'and', we could agree on a singular prefix for the main name, and a more elaborate description which follows.
- Music: Practice and Theory adopts a similar approach.
Allow purely technical neuroscience questions
- Addresses problem: Attracting experts
- A deviation from the general rule 'it has to apply to the mind' could attract these experts which currently have no place to go to.
Community decisions (i.e., should be status-completed)
Close self-help questions as off topic
- Addresses problem: Self-Help Questions
A clear authoritative post to where this decision was made seems to be missing. Instead, we have some indications of this scattered throughout the site. We should probably set this up and link to it from here. I linked to the close reason for now.
Custom off-topic self-help close message
- Addresses problem: Self-Help Questions
Specify self-help questions in the FAQ
- Addresses problem: Self-Help Questions
Close too broad questions, and guide them to be more specific
- Addresses problem: Question Expertise
- Too broad should be closed, this is in line with SE policy.
