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There is an early-stage stackexchange site for theoretical physics. http://area51.stackexchange.com/proposals/23848/theoretical-...

It seems obvious to me that something for "physics" questions is too broad to be technical. Even "theoretical physics" sounds too broad. On the other hand, there has been little traction for the high energy physics stack exchange: http://area51.stackexchange.com/proposals/6633/high-energy-p... and http://mathoverflow.net seems to work really well in spite of being really broad.

The theoretical computer science stack exchange has been very successful: http://cstheory.stackexchange.com/ . This suggests it can work.

Physics is a technical topic, but people are treating it more like philosophy. Imagine if Stack Overflow were filled with questions like "Can a computer think?" That's what's happening in Physics.

I use the Ubuntu, Unix/Linux, LaTeX, Math and Statistics stack exchange sites regularly and they have helped me tremendously in achieving a lot of stuff that would probably have taken me much more time to figure out by myself.

I think most sites will quiet down with time, because once all questions have been asked there won't be as much interest, but they will always stay my number one source of information because in one swoop I can :

* Check if a question was asked on the topic I am looking for. The Ask Question page will do a search for you after you're done typing your question title.

* If not, ask the question, and most of the time in asking the question I solve my own problem.

* If problem not solved, wait for suggestions/answers.

The difference between this and forums or mailing lists is that the rating of answers allows you to pick out quickly the best and most approved answers.

I agree with the other comment here in that not all subjects are proper to a stack exchange site, they are clearly not the best medium to do discussions for various reasons: the ordering of answers is not preserved, you cannot start a sub-thread other than by doing comments, you cannot reply to a specific comment, etc.

I did follow the electronics site (it was chiphacker.com previously but then got converted into electronics.stackexchange.com which caters to both electronics and robotics crowd). I find that it is a bad idea. I don't think it will die off but it will remain an hobby electronics site for the rest of the eternity. I don't think good EE people are that much into forming a community over the internet.

I am also against them answering stupid questions like "How do you calculate the resistance using bands on a resistor?". I know I know stackexchange wants to make all the answer available at one place but this is just stupid. Google can find you the answer, wikipedia is already summarizing the general knowledge, the why repeat an answer again and again?