Looking at the success of Stack Overflow, it should be noted that before there was a SO community, there were these Jeff-Atwood’s-and-Joel-Spolsky’s-followers communities which were able to ‘prime’ SO.

I think a successful Stack Exchange site will either have to be sufficiently ubiquitous (like guitar playing) or already have a centralized community around something else like a blog, which just migrates over.

Either way, however, the system only ends up benefits existing communities.

##############

Additionally, the classification is not only rather broad and, in some cases, far fetched, but methinks the basis of the classification should be the motivation of people’s interest.

I think more people like Magic as a fantasy game than as a card game, hence why it’s awkward to group it with poker.

Likewise, while there are Star Trek books, most people who like Star Trek like it for the TV series. Perhaps ‘books’ would be best changed to ‘media’? (Since they are “The Future of Entertainment” the change should feel natural

I take the guitar/music as a live example, but similar cases will probably arise. I am a bass player. The guitars SE gets the chance to start and thrive. I can propose a SE for bass playing, but that will not start due to lack of critical mass.

Now we ended up with a highly specialized Guitar SE site which thrives (with or without live difficulties, that has to be seen). Bass players are not allowed to post questions about bass there, since it’s a guitar site, and bass players will not have a SE site to refer to.

Since the bass guitar SE proposal has not enough followers at Area51, it will not be considered for community merge at least according to that link

“But there will be a time where two competing proposals have such a groundswell of support that both have sufficient momentum to sail through. That is the time to look closely at the two proposals”

yet if you coalesce bass players, drum players, keyboard players and so on together with the guitar players SE, this SE will see a dramatic increase of traffic (allowing to escape potential falls in visits, which would lead to a close of the site) from the very tiny but cumulatively relevant increases of communities with different specialization.

I don’t know. I think that having a “guitar only” site live, with no sites for other instruments is a loss when compared to a “musician” site where all instruments can be discussed. We will see how the situation evolves. The guys are smart, they adapt quickly. I just wanted to throw my 2 cents.

http://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/54697/near-duplicate-or-subset-proposals-on-area51/54752#54752