What would you want name and scope to be? (i.e. next steps)

Question

Ok, from the sentiments expressed on this meta question and answer/comments, there does appear to be support for a change in direction on the site.

I am going to talk with community moderators (Those folks that run the whole shebang), and see what the options are for this kind of thing. In the meantime, I would like to see some constructive discussion on what kind of topics you would want to have as both on and off topic.

While that is being determined (And if there is SE support for this), I would like to see constructive posts about what we would want to be on and off topic. Constructive, solid suggestions with concrete examples would be preferred.

Answer 1

We had this discussion last fall (when we created the Area51 site MedicalSciences as an effort to cultivate a parallel professional-level community and drum up participation on Health) and these were the consensus definitions at that time. We can continue refining from there.

Name

This meta is discussing names.

Definition

[NAME] is a site directed primarily at professionals in medical and allied health fields, students of those professions, related academics, and others with a sound understanding of healthcare-related sciences.

Scope

If your question is about...

• clinical guidelines
• disease prevention and management
• human physiology and pathophysiology
• pharmacology
• diagnostic and prognostic methods
• public health
• research

... then this is the right place to ask.

We exclude some often asked questions as off-topic, like:

• medical advice
• diagnosis requests
• treatment recommendations
• second opinions
• fundamentals of biology or chemistry (see Biology.SE and Chemistry.SE)

Please see a healthcare provider for any individual health advice; such questions will be closed here.

Please look around to see if your question has been asked before. It’s also OK to ask and answer your own question.

If your question is not specifically on-topic for [NAME], it may be on topic for another Stack Exchange site. If no site currently exists that will accept your question, you may commit to or propose a new site at Area 51, the place where new Stack Exchange communities are democratically created.

Answer 2

Hitherto we seem to have been the target for almost anything related to human biology. This has lead to a very unfocused Q&A site with poor questions and answers.

I think we should move to a Q&A site suited to medical professionals, i.e. the questions are those that one professional from one speciality might ask another in a different speciality. I think this should keep the question quality high since the person asking the question should be able to find the answers easily enough to easy questions so these won't get asked.

I've posted a few representative questions:

1. When to phlebotomize in Eisenmenger syndrome?
2. Does the Warburg effect have any relevance to the effective treatment of cancer with diet?
3. Is a drug holiday off bisphosphonate therapy a valid strategy in the management of osteoporosis?

to show where I think we need to be going.

Since this site would be medico to medico I think we can accept requests for second opinions but only if it is framed in an entirely anonymous fashion with relevant medical history, examination and results. Anything short of that would be targetted for closure as being a poor question.

Questions on human physiology should be off topic, and moved to biology.

And nutrition should be excluded unless it's parenteral nutrition though even that is more the realm of nutritionists.

So, since I'm advocating the move to the practice of medicine, we name it medicine.se. If we get surgical questions, they would go to surgery.se

Answer 3

As priorities go, here are mine, in order:

1. Really STEP 0, if markdown would allow for this: Continue with the current consensus model, name, scope, close reasons. Be friendly to new users, remind them of policy and guide them to the proper documentation on this.
   No change in our behaviour towards any new model at this step!
   Just strict application of current rules!
2. Flesh out name and scope issues. Have a moderator declare or proclaim this and the following steps as official, once our targets are reached
3. Define three well thought custom close reasons to catch as many situations as possible
4. Establish this new documentation (or updated old ones) as the current consensus, the FAQ, ideally also in our help-documents
5. Make these changes official, they need to clearly written down somewhere and easy enough to find, at least for us when reminding users in comments
6. Now apply these new rules as the new current consensus. Always pointing any newbies to the reasons and rules we documented

We have a share of users coming to this site posting something, maybe horrible in our eyes, but in good faith and sometimes even according to those guidelines available to them. When these users come to meta or start to complain in comments "but your help says…" they are understandably confused and they are fundamentally right to complain and ask for clarification.

_{As I wrote before, I would miss nutrition as a topic, for example. Health or even medicine without including nutrition seems wrong. But if it is the current consensus and clearly documented as well as easy to find, then OK, out of the window with it.}

It would be a mistake to gallop into application of new rules before we thought this through and documented it. While we are all eager to improve things, before this is done properly, every user acting according to his own vision for this site's future is acting as though we are confused and conflicted about this. To be fair, currently we are conflicted about this. As anxious as we are for change, this will hopefully speed up the process without compromising anything vital for what I would call due process.

I propose at least two different meta-meta posts "FAQ new users", pointing to the current consensus building meta posts; "FAQ regular users" pointing likewise o the current consensus on things like "how to review", "how to comment".

Both of these might seem obvious, or not. Fact is that they are way easier to change – that is to update – than all those brick walls we have hit when updating e.g. help-center files. And while some posts already on meta are already the current consensus, they are not always easy to find, and therefor not easy to link to if to be used in comments. As examples on how to implement that I suggest to orient this target on how Skeptics did it: FAQ: What are theoretical answers?