The Science Fiction StackExchange site came out of private beta today. It’s not the first proposal that I committed to that has made it to beta (that was Card/Board games), I’ve found it more interesting (so far) – Card/Board games has so far focused on a lot of games that I have no interest in (and I’m not so interested or have enough time to ask a lot of questions myself).
The current state of scifi.stackexchange is a little worrying – as might be expected, there are a lot of list/opinion/subjective/discussion questions, which aren’t really a good fit for a SE site. A lot of questions are “community wiki”, which reflects this, and that means that reputation is hard to come by for many users. It seems like there might already be a lot of ‘definitive’ factbook-type sites for many of the major scifi stories (e.g. wookiepedia for Star Wars), and there’s little point just duplicating that information (even Wikipedia has a lot of data, presumably because of a sci-fi bias among many of the editors).
However, there does seem to be a lot of potential for the “long tail” type of questions that SE is designed to address. There’s certainly a lot of lesser-known scifi novels/TV shows that don’t have a lot of information about them online. It looks like “identify this book” type questions will be acceptable as well, which definitely seems like it would be valuable (even when coming from a Google search). Overall, I’m hopeful – so go check it out!
I’m still waiting for the Parenting StackExchange site to reach the beta phase. It might end up being a huge mess of subjective opinion, but it might also end up being a truly valuable resource. If you’re interested, commit!
TonyAndrewMeyer 
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