Wednesday, 18 November 2009

My beaker overfloweth - New chemistry Q&A sites

Stackoverflow is one of the best Question & Answer websites for computer programming. It uses a carefully designed social model to build a community where people compete to give the best answer to questions in order to be rewarded with a better response to their own questions.

Recently, the people behind Stackoverflow have opened up the software to allow people to set up their own websites...but just for a beta period (money will then be required). Several chemistry 'stackoverflows' have already been set up. Here are a few I've heard about:

BlueObelisk: Questions about cheminformatics and computational chemistry leaning towards the open source or open data side of things. Update (07/10/2010): This website has moved to Shapado.
Chempedia Lab: Questions about experimental chemistry.
Chemistry: General chemistry (?)

These sites are all new so you won't find many questions there already. But give them a go. Go there and ask a question or two (even if you already know the answer), answer a question or two, and check back in a day to see what happens. You can log in with your Gmail address (among others) but do note that questions are not anonymous.

Such websites require a community. Some will gain such a community and flourish, others won't and will fail. In the meanwhile, go get some answers.

Image credit: Question Everything (Nullius in verba) Take nobody's word for it by Duncan Hull (CC BY 2.0)

4 comments:

  1. So, what happens to these stackoverflows after the beta period ends?

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  2. Hi Karol,

    I share your concern and am pondering about writing a script to pull out the data regularly. There is no API for that, but the Atom feeds are pretty OK.

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  3. Probably, unless someone steps forward and sponsors them, they will disappear. If they are successful there would be a strong incentive for someone to sponsor the website.

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  4. Thanks for sharing this resource! I like the reputation component of stockoverflow.

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