The benefits of such a site would be as follows:
- Best questions and answers are voted up by the community, flowing to the top of the page
- People with best questions and best answers gain reputation, which is visible along with the question/answer
- Would bring together computational neuroscientists that have expertise in a wide range of comp. neuro. software and methods
- Would be very useful for new crops of undergraduate and graduate students to ask beginner questions
- If made using the StackOverflow platform, the site would be free including hosting, upgrades, server maintenance, bandwidth, etc..., and all content would be Creative Commons licensed
- Would have an option to convert some posts to "Wiki" entries that are editable by the community. Note NEURON-Wiki has been discussed here.
- Over time, outdated answers can be updated by community members with sufficient reputation
- Programmers of just about any language have such a site. Much of comp. neuro. work is very similar to programming.
- There already are such sites for Physics, Mathematics, Cognitive Sciences, Biology, Rasberry PI, and Wolfram Mathematica
- As far as I know, there is nothing like it for Computational Neuroscience software tools and methods
- The Cognitive Sciences site is the closest to it, however, it seems that some senior members of the site feel that questions about comp. neuro. software are off topic
http://area51.stackexchange.com/proposa ... SbKQXb0zg2
I've posted some example questions that members could ask on the site (you can post your own as well), and you can vote them up/down as to whether those types of questions would be within scope of such site. If enough people show their support on the proposal page, StackOverflow platform will create such a site for us free of charge.
Overall, I feel that it would have a net-positive effect on our community.
What are your thoughts?