Comments on New Category ideas
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New Category ideas
Electrical Engineering has a Papers category, for writing short articles of original work, which I for one think is a great idea.
Similar to such a category would be a 'paper review' category, where people could review and explain published papers and preprints.
What are people's thoughts on such categories?
Are there other categories that could be useful to have?
Something different would be a 'problems' category, where people post physics problems for others to solve or even a category where people post their solutions to problems, looking for feedback about their approach.
I could suggest each category in a separate post, but I'm going for more of a discussion here, looking for people's ideas about what sort of things they want, over a load of individual suggestions.
Post
The Papers Category
I don't think the "Papers" category would work well for physics. It would get a lot of spam, and I think it would be much more limited in usefulness than the one on Electrical Engineering.
The Problems Category
The "Problems" category might potentially be useful because it would separate out homework-like questions. We get a lot of those on Physics Stack Exchange, and they can get annoying. It would be nice to put them in a separate place.
Even if we did create this category, though, I think we should mostly continue the Physics Stack Exchange policy toward homework-like questions. The OP should demonstrate that they made an effort to solve the question, and answers should focus on the general techniques for solving those types of questions, rather than on the specifics of an individual problem. Otherwise, we'll get tons of questions where people just post a homework problem verbatim.
The Paper Review Category
I kind of like this idea. It could be a way to differentiate this site from Physics Stack Exchange. I also think it could be very useful. When I read physics papers, I often get stuck understanding a particular point, and then eventually figure it out. It would be nice to have a place to post my explanations so that they could be used by people who encounter the same problem in the future.
Textbook Explanation Category?
Along similar lines, it would be nice to have a place to post explanations of difficult parts of physics textbooks. For example, I took notes on the parts of Peskin & Schroeder that I struggled with, and I often reference those notes in answering questions on Physics Stack Exchange.
Maybe, for organizational purposes, each textbook chapter could be a question, and people could post explanations of the parts of the chapter that they found difficult (e.g. a missing steps in a derivation, confusing wording, difficult concept) as answers.
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