Sports.SE and F&N.SE should be merged

Question

Since its inception Sports.SE has been almost completely redundant with F&N.SE. A huge number of questions that have been asked on Sports.SE are on topic either on F&N or on another stack. Because of this redundancy the expertise of the community is split and we either have to stay content with overlap or accept some kind of artificial division of scope. This has been a repeated topic on our meta.

I suggest that we merge Sports.SE and F&N into a new super site for sports, fitness and athletes of all stripes.

• F&N has already cut most nutrition questions out of their scope so dropping nutrition from the title would not be an issue to them (they’ve already wanted to do this anyways).

• The previous opposition to this merger has been rendered null by the combination of all sports proposals from Area51 into this site.

• Consolidating the community around all physical activity will lead to better expert participation and will be much more likely to produce a viable site (which was a primary concern in the merge of all sporting proposals).

• Currently a single tag, running, is close to 20% of the content on Sports.SE and does not contain a single question that is off topic on F&N.

• While there are some questions that are currently on topic for Sports.SE and off topic for F&N this is a somewhat arbitrary division and with a slight expansion of scope a new Fitness&Sport site could house nearly all questions from both sites with very little being off topic.

• SE already believes a site dedicated to rules and minutia of sports cannot succeed (this was cited as a primary motivation for the sports mergers), so why not make it a miniscule part of another site rather than a larger chunk of a small site.

• This should clear up scope confusion on both sites.

  • Fitness has perception issues they are seen as a site for workout buffs and not a site for athletic training. And our comments on this site tend to support that notion. This is primarily an issue with the title not the scope. They are currently trying to clean up the site to fix some of the other perception issues.

  • The only part of Sports.SE that will likely be left in the lurch is the part that deals with fandom. However I don’t think this is a real issue for the following reasons

    • Rules questions are inherently relevant to the participants of the sports.
    • Questions on advanced metrics can be relevant to participants and are certainly relevant to the business side of sports which should be covered in the scope.
    • Questions about things like fantasy sports, trivia and other fan activities (like watching sports, visiting venues etc) are still a question that will have to be dealt with, but it makes for far fewer scope issues than either site currently has.

This merger makes sense and without it both sites are going to continue to have the same issues they currently have. Issues I believe are hurting both sites. Sports.SE’s existence continues the perception issues Fitness is struggling with and there is no sense in having two sites with the same scope without some kind of distinction that goes beyond the arbitrary and confusing guidelines that are currently in place.

Answer 1

I think this is a good idea. "Sports and Fitness" or "Fitness and Sports" is a good solid scope with nutrition allowed peripherally only as it relates to athletic performance.

Nutrition without a strict scope limit will get a ton of junk questions unless you can get a strong nutrition expert community onto it. There's a lot of sports and/or fitness people that know enough about nutrition to give answers related to losing weight or improving athletic performance, but that probably doesn't overlap much with general nutrition expertise. Nutrition should be its own site.

To give an example for a sport that already has a fully-launched site of its own:

Let's say I'm a cyclist. There's either a big organized ride (endurance, hard to finish at all) or maybe a race. Assuming a typical mixed-terrain ride, if I want to improve my speed on that I can:

• Improve various aspects of my cycling technique (improve pedaling technique, improve techniques for cornering and braking so I can go down hills faster, etc etc)
• For races, there's various things related to rules. Some races have drafting, some it's forbidden, and there's likely rules around it either way.
• Change my "fit" on the bike (move saddle, bars, etc)
• Lose weight
• Build leg strength
• Build endurance
• Work on lactate threshold
• Build core strength
• Improve flexibility
• Make a variety of equipment changes that don't change my positioning (lighter bike, more aerodynamic bike, smoother rolling wheels, various drivetrain changes)
• Make equipment changes that require more core strength and flexibility (lower handlebars)

All those things work together. Closely together. It's common in cycling to talk about "watts per kilogram" because that's really the key performance metric. Good climbers have a very high watt to kilogram ratio, while good sprinters have a good wattage (basically). And fitting to a more aerodynamic position requires flexibility and strength.

Talking about any one of those things in isolation would be useless. If I improve my power output by 1% and put on 2% weight doing it, I'll do 1% worse not 1% better. A site where all of those things are in scope seems right.

If my goal is to get over that hill as fast as possible, the answers might be the same whether it's part of a race, an organized ride, a casual ride with friends, competing against the times other people have recorded on Strava or me competing against my own best time.

And the answers for handling a long ride will have a ton of overlap, whether it's a competitive endurance event, or just a weekend fun ride with no competition.

However, if it is a race, there may be rules that affect what choices I can make. There's all sorts of equipment limitations in the different types of bicycle racing.

When I'm looking for a place to ask questions about improving my performance, I don't want to have to know whether changing what I eat, equipment changes or specific exercises are my best chance to improve before even asking the question. A single site where I can ask and get answers that cover either or both is great.

Obviously for my actual example, all of that would be allowed on Bicycles.SE. But what about another sport?

For many athletic activities, there's an interlocking overlap between improving your overall fitness, specific fitness targets, equipment, food, hydration, rules, conventions and history.

Answer 2

Fitness - as it exists today - isn't a site for sports

We tend to close proposals as duplicates of existing sites when they stand to cover topics already well-covered by those sites - that is, the proposed topic can be considered a subset of a larger field.

This wasn't true of Sports and Fitness. Yes, the sites share some common ground, but a quick glance at the questions proposed - and now asked - for Sports shows little overlap with what exists on Fitness. Even the running questions you cite have a rather different focus here than they do on Fitness, which raises the question: if they've been on-topic for the past year, why weren't they asked?

The reports of your death have been greatly exaggerated

We tend to merge sites when one of them is struggling, and would benefit from the larger ecosystem offered on the other site.

It's entirely too early to make that call here. Sports has been in beta for barely two weeks; public beta for just over a week. It did well enough to make it past the private beta - that's a good sign! But the bulk of the effort still remains: the scope needs to be defined, honed, enforced, the community grown, and knowledge on the myriad subjects compiled. Merging won't do anything to make this happen faster - indeed, it would more likely prove to be a distraction.

So focus on making this site work. If that doesn't pan out, if we end up needing to shut it down... Then we'll evaluate salvage options.

But let's not give up just yet...