Mass Spectrometry has recently been proposed in the Science section on Area 51 by Chris Herold, the president of MSACL (Mass Spectrometry & Advances in the Clinical Lab). I have no affiliation with this association (aside from occasionally listening to their webinars and podcast), but I'd like to inform those who are interested in MS and discuss whether establishing the new dedicated SE site for analytical technique is justified and probably have some barebone ideas how it should be shaped from its main users likely found on Chemistry.SE.
Why am I writing this?
Chemistry.SE definitely has interested and competent users. At the moment of writing (Q1 2022) we have over two hundred mass-spectrometry questions and only about every fifth of them remains unanswered.
We lack narrowed-down and distinctive tags like electrospray-ionization
, orbitrap
or even liquid-chromatography
— not because we don't want them, but because we target broader audience by design.
Having a broader selection of specific tags isn't crucial because of full-text search (duh!), but might help to structure and analyze relevant Q&As faster.
As big Chemistry.SE is (well, not really, but still we are now 4th among Science-oriented SE sites :)), externalizing MS is likely going to attract more specialists from the field, as it happened with Matter Modelling, especially considering the network Chris is likely to bring alongside and, hopefully, maintain.
Are there any further ideas and proposals from the chemistry community?