Should we try to encourage users of BH.SE and †.SE to also participate on the other site?
I've noticed one active BH.SE user trying to recruit people from here (or that's how I've interpreted it). IMO these two sites shouldn't be competing for users. So giving hints about the other site might be a good practice. On the other hand, I'd hope for the participation to go both ways.
Should all of us here become active on BH.SE, too? How can we get BH.SE people to participate here? Should we try?
Cards on the table: I've never been a fan of the idea of this site and I would really like to see the Biblical Hermeneutics site succeed.
So why did I come over and "recruit" from Christianity.SE? To be honest, I became interested because of the excellent participants in Biblical Hermeneutics who also participate here. My uniformed guess was that this site would be uninteresting to me yet the cross-pollination from here made me second-guess that assumption. So I started reading through the questions on this site. None of them were interesting enough to answer, which is not a condemnation of you all, but a reflection of my interests. It's not the site for me.
However, some of the questions would work equally well on Biblical Hermeneutics and I made, what I intended to be informative and non-confrontational, comments about them pointing out the existence of another place to ask. Since they were interpreted as something else, I went ahead and removed them (except one that adds a link to a specific question that does add value I believe). I apologize for the offense. Please let me know if there's anything else I can do to atone for my indiscretion.
Personally, I think the two sites can compliment each other well, but they do not overlap. To explain why, let me share an anecdote: a few weeks ago, I realized that the best answers to my questions were from a Jewish perspective. When it comes to the Old Testament, you just can't beat an interpretation that comes from the Talmudic hermeneutical tradition. (At least for a first cut of what it meant prior to Jesus.) So I wrote an appeal to the Judaism site for people over there to take a look at what we are doing. There were two responses:
Some people did answer a few questions.
The biggest point of resistance was the site was perceived as Christian and not neutral.
So a site named "Christianity" won't work for a neutral, cross-doctrinal question about the Bible. Some of the top scholars in fields like textual criticism and historical criticism are not only non-Christian, but atheists. They won't come here and you probably don't want them anyway. That's just reality. (They may not come to Biblical Hermeneutics either, but that's not your problem.)
Believe it or not, this is not a zero-sum game. If a user participates at Biblical Hermeneutics, they are more likely to participate here, not less. I don't want to see Christianity.SE fail now that it has been started if only because it would be detrimental to the site I really care about. Of course, if we start to get territorial about questions that are in the "grey area" we can make it a zero-sum game (which Biblical Hermeneutics is sure to lose). There have been few questions asked there that would be on-topic here, but that is surely because there are few questions on BH at all. I suspect that many of the exegesis question here would be right at home on the hermeneutics site. (And I've provided an answer to one of the questions that apparently started off on BH.SE, though I only saw it today.)
I don't have an answer to the question since I have little stake in what goes on here, but in my mind, the ball is entirely in your (plural) court. Feel free to ping me in the comments to this answer if you would like any help from me.
I'm torn on this. On the one hand, we want more experts here on C.SE and over at BH.SE there seems to be a ready pool of experts who are already familiar with the SE format. We'd be daft not to make that our first port of call in our efforts to attract experts here.
On the other hand, it's not as if the folks at BH.SE aren't aware of C.SE; some quotes from meta posts there:
I've not spent much time at Christianity.SE to be very familiar with its goals
In short, I doubt we'd be able to persuade (m)any BH.SE users that aren't already active here to become so.
Regarding Jon Ericson's behaviour, I find it distasteful. Both sites have agreed that there is some overlap in scope, and I don't think it is right for every question that falls into that grey area to receive a "hey, don't listen to these guys, come and ask us instead" comment. None of those examples are off topic here, and that behaviour does nothing for building a healthy inter-site relationship.
Having said that, I'm sure a meta post on both sites asking "If you contribute here but not there, why?" would make interesting reading and useful insight as to how we can make both sites more attractive to our target audiences.
