Community Profile

Welcome to WTF Science! This is a community that is designed to encourage popular understanding of and appreciation for science by nonscientists and scientists alike. It is a place to showcase your own research, interesting information about science that you recently discovered, or to share your own passions with an interested audience. Hopefully, this will be a place where we can all learn about disciplines, and maybe even refine our own ideas and research.

We encourage posting about both physical and social sciences.

Anyone can post to the community, but all posts will be moderated before they are posted, and specific guidelines must be followed in order for your post to be approved.

Post Guidelines

1) Posts must discuss an interesting aspect of science -- don't just post a picture looking for an "oh, cool" reaction -- teach us something. Tell us about an animal's niche and evolutionary history, or the atmospheric science behind an interesting cloud formation.

2) Your post should be written in a style that is easily accessible to someone outside of your field! That means that if you're going to use technical jargon, you must define it first, and you must clarify concepts that might not be obvious.

3) If you are highlighting your own research, it must have been published in a peer reviewed journal. While it might be cool to talk about your ongoing research, there are a lot of nasty issues that could come out of making your ideas public before they go through a peer-review process, so save the discussion for your lab, not the internet.

4) Citation of information is strongly encouraged so that people who are interested can go out and discover more! We're not requiring anything terribly rigorous, but if half of the information in your post came from Jones et al. 2004, that might be nice to know. These citations don't have to be academic in nature, blog posts, detailed wiki articles and popular scientific articles are all fine -- just give people an avenue to start finding out more.

5) Question posts are encouraged to a certain degree. These posts should be geared towards questions like "what causes a specific natural phenomenon?" Simple identification questions will be rejected out of hand -- there are lots of communities geared towards identifying unique mammals, reptiles, fish, etc. and this is not one of them. Of course, once you've found out that the weird bug in your backyard was, feel free to ask us about its feeding habits and niche space.

6) Tag all posts. You may add tags, but these may be changed based on the moderators' discretion. In order for a post to be approved, it must be tagged with at least one of the following tags: biology, chemistry, physics, anthropology, sociology, psychology, geology, astronomy or linguistics. This will allow the appropriate moderator to review your post so that we can maintain high quality across disciplines. If your post encompasses more than one discipline, use more than one tag to describe it -- for example, tag biochemistry posts with both "biology" and "chemistry."

7) Long blocks of text (more than six sentences) should be under a cut as should large images (more than 400 pixels wide) and multiple images.

Discussion Guidelines

The primary focus of comments should be discussion. That being said, we don't mind posts along the lines of "Oh, cool, I didn't know that," because they make us happy. However, uncivil discussion is unacceptable. Academic criticism of a post is one thing, but personal flames, insults, etc. will not be tolerated. You will be warned once, and then permanently banned from the community.

Moderators

This community is currently accepting applications for moderators! The following disciplines need a moderator:

Chemistry, physics, anthropology, sociology, psychology, geology, astronomy, linguistics, microbiology and biochemistry

To apply for a moderator position, either send a private message to crumpetsfortea or an email to crumpetsfortea@livejournal.com. Include your LJ username, the discipline for which you are applying, your specialization within that discipline, the amount of experience you have within that discipline (it need not be extensive, but should be enough that you can sort out obviously bad research) and an estimate of the amount of time you can dedicate to moderation duties per week (we won't hold you too tightly to this).

If you wish to suggest a new discipline to be added to the community, and are willing to moderate posts in that discipline, send the same information along with the name of the discipline you want included. So long as it falls within the domain of science, rather than art, it will be approved.

Posts addressing topics that cannot be addressed by empirical science do not belong in this community. This includes topics like spirituality, creationism, intelligent design and cryptozoology. There are better forums for those discussions.

Your Friendly Mods

Biology: crumpetsfortea (parasitology, paleontology, herpetology, zoology, evolutionary biology), synthesize (embryology, developmental biology, genetics, reproductive biology and medicine, evolutionary biology), rayerai (reproductive biology, vertebrate physiology), droserary (microbiology, botany)

Chemistry: rayerai

Physics: None

Anthropology: None

Sociology: None

Psychology: madamecacoon (all fields of psychology with a special interest in abnormal and social psychology)

Geology: crumpetsfortea (paleontology, sedimentology and stratigraphy)

Astronomy: None

Linguistics: None

Community Maintainer

crumpetsfortea: Direct all of your complaints here, not to the mods, who are nice people and don't deserve that.