If you require a lot of people with lots of reputation across the SO sites, doesn't that mean only programmers will be attracted? In order to get a proposal to beta, you need high rep users, while those are not always experts on the site you are creating.

Sure, you can try to attract lots of 1 rep new users from across the internet, but they will never match up with some high rep users that have been around a bit. So if you're trying to create a site that has nothing at all to do with computers (for that's what most people here are interested in), you can probably never get it past commitment phase. The current system will only spawn sites that programmers have at least some interest in, or take incredibly long for other sites.

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Please read this if you haven't yet: meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/53650/area-51-commit-percent -- I don't think this question is a duplicate of that, but it should give you a bit of an answer, at least. –  Jon Seigel Jul 22 '10 at 23:31
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1 Answer

Because the odds of people following through on the commitment is dramatically higher, the more reputation you have.

We have the stats to prove this, too. It is not a subtle effect.

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Jon Skeet is the exception that confirms the rule –  Andreas Bonini Jul 22 '10 at 23:55
That's fair I guess, but it's currently impossible for non-programmers/computergeeks to gain enough rep to make their commitment 'count', so they can prove themselves. –  Jouke van der Maas Jul 23 '10 at 9:31
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