This is done. See: This site is now Writing
Back when Writers was created, the convention on Stack Exchange was to name sites for their audiences -- Programmers, Super User, Webmasters, Database Administrators... and Writers. Over time, the convention has shifted to describing the subject matter -- History (not Historians), Photography (not Photographers), Software Engineering, Project Management, Cryptography, Parenting... the list goes on.
I've been wondering if we should ask for a small change to our name, from Writers to Writing. This is for a couple reasons:
Anecdotally, "Writers" conveys aspiring novelists to many people. While that's an important part of our scope, our scope is broader than that, and people aren't always seeing it.
Many of the off-topic questions we get are asking for critiques, plot ideas, and general discussion -- the kinds of activities that take place in writers' groups/circles.
Really, we're about the product and the processes to get there, not personal identity. We want novels, poets, and essayists, and we also want scientists (who write papers), marketers (who write, e.g., brochures), software developers (who write technical documents), etc too. By and large we aren't getting those people.
In comments, Mark Baker brought up the idea of a bigger change -- instead of trying to succinctly describe our scope in a word or two, maybe we can find an "evocative" name along the lines of Seasoned Advice (cooking).
Either way, I feel we should do something. I've talked with technical writers who had no idea that anything other than fiction is on-topic here. (This is also part of why I want to adjust our short blurb; that alone won't make the difference, but it will help.) I don't have much contact with scientific and academic writers, but I suspect their impressions are similar.
We've been in beta for a long time without growing (though we're stable), and part of the non-growth is that people with other writing problems who don't necessarily see themselves as "writers" don't come here.
Regardless of what we name the site, the front page will usually be dominated by fiction. That's fine; fiction is popular, after all, and we want people to bring their (on-topic) questions about writing fiction here. We also need to be more active in putting questions that don't work on hold (and fixing and reopening them when possible). There's other site-promotion stuff we need to do better.
But, all that said... is our name part of the problem here? If so, can we fix it?
I proposed Writers -> Writing because it's small but still significant. There might be a better (bigger) change -- please propose those too.
SE has renamed sites before, so it's possible with support from the affected community.
What do y'all think?