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Welcome to the staging ground for new communities! Each proposal has a description in the "Descriptions" category and a body of questions and answers in "Incubator Q&A". You can ask questions (and get answers, we hope!) right away, and start new proposals.

Are you here to participate in a specific proposal? Click on the proposal tag (with the dark outline) to see only posts about that proposal and not all of the others that are in progress. Tags are at the bottom of each post.

Comments on Allowed types of questions for Worldbuilding

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Allowed types of questions for Worldbuilding

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−3

I like the proposal text and have actually very little to add. Should be a solid starting ground.

One concern I have is the general thing with "malformed questions".

I strongly advocate for not having a strict policy of "ask your question correctly or it gets closed". I would like to emphasize to focus on the "intent" of a question and ask back if there is something unclear. Also of course, creative questions, brainstorming etc. are welcomed (maybe with some focus recommendations like in Creative Challenges).

Thus, either such questions are handled directly inside the input queue or there should definitely be a sandbox for it.

Also see my posting on Proposals:Meta "Can I ask Worldbuilding questions here?", where I have laid out that thought in more detail (especially in the answer to that question).

discussion worldbuilding
posted 3 months ago
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Antares‭
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Downvotes absolute DO mean something! (4 comments)
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+3
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not having a strict policy of "ask your question correctly or it gets closed"

This doesn't work well in a Q&A format, as opposed to a more traditional threaded discussion. These sites and the Codidact software are for the former.

Experience here and Elsewhere has shown that attempting to community-fix bad questions in a Q&A format creates a lot of noise that most users don't want to see.

Quality is important. A site with 1000 questions of which 200 the users actually want to see is far worse than a site with just 200 good questions. To get there, noise-generators need to be culled and dispensed with quickly and ruthlessly.

posted 3 months ago
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Olin Lathrop‭
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Sandbox then? (4 comments)
Sandbox then?
Antares‭ wrote 3 months ago · edited 3 months ago
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I see your answer as constructive input (thank you!) - although I am of a different attitude towards "bad" questions.

I totally agree that in the end you want to have a corpus of well written questions with a topic that can be answered in a Worldbuilding context. I also agree on the point of "noise" for the main readers of the site-to-be. These are important points to consider (thanks for the feedback/emphasis!)

I am a strong advocate of community-helps-community in the sense of, I do not want to offload all responsibility for a question to the user. I also want to help them formulate the question in a way that they are useful for both sides. This needs tight involvement of the querer otherwise the question just gets abandoned.

Thus I conclude, you would favor the sandbox approach? I think this would combine the best of everything. Do you have ideas/concerns towards that?

celtschk‭ wrote 2 months ago · edited 2 months ago
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There's already the precedent of a sandbox system in the code golf community. There the sandbox is simply another category, and challenges are supposed to be copied to the main category when they are mature enough. However the system relies very much on users following the policy voluntarily; it probably would need to get software support to work on more general sites, especially if it is supposed to be used by beginners.

Antares‭ wrote 2 months ago · edited 2 months ago
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I don't see a problem in making it an "implicit rule" (of course presented somewhere accessible). If a question needing improvements show up in the "Q&A corpus" there can be helpful comments made about that the sandbox is a better fit right now. The post could be moved to the sandbox by mods for example easily, wouldn't it?

celtschk‭ wrote 2 months ago
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I don't think moving posts between categories is currently supported by the software. If the moderators copy the post to the sandbox by hand, the sandbox post appears to be written by themselves, and of course the original post in the Q&A section won't be gone anyway.