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.
Make proposed community tags mandatory
Every question in the Incubator Q&A category should have 1 or more tags for a proposed community, so that it is clear which community or communities the question is intended for.
Currently it is possible to add a question without adding a proposed community tag. Could the presence of such a tag be made mandatory, in the same way as the mandatory tags on Codidact's Meta categories must have at least 1 applied?
The Codidact Proposals Meta category also does not have any mandatory tags, unlike other Codidact communities' Meta catagories. Should this also be changed?
3 answers
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I agree - the obvious candidate for these mandatory "community" tags are those listed for each community below "Descriptions".
The "community" tags should be optional on meta, since posts here might also be about this site in itself (like for example this very question).
Maybe we can also make these tags stand out by giving them a unique color? Similar to how the "feature-request" is colored dark blue in this meta post.
I also agree that this meta should enforce the usual mandatory tags "feature-request", "support", "discussion", "bug". Maybe there is a reason why they aren't mandatory?
I've added a new close reason:
community not specified
This question is missing a tag for an active community proposal. If the proposal this question is part of exists, please add the tag and the question can be reopened. If the proposal does not yet exist, please start an entry in the Descriptions category to describe the intended community. Descriptions can be fleshed out over time.
I did this instead of setting up required tags for two reasons. First, the list of community tags is already a little long and is expected to grow, so this could get cumbersome in the UI. Second, if somebody does intend to propose a community and ask some questions for it, I don't want to get too picky about order of operations so long as the description gets written reasonably soon. A closed question -- as opposed to a question you haven't been able to ask yet -- might even motivate someone to write that description, after which the question can be reopened.
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I disagree. We should allow people to ask questions that don't fall under any existing proposal.
- Proposal tags can always be added later, it's easy to do even in bulk (especially if an API is implemented).
- Proposals are easier to compose when you already have a bunch of existing questions that would fall under your proposal.
- Requiring this would not stop people from asking oddball questions, it would instead encourage one-off, poorly thought out proposal that clutter up the proposals list (this would be less of a problem if the proposal UX was improved, such as by adding the ability to rank proposals by activity/interest). Since the person is mainly interested in getting a question answered, not creating a proposal (which takes a lot more thought) it's logical to expect that they would put only the minimum effort in for creating a proposal to make the mods stop harassing them. The user community gains little from this pointless ritual.
- Nobody is going to die or abandon this site because there's a few untagged questions. It will actually encourage more participation, especially at the current low-activity phase, by removing barriers to exchange of knowledge and mutual learning.
- The incubator is always going to be big hodge podge of questions because it mixes many proposals together. When one proposal accumulates too many questions it's supposed to be promoted into a full site, removing those from the incubator. The proposal-less questions are really making things significantly worse.
- Having one place for off-topic questions means all the other sites accumulate much fewer barely on-topic questions. People don't need to stretch the definition of scope if they can just go to this other place where everything is in-scope.
Also, I was one of the people who asked for an incubator section where real questions could be asked and answered, in contrast to StackExchange's Area51 that only allowed example question titles but not descriptions or answers. I won't take credit for it, because I wasn't the only one asking, as I recall admins shared that this was something that they had also thought about previously, and I didn't actually implement any of the code. But I did post some arguments in favor. From the very beginning, I tried to frame it as not just a test bed for proposals but also a space for free form discussion on topics that are not worth creating a proposal to cover them.
In my opinion the incubator has a dual purpose: To showcase example Q/A for existing proposals, but also to provide a space for "off-topic" questions that don't fall under any existing proposal, and perhaps never will be on account of them being esoteric. I think this dual purpose is a valuable thing, it stands to seriously boost the growth of this site and benefit its users, and it is not doing any great harm (we can already easily filter by tags - maybe the devs can add a "questions with a proposal tag only" filter). It would be disappointing if the decision was made to negate this dual purpose. The goal of this site should be first to serve the community of askers and answerers, not to expand its bureaucracy to meet the needs of its expanding bureaucracy.
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