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How can Worldbuilding support more open-ended questions?
The Worldbuilding proposal has some "conventional" questions and some that are more open-ended or even "idea generation". This happened in the SE Worldbuilding community too, and the latter got shut down as not fitting the stricter Q&A format. And on most communities that's probably the right call, but... worldbuilders are a creative lot, the subject inherently involves a lot of exploration and brainstorming, and Codidact is not SE and we have better tools and can try new things.
This came up in an answer to Is this one fishing for ideas?, but I want to make a more direct proposal: for the Worldbuilding community here, let's support these kinds of questions in a way that does not interfere with conventional questions. Each community on our network should be (and can be) customized to meet its needs, even if that's not something you would do on some other communities here. How can we best support this for Worldbuilding?
I'll propose an answer, and I hope that others will do the same.
1 answer
Let's create a separate category called something like "Exploration" (please improve this name!) with the following properties:
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A category description that explains what this is for as distinct from Q&A, linking to a help topic that explains expectations in more detail (could be the community FAQ).
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Same tag set as Q&A (the topics will be the same; the difference is the nature of the posts).
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Supported post types: just Q&A -- you're fundamanetally asking for feedback or input, not writing an essay.
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No reputation.
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(Probably) no reactions.
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We can't customize close reasons per category yet, but I'd expect a culture of almost never closing exploration questions unless they are clearly off-topic for Worldbuilding.
A post in this category will probably spawn more specific, answerable questions in Q&A. That's great! That's one of the goals. When that happens, we should edit links into the top-level post for visibility (until we have a more formal way to handle related questions).
This isn't a sandbox like Code Golf has, but a sandbox is a place for "incipient Q&A" and this idea is kind of similar, though without the idea of a question "graduating" from the sandbox. An exploration post might spawn several questions, or none, depending on how things go for any particular thread. By separating them, we allow community members to focus on the kinds of activities they are most interested in at any given point in time.
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