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Meta How can Worldbuilding support more open-ended questions?

Let's create a separate category called something like "Exploration" (please improve this name!) with the following properties: A category description that explains what this is for as distinc...

posted 1d ago by Monica Cellio‭

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#1: Initial revision by user avatar Monica Cellio‭ · 2024-12-26T16:47:26Z (1 day ago)
Let's create a separate category called something like "Exploration" (please improve this name!) with the following properties:

- 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).

- Same tag set as Q&A (the topics will be the same; the difference is the nature of the posts).

- Supported post types: just Q&A -- you're fundamanetally asking for feedback or input, not writing an essay.

- No reputation.

- (Probably) no reactions.

- 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.