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.
Where to put proposal-community-specific help pages?
In a Codidact community there are community-specific help pages, reflecting the fact that each community is different. Over time these help pages can be modified in response to discussions on Meta. However, here on Proposals there is only one help section, shared between many proposed communities.
Ideally, part of preparing a proposed community would be settling on what its help pages should contain, so that when it is ready to be self contained it does not need to start with the default help pages. Having its own community-specific help pages will also help during the proposal stage, so that users can better understand the emerging community that they are shaping.
How should we provide a place for community-specific help pages?
1 answer
What works out pretty ok with the tools we have, is to make a separate meta thread per help page. Example from when we started up Software Development: Community feedback: What type of questions can I ask here?
That is:
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Make a meta thread here tagged [site proposal main tag], [help-pages], [discussion] plus other relevant tags.
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Include a draft for the help page in the question.
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Include some manner of "rules for posting here" like I did in the example, in order to encourage high quality answers:
Please give feedback on specific items in the list that you agree or don't agree with and post a proposed change, so that the community can vote agree/disagree with your answer. This includes change of wording etc. If something is missing that you feel should be added to either on-topic or off-topic, please propose that too.
In order to label something "community consensus", we should preferably have a strong majority for/against. (Voting on this particular question here is kind of meaningless, please vote on answers.)
One item at a time please! Don't hesitate to post several answers.
Maybe we can eventually streamline guidance for this with a default template text.
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Let the post sit on meta for a couple of weeks at least.
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Someone who is either one of the active founders of the new site or a proposals.codidact mod may then review all answers and assemble a help page based on votes. (Maybe items with +3 or +5 score and not too many down votes.) Then either post a new draft if it needs to be iterated further, or post a complete help page once the proposal is launched.
Advantages:
- Highly democratic and easy to determine consensus by checking votes. We tend to like community-driven things around here :) It works much better than for example a community wiki where one person can unilaterally edit anything at a whim without prior discussion or consensus.
- Easy to follow separate discussions as they will be categorized as per each answer posted.
Disadvantages:
- Hard to get an overview of the work in progress.
- Somewhat subjective to assemble and with a risk of mistakes as there's a lot of manual copy/paste and editing.
I think this way of working through Q&A could probably be improved a lot by a moderator or other suitable person making each answer as "status complete - added YYMMDD", then edit and update the draft in the question itself. Then the meta thread can live on for a long while as long as someone actively maintains it.
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