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proposal: advance Worldbuilding and merge with Scientific Speculation
We'd like to discuss advancing the proposed worldbuilding community and merging it with Scientific Speculation. A discussion on Sci Spec meta was positive (see also this comment thread on the proposal).
Specifically, if both communities agree, we would:
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Create a community (name discussion below)
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Set up URL redirection for existing Sci Spec links
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Create the following categories (discussion below)
- General (questions, articles)
- Science Only (questions, articles)
- Workshop (articles)
- Meta (questions, as usual)
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Add a
rigorous-sciencetag to all questions in the Sci Spec Rigorous Science category and create a tag description based on the help for rigorous science questions -
Move posts from Sci Spec's Q&A and Rigorous Science categories into the new Science Only category
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Move worldbuilding Incubator questions to the General category (and move meta questions as appropriate)
I am cross-posting this proposal on Scientific Speculation and Proposals to try to reach all interested parties. If there's opposition to either, we'll stop and adjust.
Name and scope
"Worldbuilding" is an established term that seems to cover what this proposal is about. Scientific Speculation was originally created as a subset of the broader worldbuilding space -- people wanted just the science, not the magic. The name was inspired in part by the field of speculative fiction. Scientific Speculation has gotten some questions from people who are looking for information but are not actually building fictional worlds, and I assume such questions are still in scope. Scope details are up to the community and can be modified over time; I'm raising this now in case anybody thinks the name "worldbuilding" would deter types of questions that the community wants.
Two main categories
For most of our communities, the main category is called "Q&A". Here there would be two main categories, so we're looking for a name for the one that isn't restricted. Y'all worldbuilders are more creative than I am, so if you have a better idea than "General", please speak up. We prefer shorter names so the category row doesn't look terrible on smaller devices. ("Science Only" would render as two lines on a phone, most likely.)
I'm proposing that the first two categories support both Q&A and articles. Sharing information, as opposed to asking questions, has already come up on Scientific Speculation. I think we should help people share knowledge without having to manufacture a question first, if that makes more sense in context. Some of our communities separate articles/papers/resources into their own categories, but for Worldbuilding, I think it's better to mingle. More categories make things harder to notice, and if you're looking for information about stable orbits around binary stars, does it matter if some of the search results are answers and some are articles?
Question: should these categories also support the Wiki type for easier collaboration on shared resources, or just articles (and questions of course)?
Workshop
The Workshop category is a sandbox where people can refine ideas into questions that can be asked in the first two categories. Our Code Golf community has one, and the Worldbuilding community on SE had a "poor man's sandbox" on meta due to platform limitations there. The idea has been part of the worldbuilding proposal here from the beginning.
There's been some discussion of "exploration" questions (also on the Sci Spec link in the previous section). If we set up a sandbox, we will almost certainly get some creative exploration or brainstorming posts that never "graduate" to posts in the main categories. I think that's ok. It's pretty clear to me that a community that has creativity at its core is looking for this kind of space too, and we want to serve our communities as best we can. These discussions would be segregated from the main Q&A, people can provide feedback in comment threads (and threads make that not terrible), and new comments don't bump posts or light up the silver dot.
I would suggest not having votes in this category affect reputation (in either direction). It's a workshop or sandbox, not finished work.
Next steps
We've done our best to interpret past discussions (and voting on them) in creating this proposal. How'd we do? Would advancing this proposal as described here meet the needs of both worldbuilders and the existing Scientific Speculation community? (If so we'll have some followup questions.)
2 answers
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Workshop
A comment thread on the Sci Spec post points out that "workshop" has been used in some discussions to refer to two different things:
- a sandbox where you develop a question before posting it in Q&A
- developing broader ideas or compiling resources, such as with a wiki ("exploration" posts)
When I proposed the Workshop category here I was thinking of the former. Does the community want to support both concepts? Together or in separate categories? I think there's solid support for the sandbox idea; what about the other?
0 comment threads
Categories
The voting on this post and its crosspost on Scientific Speculation has been positive. The only other feedback so far has been on Sci Spec. An answer there pushed back on the idea of segregating the science questions:
I'm not sold on this category split, though. If two "main" categories are needed, I'd think that it's the "rigourous science" that should be split out, while informal speculative musing (other sci-spec) shares space with pure imagination (worldbuilding), differentiated by tags.
But actually I'm not sold that world-building entails throwing rigour away. Someone might want to know what happens in the real-world in a particular situation, specifically with an eye towards writing about it in a fictional context. And strict logical reasoning can be applied to counterfactual premises ("what if XYZ fundamental constant were different?"), although there may be limits to how far that can be taken. I'd propose starting with a General category and seeing whether tags are sufficient, first.
Scientific Speculation spun off from Worldbuilding (on SE) originally because people wanted to exclude magic, for which the answer is often "it's magic; you can make it do whatever you want". But we have filters here, so a tag-based approach could work. I asked the Sci Spec community for feedback but haven't received any so far.
What if we had a single (general) Q&A category, like most communities here, and added a "topic tag" for science-only (no magic)? A topic tag is styled differently; the tags for individual proposals here are examples. They're still tags, so you can filter based on them, but they also stand out a bit, which could help with the problem that Sci Spec set out to address.
If we do this, then
- Move posts from Sci Spec's Q&A and Rigorous Science categories into the new Science Only category
would instead become:
- Tag posts from Sci Spec's Q&A and Rigorous Science categories with "science-only" and then move them into the Q&A category.
The new community would thus have just three categories: Q&A, Meta, and Workshop.
Feedback? (I'll post a similar answer over there too, to make sure we're reaching all the affected people.)
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