We're going to upgrade the Help Center page, here is the 100,000-foot-view discussion of the what-we-cans and what-we-can'ts

Question

@HDE226868 has agreed to help us update the Help Center pages. I believe it's time for a fairly thorough review of what we want for the next stage in the Stack's lifespan. It's an opportunity we're not going to get very often. Consequently, the process will be intentionally time-consuming with each "phase" of the discussion taking 2-4 weeks.

This is the kick-off for the effort and I'd love to have as many of our users as we can join in. Heck, it might be against policy, but I have no problem suggesting that the following comment be pasted to questions and answers of users (arbitrarily) 10,000 rep and higher. (Others will see the link and join us, which is great! But we need to draw a line or we'll be posting this in millions of places.)

The Community is starting the process of updating our Tour and primary Help Center page. This will include policy decisions and it's a great opportunity to help us define the next stage of [worldbuilding.se]. Please join us at [this Meta page](https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/q/10334/40609) and share your thoughts. Thanks!

What is the 100,000 foot view?

• There are things we can't do.
• There are things we can do.
• There are things we can do if we're clever.

What can we edit?

We can edit...

1. Some of the Tour (it's not very flexible).
2. Some aspects of the front page (which is even less flexible).
3. The What topics can I ask about here? page.

Basically, we have one page to work with. The relevant movie quote is, "We've got to find a way to make this... fit into the hole for this... using nothing but that."

Request for High-Level Section Ideas

Today the "What topics can I ask about here?" page has the following general sections:

INTRODUCTION

• Who we serve.
• What "worldbuilding" means to us.
• What worldbuilding vs. storybuilding (one sentence).
• No character decisions here (specialized storybuilding).

ASKING QUESTIONS

• What, why, how, and research.
• Sample topics (really old question examples).
• Another we-don't-do-storybuilding sentence.
• How to ask about events.

SITE RESOURCES

• The Sandbox
• The Perfect Question checklist
• Real-World Questions
• More "how to ask about events"

THE SMALL PRINT

• Specific & answerable, good/bad subjective
• Flagging questions

My Proposed Goals...

1. At this point in time, everything is up for grabs. However, I believe it makes more sense to start from the top and work down. That page needs to be clean, clear, and preferably short. That means it's ultimately going to be a bullet list of concepts with brief statements and links to Meta pages that explain all the gory details.

2. Which means we need to be careful which rabbits to chase. We'll be compromising across a lot of opinions with the goal of setting up a help center page we can be proud of for the next 7-8 years. If any of us nudges another with a comment like, "that's a discussion for later," we need to be ready to take a step back.

Therefore, this first discussion is...

What are the high-level sections that this page should have including a description of their content and, if appropriate, examples?

Please post answers with ONE PROPOSED SECTION PER ANSWER. That way comment discussions can be focused. Remember, there are things we can do if we're clever, meaning the Help Center is authoritative so long as it links to the necessary policy pages, which I think also need to be looked at. But, one thing at a time.

One more thing. This is the first step in a somewhat complicated process. If you think this is the wrong first step, don't be shy... post and answer and explain why we should be focusing somewhere else first. I've been in business meetings where the first day was spent figuring out where to start. Relevant book quote, "A beginning is the time for taking the most delicate care that the balances are correct."

Answer 1

Creativity vs Science Lite

Somewhere in this discussion and definitely in the who we are / what we do sections, we really need to stress that worldbuilding is a creative endeavour and that we encourage questions that demonstrate creativity and also elicit creative responses.

We must stress that we are NOT physics.lite.se and that questions and answers do not have to couched in terms of real world science or follow the realist school.

Unfortunately, WB.SE has morphed quite a bit since its inception. To quote Separatrix from a recent response here:

WB has changed, a lot, several times. The stack I joined isn't the one you joined, I was already fading out as you became active. The stack as it is now isn't that one either. I miss the one I joined, but that's long gone. Fundamentally most of the questions when I started were either story based or opinion based requiring creative solutions. Everything is now much stricter, it's more about maths problems that can be solved, heading for "I can't be bothered to categorise this properly for another stack" questions rather than the considerably more creative place it used to be. (Separatrix)

I would like to focus on this aspect: story based or opinion based requiring creative solutions. This alone is why I joined and stayed and remained active. If this place continues on the path to convergence with the science forums and continues to push away the creative aspects of the art, then there's no longer any use for this forum.

Here is a good example question: Determining the qualities of a quill based on the qualities of the bird. This is a worldbuilding question that, as I read it, touches potentially on in world natural philosophy / science; in world folklore & culture; in world magic and underlying principles. In the comments we find many typically "science lite" complaints:

What makes you think flamingos eat microbes? Seeing as how these birds are nominally able to fly, why would you think their feathers would be different from those of other wading birds? (Eg. flamingos.)

Using quills for writing with ink on paper was a strictly European thing, limited in time from the Middle Ages to the Early Modern period. In the Antiquity, they used reed pens, and reed pens continued to be used in the Islamic world throughout the period when Christian Europe used feather quills. Goose, swan, and chicken quills worked just fine and were interchangeable. The only requirement was for the primary flight feathers to be large enough; even the feathers of large crows or ravens worked all right. There were no major material differences.

I guess that the difference between the Classical Antiquity and the Islamic world where they used reed pens on one hand, and Christian Europe where they used quill pens on the other, is the lack of suitable reeds in colder climates... For the same reason nobody has tried flamingo quills -- there are few place with flamingoes but no reeds.

It took me no time at all using Google to discover a great variety of bird primary feathers were used as quill pens and that Ostriches prove that a quill pen could be made from the primary feathers of a flightless bird. Research is mandatory.

Another query: Is there a way to offset the damage caused by breaking cosmic strings?

Cosmic string are nothing more than fictional objects devised by some people who cannot even agree on a way to verify their theories. You can build all and nothing on them.

Do you know that the amplitude of gravitational wave wanes quickly due to geometrical spreading but I will need to check if it also experiences attenuation.

These kinds of comments seem somewhat to considerably unhelpful in a creative sense. For the first question, we note that the OP did not ask for materials science or physics or biology; so we are not dealing with a sciency answer. If anything, the wording of some quality of the bird leads to a particular quality of the quill leads one naturally to consider a more esoteric, more philosophical answer. And since the OP is specifically not asking for a scientific answer, clearly, the answer needs to be more creative in nature. For the second question, the OP touches on highly theoretical things that may or may not exist and technologies we probably won't reach within the next millennium. But you know what, who cares!? It's science fiction! It's a creative endeavour!

These are questions of classic worldbuilding. The questions' wording and the expectations allude to a creative approach. Scientifically speaking, none of the fictional bird's description really has any bearing on what kind of quill can be made from it; for in the real world, I can make a quill pen out of any feather! For the other one, I doubt anyone has a clue what could really work in a situation like that.

Classic worldbuilding is, first and foremost, a creative endeavour. Comments about whether or not flamingos eat microbes is not only unhelpful, but also completely off the topic. Irrelevant. Comments focusing on where, geographically in the real world, quill pens were used are also unhelpful. Irrelevant. The only helpful comment was the one about research. Yes, research is mandatory, but this doesn't read as the kind of question where the OP needs to demonstrate a PhD in ornithology to ask a question about a fictional bird and the kind of quills that might be made from it.

If the OP were focused on microbes, then the question should be asked in BIOLOGY.SE; if the OP were focused on quill usage, then it should be asked in HISTORY.SE. But no, the OP asked here, in WB.SE, because a different kind of answer is needed. A more creative solution for a more creative query.

To that end, we really need to come to some sort of consensus on what "story based" means in this context, and also what "opinion based" means. And we also need to unshackle ourselves from becoming too rulebound. We are becoming SCIENCE.LITE.SE, and that is not where we should be!

Criticisms and Considerations: (to follow shortly...)

Answer 2

Story in questions

• Is storybuilding part of WBSE?
• can I ask about my story? (e.g. let people do a internal consistency check on my story)
• can I give story details to explain something in my question?
  you can give a "story goal" (e.g. how can my merfolk sink this ship) you want to achieve but you are missing the in world way to that goal.
• what can I do if my question was closed as "to story based"?

Goal of the section

My goal would be to have a section people can point to when discussing whether a question should be closed as "to story based" and also for new members to check the rules about this specific (and often controverse) topic before (or after) asking a question.

Answer 3

Worldbuilding Stack Resources

The Stack provides a number of resources to help you with your worldbuilding. Please consider reviewing these resources before asking a question.

• Worldbuilding Meta is where you can ask and learn about how Stack Exchange works, Stack policies, and Stack culture. You need one reputation point to enter Meta. Thus it is accessible to every registered account.

• We provide a list of worldbuilding resources with a large list of links to worldbuilding tools and help.

• We've created a checklist for new questions that is the best place to start before you ask your first question. We have also provided a catalog of question types that identify the types of question we answer and those we don't.

• We have a new question sandbox where you can test a question before posting it on Main. This is a great way to learn about how to ask questions and how Stack Exchange's rules and the Stack policies affect questions.

Answer 4

I don't have a formal write up for this, but I would like to see more specific resources for people with moderator privileges about what to do in common situations. We are given privileges, and there are instructions about their mechanics, but little training in their daily use. I think this leads to divergent ideas about how to use those privileges, something I am definitely guilty of.

I'll start with a sketch of one that's been on my mind.

How to vote-to-close constructively

I find it off-putting to see close votes for "Needs Details Or Clarity" or "Opinion Based" (always an odd one here) or "Needs More Focus" with no explanations. The questioner should have the opportunity to adjust their question, but how can they with only a vague idea what the problem is?

As much as we hope they would, people cannot be expected to study the Tour and Help Center before asking. And one can never assume the VTC reason is obvious. Rather than expecting people to know all the rules or read our minds, we should focus on correction and education.

This could include...

A linkable reference of common close reasons and their remedies

For each specific type of reason for closing, we could have a page discussing it, and suggestions for how the question could be fixed. VTCers would be encouraged to add a comment linking to the appropriate page.

This would be mentioned in the help pages about closing.

This could be as simple as specially tagged meta questions. For example, I frequently reference What is the XY Problem? on Stack Overflow.

This allows everyone to pool their efforts into building a collective reference of both very specific close reasons, and also their specific solutions. Rather than asking each VTCer to write a big explanation, they can link to the reference making it as easy as possible to provide clarity and instruction.

Answer 5

Site-Specific Policies

Every Stack is a little different. These differences are often reflected in the site's policies. Below is a short list of the most important policies. You can find a complete list by clicking here.

• We do not answer questions about 3rd party or commercial worlds. [1]

• We accept real-world questions with a worldbuilding context. [2], [5]

• We do not accept brainstorming or idea-generation questions. [3]

• We do not accept questions about character or organizational decisions or choices. [4]

• We allow answers that address problems with the question. Such answers are called Frame Challenges and must contain specific types of information to be valid.

• We do not accept questions presenting a seemingly small or minor change with a request for evaluations of broad consequences (e.g., "if Hitler died of pneumonia one year earlier, how would that have affected World War II?"). We call these high concept questions.

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NOTE: I'm using some existing policies (and two that aren't...) to demonstrate the proposed section. I expect some policies may change as a result of this effort. I believe the specifics of what should be here is a discussion for later.

Answer 6

Don't waste your time.

The Stack Exchange model of curation and moderation is predicated on small communities where the majority of members understand and share that community's rules and goals. Because of this, compliance is high, community participation in curation is high, and active moderation is rarely required since the community is self-policing.

As the various sites in the SE network have grown in user count, this model has very obviously begun to fail. Few of the new users are interested in becoming part of the community by e.g. reading the help pages; they don't care about such things as "rules" because each one is a special snowflake who expects their question to be answered. Over time the ratio of curators:users thus decays to the point that the workload on the remaining curators becomes such that many cease curating. This leads to more work for fewer curators, which accentuates burnout, which creates a negative loop whereby curation activities ultimately cease because nobody is interested in dealing with the torrent of rule violations that non-compliant users call "questions".

This could be overcome if Stack Exchange moderators had the ability to unilaterally remove content they believe violates site policy - but they very crucially lack that ability. In contrast, moderation in pretty much every other community on the web grants that sort of ability. Guess which of these two models has been around since the invention of the internet because it works? I'll give you a clue, it's not Stack Exchange's one.

So yeah, you and the mod team can go ahead and bail a few cupfuls of water out the side of this particular site-boat by updating the help pages. But when you have hundreds of new users throwing cupfuls of water in the other side, what exactly do you expect is ultimately going to happen to the boat?

For anyone who thinks I'm being unduly negative or doom-and-gloomy... I've experienced this on Stack Overflow, where I estimate that currently at least a third of the questions are unfettered garbage, and that percentage is trending swiftly upwards. Is Worldbuilding likely to experience the same thing? Almost certainly; it's never going to have the same number of new users as SO, but it's also never going to have as many curators, and the number of bad questions that remain open here nowadays - because nobody flags them for closure - is already horrifying.